Leaving San Francisco is one of the more common subjects in therapy rooms here, and it’s rarely a simple cost calculation even when it’s presented as one.
The reasons people actually give
Cost, obviously — and specifically the arithmetic of ever owning anything, or of having children with the space to raise them. Distance from family, which sharpens when parents age or when a child arrives. The street environment and a sense that the city is harder than it was. Friends who already left. A job that no longer requires being here. And a quieter one, less often said out loud: that the version of a life available here isn’t the one you wanted.
The reasons worth examining first
Are you leaving something or going somewhere? Both are legitimate. But a move made primarily to escape a state tends to relocate the state, and people are frequently surprised to arrive somewhere cheaper and find the same flatness waiting.
What’s the timing about? The decision arrives disproportionately in February, after a bad stretch, following a layoff, or at the end of a relationship. None of those are wrong reasons and all of them are poor conditions for a large irreversible choice.
Is this a mood or a conclusion? A useful test: has this been consistently true for a year, across good weeks and bad, or does it appear and recede? Depression makes leaving look like the answer to almost everything, and it’s worth knowing which you’re in.
What people underestimate
The social cost. Whatever network you’ve here took years, and rebuilding one takes years again — and it’s meaningfully harder in your late thirties than it was at twenty-five. The first-year drop applies to the next city too.
The specific things. People list cost as the reason and then miss things they never itemised: the light in October, being able to walk everywhere, the food, the particular political and cultural texture of the place, being unremarkable for whatever makes you unusual elsewhere.
The partner asymmetry. Couples frequently discover the decision means very different things to each of them, and that the conversation they have been having wasn’t the conversation.
What people overestimate
That it’s permanent. People move back constantly, and framing it as irreversible raises the stakes far beyond what they are.
And that the money will resolve it. Housing is cheaper almost everywhere; salaries are usually lower too, and the delta is frequently smaller than the headline suggests.
The question that usually settles it
Not where would you rather live. It is: what would you be doing with a Tuesday evening there?
People who can answer that concretely — the people, the activity, the shape of an ordinary week — tend to do well after moving. People who can only describe the house and the cost tend to arrive and find they bought space and lost a life.
What therapy is useful for here
Not deciding for you. Working out which of the reasons are actually yours, whether the timing is a conclusion or a mood, and — for couples — having the real conversation rather than the proxy one.Couples work is frequently the right room for that.