Moving House
I know I’m talking about the same thing a lot, but here’s a different angle. This is loosely related to a Claude Artifact I posted on Twitter a few days back. For some reason, The Ancient City by Fustel de Coulanges is one of those books I read long ago that just keeps coming back to me. The point of that post was to make people really grasp what primogeniture (the system of passing all family land to the first-born son) meant over a dozen generations. It’s a relentless, social engine that mechanically produces a growing class of people with no inheritance, no land, and no place.
Now, let’s get to the point of this post. I’m surprised that out of all the fringe and niche discussions I’ve seen, I have NEVER heard anyone entertain a “what if” related to the simple act of relocating.
Moving is something almost everyone does now, and we barely think about it. But the experience of changing the place you live from a multigenerational constant to a temporary stopover for a few months must have measurable effects on our psychology and physiology. When I started digging, I expected to find nothing.
Turns out, there has been research. And it paints a fascinating, and frankly, disturbing picture of what those second, third, and fourth-born sons from the ancient world actually endured.
In that world, property had a religious gravity. The family estate held the sacred hearth and the family tomb. The eldest son’s inheritance was a spiritual duty to the ancestors. Being a younger son meant being permanently excommunicated from that spiritual and physical anchor.
There’s a modern term for this kind of severe dislocation: “Root Shock.” Dr. Mindy Fullilove coined it to describe the profound disruption of losing one’s entire emotional ecosystem. For a younger son forced to leave, it was an amputation from the only world he knew. It was a severance that created a lasting state of being adrift.. The modern concept of “place attachment,” explored by researchers like Liana Scannell and Robert Gifford, breaks it down further. They see it as the bond between a person, their rituals, and the place itself. For these sons, all three cords were severed at once.
What does a person become when they are so completely unmoored? This is where the work of Shigehiro Oishi on the psychology of mobility gets really interesting. His research shows that people who move frequently get their social software rewritten. Deep, loyal, kin-based relationships are replaced by more conditional, transactional friendships born of convenience. Mobile people also crave familiarity to soothe their anxiety. This perfectly explains the Greek colonial impulse, where sons sent out from a mother city would carry a flame from its sacred hearth to light a new one. It was a literal, desperate attempt to recreate a lost anchor.
This process changed individuals. The cumulative effect frayed the entire fabric of society. The work of Sampson and Groves on social disorganization shows that high residential churn weakens community ties and erodes the informal rules that keep order. An ancient city-state absorbing a flood of these disconnected men was a society asking for trouble. You get a population with no real stake in the system. This is a perfect source of crime, unrest, and revolutionary energy.
When you put it all together, you see this forced mobility as a hidden engine of history. The system of impartible inheritance, which Hayami and Saitō studied in other contexts, was designed for maximum stability. Its primary byproduct, however, was a constant churn of instability in the form of displaced sons.
Their fate depended entirely on the historical moment, a reality mirrored in the modern “Moving to Opportunity” studies by Chetty, Hendren, and Katz. Early on, when the world was emptier, a younger son could move to opportunity by founding a colony or conquering new land. Centuries later, he was simply moving away from a lost home, into an overpopulated city where he became another face in the urban mob that fueled the land reforms of the Gracchi brothers in Rome.
The ancient world’s obsession with the stability of the home could only be maintained by the profoundly destabilizing act of perpetually ejecting its own children. We think of ourselves as a uniquely mobile society, but perhaps we are just living out the psychological echo of a process that began thousands of years ago, the first time a second son walked away from the only home he had ever known.