I would live in Scottsdale if it meant my friends and I could be together again

The idea that this is supposed to be the rest of my life, with my dearest friends across the country year-round (or even further if/when I move abroad), makes me want to curl up into a ball and scream! My dystopian solution is that universities across the United States should be assigned two post-graduate cities that their students are allowed to live in. It could be tied to national ranking, like the one US News does, and if you have a higher ranking, you get a better pick. First place school gets to pick first, so on and so forth. WashU’s rank has dropped since my freshman year, I think it’s around 20-something now, so we wouldn’t get the greatest picks. It would be random places like Scottsdale and Indianapolis. Anyways, in my alternate reality, my school friends and I would only be able to live in Scottsdale and Indianapolis after school- nowhere else. Scottsdale is hellishly hot, and Indianapolis isn’t the most interesting city but if those were the only two options, I would be perfectly okay with that because we would all be within only two cities. Personally, I’d end up in Indianapolis because I can’t take desert heat, but wouldn’t it be great if the only place I needed to visit was Scottsdale to see everyone else? In this world, hometowns don’t exist because that complicates things and honestly, I probably wouldn’t have even ended up at WashU because I’d want to go to a higher ranked school in hopes of living in NYC or Chicago post-grad or even a smaller but livelier city assignment like New Orleans or something. I’m not sure this makes sense, but the grand takeaway is that I deeply miss almost all of my friends being within a 10-minute drive from me. Another solution is that one of my friends gets insanely rich and buys an island for development and then we all live happily ever after on said island. However, there’s no way to get really rich ethically, as if any of this is ethical, so I think college city assignment dystopia might work better.

There are statistics on how moving closer to friends increases your happiness and there are so many studies about how walkable communities and cities are tied to a decrease in loneliness, better land-use and overall satisfaction. As someone who lives in car-centered Houston and has temporarily lived in walkable Paris and NYC, I completely second that. How it’s “normal” for us to go from four years in a walkable community in proximity with our closest friends to thousands of miles away in massive cities, many of which are not walkable or decently interconnected, is something I will never understand. All this to say that the post-college transition is kicking my ass and I’m looking forward to when I can look back a year from now and feel more well-adjusted.