#227： The Art & Science of Loving the Place You Live
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Summary
Melody Warnick is the author of the new book, "This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live," and she s spent a year researching the burgeoning science of Place Attachment in order to answer the question: Is there any truth to the adage, "Wherever you go, there you are"?
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. So there's
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a tendency in people to think if they only lived in a super cool place, their lives would
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be infinitely better. And while it's true that geography can influence our well being,
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we often vastly overestimate how much moving will actually improve our lives. I mean,
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if you're miserable in one city, you're probably going to be miserable somewhere else. There's
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truth to the adage, wherever you go, there you are. And let's face it, we often don't have complete
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control over where we live due to jobs, family obligations, and other factors. So how can you
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learn to love the place you live, even if you don't feel it's the place of your dreams or the
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most ideal location? My guest today has spent a year researching the burgeoning science of what's
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called place attachment in order to answer that question. Her name is Melody Warnick,
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and she's the author of the book, This Is Where You Belong, The Art and Science of Loving the Place
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You Live. And onto the show today, Melody and I discuss what place attachment is and what you can
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do to have more of it for the place you live. It's a great podcast filled with some extremely
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actionable advice. After the show, check out the show notes at aom.is slash place, where you can find
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links to resources you can delve deeper into this topic. All right, Melody Warnick, welcome to the
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show. Thank you so much for having me. So your new book is called This Is Where You Belong,
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The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live. I'm curious, what got you started down this path
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exploring the science of loving the place you are? For me, it was what happens to a lot of Americans.
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I was moving a lot. I moved six times among five different states in 12 years, which I know for
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some people is just a drop in the bucket. But it was my latest move to Blacksburg, Virginia,
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that really made me want to delve into this. My family had lived in Austin, Texas for a couple of
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years and really thought, oh, this is going to be the place. We're going to stay here forever.
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And then after a couple of years, it just didn't quite feel right. And my husband got a new job
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offer at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, and we moved again. And every time we moved, we would have these
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high hopes that this new town would somehow magically solve all our problems and make us better people and
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make us happier. And when we moved to Blacksburg, it was kind of this realization, again, that that
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doesn't always happen. That doesn't usually happen. And I needed to figure out a way to be happy where I
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was right now instead of waiting for the next town or the best town.
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Right. Yeah. I think there's this tendency in all of us think that, oh, if only we live someplace we
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love, sounds like the coolest place ever, someplace different, our lives would just magically be
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better. I like how in your book, your friend calls this the geographic cure. Is there any truth to the
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idea that our geography can affect our well-being? Or is it really true that wherever you go, there you
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are? They're kind of both true. I mean, you would have to be really ridiculously blind to insist
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that every place in the world is the same. And so a lot of us have these fantasies of how different
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our lives would be if, you know, if I moved to New York City or if I lived in Toronto or, you know,
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a beach town in the South or something. And it is genuinely true. Your life would be really different
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in a lot of ways. And there are studies that show really huge geographic disparities in things like
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income levels or marriage rates or levels of well-being. So if you live in Hawaii, you're more
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likely to be happy than if you live in Kentucky or West Virginia. So there's definitely truth to this
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idea that our geography affects our lives and how happy we are. On the other hand, we don't always have
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ultimate control over where we live. And even when we do, there will for certain be disappointing
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things about our town or things that make our place hard to live in. And so there's a point at which you
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need to learn to simply make the best of where you are. And there's also this idea that, you know,
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no matter where you live, you're taking yourself with you. I always had this idea that, you know,
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every time I moved, I was kind of shedding this baggage and, you know, all the friendships that
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hadn't quite developed right or, you know, the home improvement projects you didn't finish. You were
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leaving those behind and you were starting fresh. And that's an incredibly addictive idea,
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this idea of starting over. But at a certain point, you have to realize those things come with you
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or they start over in your new place. So the best thing that most of us can do is simply become
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settled. And urban design mentioned a lot, which is that millennials are more likely than any other
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generation in the past to pick the city where they want to live and then find the job to get them
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there, which is totally different from how we think of people finding jobs. You know, you graduate
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from college and you just, you know, throw out an enormously wide net and you go wherever anyone
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will have you. But now people are being a little more choosy about it. They want to end up in San
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Francisco or Austin or they want to live in Raleigh and they will just target their search to those
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places or they'll move there and then get the job. But is this just a manifestation of the
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geographic cure? I mean, they think that if they live in this cool place, their life would be
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fundamentally different. Yeah, I think so to a certain extent that, you know, we have this idea
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that we want to experience a certain kind of lifestyle and we see that that might be possible in this
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place that we haven't lived before. And sometimes a place that we have lived before. I certainly meet
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a lot of people in my town, which is a college town who moved here to go to college and just never
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left. They loved it that much. But on the other hand, there's something valuable about this sense of
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paying attention to place, acknowledging that it is important in our lives and being thoughtful about
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where we live rather than just kind of randomly moving places.
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All right. So you talk about in the book that there's research about it, and I'm surprised that
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there was research about how we feel about where we live. You talk about how there's some people are
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movers and some people are stayers. What causes a person to establish roots in a community and what
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does the research say about the differences between movers and stayers?
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So the thing that really interested me about moving and staying, as I looked into the research,
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I discovered this idea of place attachment, which is this concept of feeling really connected to
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a town or a city or the place that you live. Most of us have experienced that in some way. Maybe
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it's your hometown or it could be the place that you live right now. But a lot of us identify with
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some place that feels really close to our hearts. I've seen it identified in the scientific literature
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as your heart home, which is kind of a woo sort of way to describe it, but it really is an emotional
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feeling. It's an emotion tied with action. So when we feel place attached, not only are we more likely to
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stay living in a place longer, but we feel more satisfied while we're there. We want to be involved
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in the community. We want to know what's going on. We feel like the people who live in this place
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are our kind of people. They're like us, or we feel socially connected and supported. So when you have
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all these factors in place, and you don't have to have all of them, but some of these factors,
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they make you feel place attached, and that makes you less likely to move overall. There's studies
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that show some people are just stayers. According to the Pew Research Center, 37% of Americans still
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live in their hometown. When I read that statistic, I was shocked by it because I feel like in America
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now there's a stigma to staying put that people think if you are upwardly mobile, you're also
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geographically mobile. You're moving around to get to college or to a new job. But there are advantages
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to being stable in one place. There are studies that show that especially adolescents who move a lot
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tend to have worse grades. They're more likely to experiment with drugs and alcohol. They have
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fewer friends than teenagers who stay put. And the ramifications can be kind of long lasting for
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children and teenagers who are introverts who move a lot. Even 30 years later, they show
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lower levels of well-being and higher levels of depression. Simply liking where you live can have
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a really important, have some really important health benefits. There's a study of Japanese senior
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citizens that found that people who felt connected to their community and their neighborhood, who liked
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where they lived and knew people, tended to live 6% longer than people who didn't. So it can even
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Wow, that's amazing. So does place attachment require that your city or town be amazingly awesome
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and hip like say Austin or San Francisco? Or could you live in Claremore, Oklahoma and still have place
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You can definitely live in Claremore, Oklahoma and be place attached. And that's kind of the funny thing
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about it is you probably know people who are really attached to their hometown or the place they live
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now. And you as an outsider are like, what? I do not understand what's going on. One of the experiences
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that first made me think about this was meeting a woman named Gertie Moore who lived in this tiny
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little holler in West Virginia. And she lived there her whole life, you know, lived on the same street
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her whole life. And, you know, meeting her as part of a research for a magazine story I was writing,
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I was kind of dumbfounded because her town was not a place I would ever live, you know, in a million years,
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I would never choose to live there. But for her, this was home. And home meant, you know, not only the
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geography of this place, but she was incredibly socially connected. She belonged to every club
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in town. She, you know, helped her neighbors. And even in a state that struggles with well-being
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levels, I think that sense of place attachment made her happy. You know, she was kind of at the
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center of the community and there's value in that. So a lot of how we develop place attachment is simply
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perception. There's a great study that was really integral to my research called the Soul of the
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Community Study. It was a collaboration between the Knight Foundation and Gallup. And they surveyed 26
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communities across the United States, communities of all different sizes. They talked to 26,000 people
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and asked them questions about, you know, how much they liked where they lived and what mattered to them
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and things like that. And some of the cities that did really well in this study where people were
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really place attached were really surprising. In the second year of the study, Grand Forks, North Dakota
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was tied for number one out of these cities. And, you know, a lot of us do not have North Dakota on our
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radar as, you know, someplace we're desperate to move. But, you know, it doesn't really matter that
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objectively Grand Forks has, you know, fewer museums or fewer big sports arenas or whatever.
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The people who live there are happy with what they have and they feel good about it. And
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that increases their well-being. Does place attachment happen right away
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when you move to a place or does it take some time to feel attached to a location?
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So it usually takes time. Studies show that attachment peaks between about three and five years.
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Um, my goal, you know, working on this book is I wanted to speed that up. You know, I was new in
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Blacksburg and kind of didn't like it, didn't really feel comfortable. And I wanted to head off that
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feeling of, you know, wanting to just call it quits and move on somewhere else. And so I wanted to,
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uh, you know, accelerate the process of developing place attachment by doing these place attachment
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experiments, you know, love where you live experiments, doing things that have been shown
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in the literature to boost place attachment and kind of like doing them all at once in the course
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of a year. So I would feel better about where I live. Um, and so there are behaviors, there are
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things that you can do to feel better faster. But I think if you're new in a town, you have to assume
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that the first three to six months are just going to be chaos. That's like survival skill
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sort of level, you know, where you're finding your way around, you're trying to figure out where the
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tortillas are in the grocery store. And it's really hard to even lift your head. Um, but once you've
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been there for a while, you can work on loving the place you are.
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All right. Well, let's talk about some of those things you did in your experiment. You start off
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talking about walking more in your community. So how does walking more and driving less foster
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place attachment? At a certain level, it's just, um, the really basic sense that walking tends to
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make us happier, especially when you compare it to commuting by car. There are studies that show that,
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um, you know, commuting, whether by car or by subway can be more stressful than being in like a
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military operation, you know, it's incredibly stressful. So, you know, part of being happy
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in your town is simply being happy and walking or biking is something that does that for you.
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But there's also a process, especially when you're new of developing a mental map, um, you know,
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sort of a sense of where things are in your town and how to get from point A to point B.
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Uh, there's a study that shows, um, that studied children and children who, you know, never got out
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of the car who had what's called windshield perspective. Um, when they were asked to draw
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maps of their neighborhoods, they drew less detailed maps and less accurate maps than kids
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who spent a lot of time on bike or on foot. So when we're biking or walking, we were going at a
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slow enough pace, a human pace, um, that not only do we have a better ability to develop these mental
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maps to kind of suss out how your neighborhood streets all connect to each other, but you're
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more likely to have interactions, um, or experiences that help you. Um, I call it putting pins in your
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map of your place, you know, like little happy experiences that make you feel more comfortable
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there. And it can be anything from like saying hi to a neighbor who's out on his porch to learning
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the name of the dog at the block or smelling your neighbor's roses. It can be a sensory experience
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that helps you feel immersed in your town, um, or your city. And that can be really helpful to helping
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So what can people do? I mean, I'm sure there's people who are listening that they there's like,
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that sounds great, but my city is completely unwalkable. It's made for cars. What can these
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people do to, um, take advantage of the walking benefit of place attachment?
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So there's a guy I talked to for the book named Matt Tomasulo. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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And when he moved there, he was just, um, coming home from a study abroad in Europe where everyone
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walked all the time or they biked. I think he was in Copenhagen. He moved to Raleigh and was really
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irritated by this fact that like no one was on the streets and he lived downtown and no one walked
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at all. Um, and people had this perception that, you know, it was just too far to go anywhere. So
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he developed this project, he called it walk Raleigh, where he made these signs that just pointed out
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that, um, it was only like a 10 minute walk to the grocery store or five minute walk to get to,
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you know, this statue or, um, the bell tower at NC state or something like that. And he went out,
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um, you know, no permission for this, like nothing was permitted, but he went out in the middle of the
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night with some friends and, you know, zip tied them to street signs in an effort to make people
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start walking more. Um, and it totally worked. Um, you know, people would see the signs and it's just
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something, something kind of clicks like, Oh, that's not that far. I can walk. Um, it became
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really popular in Raleigh. He, it spread to other parts of the city and he eventually developed it
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into a website called walk your city where anyone can go and, you know, put up signs encouraging to
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walk, encouraging others to walk. Um, so I asked him this question, you know, what if you live in a town,
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you know, where there's not a walking infrastructure or where no one walks or it doesn't feel safe.
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Um, and you know, you can't go crazy with it. Um, especially if you're worried it's not safe,
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but he was kind of like walk anyway. You know, the thing that makes a place walkable is when people
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just start walking, um, you can sort of be a trailblazer in your neighborhood and, and just
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get out there. Um, even, you know, in little doses, maybe it's not your neighborhood, but maybe it's the
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local park or maybe it's downtown or, you know, someplace in your town where you can get outside
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and experience life on foot. I love that idea. I was tempted to make some signs. I mean,
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the library from my house isn't that far. I think it's like 20, like a 20 minute walk,
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but I always drive to it because I'm just, it's out of laziness and habit.
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Right. It's totally habit. You know, that we just,
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you know, we just get in the car because it's hot or it might rain or, you know, whatever. Um,
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so it's kind of like, you have to get over that initial inertia against doing it. And honestly,
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you're, you're probably not going to do it all the time. I recommend the book,
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you know, just making a swap, like, you know, one trip that you would normally make by car,
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try making it by foot or, you know, go on a walk in your neighborhood for exercise or something.
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And when you start like having the good experiences, um, you, you'll enjoy it more. Um,
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I've, I've lived in my neighborhood now for four years and it was seriously like a month ago that
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someone pointed out that like a half mile from my house is this beautiful path through the woods,
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like this hiking trail that I never knew was there. But, you know, those are the kinds of things that
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make people love their neighborhood is, you know, those, those hidden paths that you explore that
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is a cool process. So another activity you encourage or you experimented with, and you're
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loving the place you are, um, experiment is, uh, buying local. So how can buying local create place
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attachment? So what I love about buying local is that it helps you and it helps your town. Um, you know,
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there's a lot of studies, um, that when we buy local, more money stays locally, um, you know,
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feeds local taxes, stays, um, among local people than, uh, would when we shop at big box stores,
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it's actually, you know, about three times as much money stays local. It's called the local multiplier
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effect. So part of loving your town is doing what's good for your town. Um, and shopping local
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definitely is, there's a total social and psychological benefit to buying local as well.
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Um, I have always been, you know, an Amazon and Target devotee. That is just where I bought my stuff.
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But, um, the thing that makes Target and Amazon so efficient, you know, that it's the same everywhere,
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uh, and it's so easily accessible, you know, especially Amazon, you just do it from your couch.
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You don't have to leave the house, um, is exactly the thing that makes it bad for towns. Um, it takes
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away money from your town and it's completely non-social. So I made an effort to try and buy local,
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which was hard for me. And in most towns it's, it can be hard to find, you know, necessities and
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things like that. Um, but one thing I did recently was, uh, transfer all my prescriptions to a locally
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owned pharmacy that's on the main street in my town. You know, they were like at Target and the
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grocery store and this new pharmacy opened up and I'm like, okay, you know, like this is my thing.
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I have to transfer my prescriptions. And I did. Um, and this pharmacist is so awesome. Like he
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reminds me of Andy Dwyer from Parks and Rec, just like so happy for your business. So happy to talk
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to you, willing to bend over backwards to get you what you need. Um, they do delivery, which is awesome
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for me. Um, but there's also just kind of a relationship there. Um, I know, you know,
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I know Jeremy, my name, he knows me by name. He knows the kind of stuff I'm, you know, I need and
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we've talked, um, those are the kinds of relationships that a lot of us don't have anymore. But when you
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have some of those, um, you know, loose tie kind of relationships, they make you feel, um, more at home
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where you live. And that's a great thing. I love that. I do too. And something you suggest in your
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book, you, you argue that if you continue to buy your stables at Target or some big chain grocery
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store, you suggest to, you suggest people to at least spend $50 a month at a locally owned store
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shop. Right. There's, um, there's this idea it's called the three 50 project. And, um, you know,
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you're not going to spend everything at a locally, locally owned store. You're definitely going to keep
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shopping at Target and Amazon. I know I do, but if you can just transfer some of that money, you
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know, aim to spend $50 at three local stores every month. Um, even just that small amount can make a
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difference. I recommend that people think of one thing that they will always buy local and maybe
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that's eating at a restaurant or, you know, I will always buy toys from this locally owned toy store or
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books from the independent bookstore in my town and just commit to that. And that's,
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that's your thing. And you always shop local for that. Yeah. I love that idea. Cause it's something
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we do in our family, you know, for Christmas presents, my wife and I, we buy our toys at this
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locally owned store, which is nice. It's a, it's a pleasant experience. Right. And the people who work
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in those stores, they, they value it. They know you. Um, it's just a different experience than
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shopping at Target. So you talk about neighborliness. I think everyone kind of bemoans the fact that
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being neighborly is declined. We're not as neighborly, but you say we're actually still
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neighborly, but the definition of neighborly has changed. So how has that definition changed
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some say like the 1950s? Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, 40 or 50 years ago, neighbors
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were fairly likely to socialize with each other, you know, once a week or once a month, you'd have
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the bunco group or the poker night or the neighborhood potluck or something like that.
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Now being neighborly mostly involves leaving other people alone. You know, like you're a great
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neighbor if your dog doesn't poop in my yard or you're a great neighbor. If, um, you know,
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you deliver the mail that got missed delivered to your house and you don't throw parties late at
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night. So we tend to think of, you know, being neighborly as simply keeping yourself to yourself,
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minding your own business. And there's something to be said for that. Um, but on the other hand,
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I love the old fashioned idea of neighborliness, um, which is that you get to know your neighbors by
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name. You trust them. You maybe ask them to, you know, house at your cats while you're gone.
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Um, um, you socialize with them on a small level and you actually know them.
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And what does the research say about communities that have a strong sense of neighborliness?
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I mean, what are the benefits that come with that for the community as a whole?
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On an individual level, um, neighborliness has been shown to really, uh, have an important
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health benefit. Um, there's a study from the university of Michigan that showed that, uh,
00:26:30.920
people who know their neighbors, you know, who know their first names, who trust them,
00:26:35.260
who have a relationship with them are 60, 67% less likely to have heart attacks and 48% likely,
00:26:42.440
less likely to have a stroke, which is an enormous, uh, kind of stunning study there. Um, but for
00:26:51.520
communities as a whole, crime tends to go down when neighbors know each other. Um, and, you know,
00:26:58.420
there's a great quote from, uh, someone at Harvard who said, if you had to choose between 10% more
00:27:04.360
cops on the beat or 10% more citizens, knowing their neighbors, first names, the latter is the
00:27:09.820
better crime prevention strategy. So this is something that communities themselves are investing
00:27:15.700
in, you know, developing, uh, neighborhood councils or one, uh, one program I talked about
00:27:23.080
was from surprise Arizona. They have a block party trailer where they have this trailer just stocked
00:27:28.600
with everything that you need to throw a good block party. And they'll throw in, you know,
00:27:32.440
a hundred dollar gift certificate to the grocery store so you can get food and party supplies.
00:27:38.060
And they want people to get out in the street and talk to each other. When you have those
00:27:45.060
relationships, um, it tends to ward off ill feeling. It makes people happier. It helps neighbors solve
00:27:53.780
problems before they escalate. Um, and it makes a community feel better. Um, there's also something
00:28:02.600
called neighborhood social cohesion. And the idea is that a cohesive neighborhood where people know each
00:28:10.460
other and trust each other can also work together to solve its own problems. And this is
00:28:14.920
really effective, especially in communities that are struggling, but even in, you know, your average
00:28:20.900
middle-class communities, sometimes neighbors have, have issues. One person that I talked to for the
00:28:27.780
book, and I think you've had him on your podcast, Mark Dunkelman told me this, um, story. He moved
00:28:33.500
to Providence, Rhode Island, and their street got ripped up for, you know, some work and it didn't get
00:28:39.520
repaved or didn't get repaved properly. And he took the initiative to go around to all the
00:28:44.760
neighbors. They all called the city council people, signed petitions and got the, got the repaving
00:28:52.120
done. So, you know, that's something that ordinary citizens can do, but they have more power when they
00:28:59.200
band together and make it happen. And the thing that Mark said about it is having done that, he was like
00:29:04.660
the mayor of the street. People loved him. Um, so there's a happiness benefit too.
00:29:09.660
The other experiment you did was to do something fun in your community, which sounds great, but what
00:29:14.560
if your community doesn't have anything fun to do? What if it's just strip malls and nothing else?
00:29:20.100
So that's, that was my town, or at least that's what I thought my town was. You know, I moved here
00:29:25.620
from Austin, which is a big city, totally happening. People love living there. And I moved to Blacksburg,
00:29:30.700
Virginia, which is a town of about 43,000. And we have a university here, but you know,
00:29:36.500
it was a lot slower. And that was one of the things that bugged me when I moved here is like,
00:29:41.840
what do people do for fun? The thing that I realized researching the book is that basically
00:29:47.620
every community has fun stuff to do, but we don't always pay attention to the fun stuff our town has
00:29:54.740
to offer because it's not our fun stuff. It's not the stuff that we wanted. You know, maybe
00:29:59.460
we want a big art museum and what our town has is some bars, or we wanted Disneyland and our town has
00:30:09.000
a historic plantation. So we tend to sort of ignore the things that our town is good at.
00:30:18.740
But a lot of how we feel about our town is perception. We create our cities with how we think
00:30:25.200
about them. One of the places I went to as I researched the book was Sierra Vista, Arizona,
00:30:30.420
who's doing a rebranding project. And it opened my eyes because I talked to, you know, one person who
00:30:36.700
was like, oh, Sierra Vista is the best place. There's so much to do. I love it here. And then 20
00:30:42.940
minutes later, I would talk to someone who'd be like, Sierra Vista as a whole, I can't wait to leave.
00:30:48.120
And it made me realize that towns are not the same for everyone. You know, we all sort of live in a
00:30:56.840
different city based on how we think about it. So I have two ideas about this fun stuff. You know,
00:31:04.380
first, if you want to stop seeing your town as this drag, you know, a boring place to live where there's
00:31:11.340
nothing going on. You have to figure out what your town is good at, you know, and accept those things,
00:31:18.400
even if they're not the things that you would prefer. So you do that by asking around, you read
00:31:23.440
the local newspaper, you find the online event listings, and you start showing up for stuff
00:31:28.780
that's going on. I write in the book about trying to pay more attention to what my town was good at by,
00:31:37.180
you know, starting to attend hokey football games. And I probably should not admit this on the Art of
00:31:43.100
Manliness podcast, but I'm not that into football. But it was something that I did just to be part of
00:31:50.640
the town, you know, to experience what people in the town got excited about. My second thought is that
00:31:56.520
if your town isn't amazingly entertaining and interesting, there's nothing that says that
00:32:01.500
you can't make it amazing. A lot of us in our cities sit back, and we wait for stuff to come to
00:32:08.020
us. You know, we wait for entertainment to descend from on high. But one of the things I love right now
00:32:16.240
is this idea of placemaking, which is a concept that the average citizen can shape their place for the
00:32:25.420
better. By, you know, opening a pop up store or starting a festival in the town, I read about people
00:32:34.140
in Fargo, North Dakota, who started something called the hammock initiative. And what it was
00:32:40.200
literally was people gathering at a park and lying in their hammocks. But you know, they built a website
00:32:46.900
for it, they invited the press, and it became a thing, like an event that was going on. So in the same way
00:32:54.380
cities can develop entrepreneurial ecosystems where they nurture and invite entrepreneurs to start new
00:33:01.500
things. Cities can also become placemaking ecosystems where they encourage community initiatives, you
00:33:10.580
know, parklets or benches or murals or anything that makes the town a cooler, better place to live
00:33:17.740
and more fun. One of the ideas that you suggested and I started doing is pretty much every city probably
00:33:23.620
has an Instagram account around the city where they're talking about the events that are going
00:33:27.520
on or just things about your city. And I've been following a lot of Tulsa Instagram accounts. It's
00:33:31.940
been fun. I've actually discovered some cool events I had no idea that was going on that I would have
00:33:36.180
known that was going on, you know, going on if I weren't following these accounts.
00:33:40.680
Right. I love that. You know, there are exactly social media accounts, Twitter, there are blogs,
00:33:47.840
almost every city in the world has online event listings. And one of the benefits of that too is
00:33:55.380
you connect with other people who are really in love with where they live. And when you're hanging
00:34:00.740
out with people who are boosters for your town, who are really enthusiastic about it, that attitude
00:34:08.360
All right. I love that. So another part of your experiment was you got out into nature more.
00:34:12.280
How does getting out into nature, and I guess this kind of ties in with walking too, but how does
00:34:20.180
I love encouraging people to get out in nature because it's sort of the purest
00:34:26.140
manifestation of place. You know, it is literally your place without all the houses and the buildings
00:34:33.180
as just the sensory experience. It's full of sounds and smells and sights. So experiencing
00:34:41.060
nature can be a really powerful, positive way to feel connected to where you live.
00:34:46.660
Studies have shown that nature is almost primal in the way it affects our bodies. Scientists
00:34:52.680
call time spent in green spaces vitamin G because it's so effective at things like reducing your
00:35:00.060
rates of cardiovascular disease or pain or migraines or lowering your blood pressure. It definitely
00:35:06.880
lowers stress levels and also helps neighbors form closer community ties. I found one study that
00:35:13.300
showed that neighbors who live near parks are more willing to help each other out and trust each
00:35:20.120
other than people who live farther away from parks. So when we talk about nature, it doesn't have to be
00:35:25.760
like the primeval forest or something. It can just be, you know, your local greenbelt or a park or
00:35:32.720
someplace, you know, the High Line in New York City, someplace that helps you experience
00:35:38.320
something a little green, something outside the normal town setting. And the interesting part is
00:35:48.040
that the kind of nature we gravitate toward can feel really personal. You know, everyone has their
00:35:54.620
thing. This is kind of the thing that you sit around and talk about with your friends when you're
00:35:58.340
kids. You know, if you could live anywhere, would you live in the mountains or on the beach? You know,
00:36:04.820
some of that is evolutionary biology. We tend to prefer places where we have a vantage point and a view
00:36:12.100
that includes water. You know, so you imagine a hunter on the savannah trying to get a bead on a lion
00:36:18.080
without being killed himself. And somehow that has transferred to our preference for, you know,
00:36:25.400
flat, park-like places with some trees and some water, but where we can still see where we're going.
00:36:34.140
And our preferences in nature also have a lot to do with where we're from, you know, where we grew up.
00:36:40.480
There's a study by some Swedish environmental psychologists that found that 73% of study
00:36:48.120
participants who grew up near the coast settled near the coast as adults. And 63% of people who grew up
00:36:54.940
near a forest settled near a forest as adults. So we tend to gravitate towards, you know, things we've
00:37:03.580
experienced in one way or another. But even so, all levels of nature can, you know, be positive. So we find
00:37:14.200
the aspect of nature that speaks to us. And it can be really important in our sense of place.
00:37:22.480
One aspect of place attachment is called place dependence. And it's this idea that when we depend
00:37:30.000
on certain places to do the things we love, we love that place. So if you're a skier, you might
00:37:37.360
develop a sense of place dependence for the mountains. Or if you kayak, you develop a sense of
00:37:42.840
place dependence for the river near your house. And that can, those can be activities that make you
00:37:48.940
fall in love with where you live. Well, Melody, we've talked about a lot of great ideas. There's
00:37:53.160
more we could talk about. But I'm curious, what were the results of your place attachment experiment?
00:37:57.460
Did you learn to love Blacksburg? So I did. And I was a little skeptical of the results at first.
00:38:04.300
I started noticing it because I was traveling to research the book. And I'd come back to Blacksburg,
00:38:10.300
and I would just have this feeling of, oh, I'm home. You know, I miss that. I miss those mountains,
00:38:16.420
or I miss these trees. And I would, you know, I would ride my bike around town. And I'd be like,
00:38:23.120
that's, that's beautiful. Look at the sky today. I started having these experiences where I just
00:38:28.920
sort of noticed where I was, and I loved it. And I kind of worried that I was, you know, I was
00:38:35.080
tampering with the evidence, you know, I was researching this and writing a book about it,
00:38:39.080
of course, is in my best interest if I fall deeply in love with Blacksburg. But the thing is,
00:38:45.880
you know, my whole study, you know, trying to do things that build place attachment was really like
00:38:53.340
this long extended exercise in positive thinking. And when you are determined to see good in your
00:39:00.640
town and feel part of the community, you do, you do after a while. I really do feel like Blacksburg is
00:39:08.460
home. And we've, my family has rented a house here ever since we moved here. And we finally
00:39:14.940
got a realtor and started house hunting because we're like, okay, this is it. We are, we are committed.
00:39:21.580
Um, and I really can't imagine living anywhere else right now, which is not to say that I will never
00:39:27.400
move. Um, you know, jobs happen elsewhere. Families sometimes draw you away. So, you know, being place
00:39:38.260
attached or loving where you live doesn't mean that you have to stay there forever. It just means that
00:39:43.480
while you there, while you're there, you just love it really hard and you, you make it your own. Um,
00:39:52.000
and you just live it up for the time that you're there. And if you leave, you can do it in the next
00:39:58.940
town too. All right. I love that. So I'm not sure if you like these types of questions about to ask,
00:40:02.920
because I'm sure you just say, do all the things, but if there's one thing that you'd recommend that
00:40:08.060
our listeners could start doing today, if they want to start the experiment, what's the one thing
00:40:12.400
that would probably provide the most immediate results in learning to love the place you are?
00:40:17.100
I'm going to say the really, um, basic one and say, go meet your neighbors. A lot of us don't know
00:40:25.140
our neighbors, you know, 28% of us don't even know their names and neighbors in all the research
00:40:32.220
that I looked at, knowing your neighbors can be one of the most powerful things for helping you
00:40:39.700
be healthy, helping you feel connected, helping you feel happy in your community.
00:40:44.900
So seriously, just like, you know, take banana bread to your neighbors or invite them over for
00:40:52.240
ice cream or, you know, just say hi. It will make you feel better about your town.
00:40:58.540
That's fantastic. Well, Melody, where can people learn more about your book?
00:41:01.420
I have a website, which is my name, melodywarnick.com, um, where you can find tons more info about the book.
00:41:09.280
There are links to buy it and, you know, there's a book club guide and a blog and all kinds of good
00:41:14.760
stuff. So that's a great place to start. Melody Warnick. Thank you so much for your time. It's
00:41:18.520
been a pleasure. Thank you so much, Brett. I appreciated it. My guest today was Melody
00:41:24.040
Warnick. She's the author of the book. This is where you belong. The art and science of loving
00:41:27.580
the place you live. It's available on amazon.com. Go check it out. It's a fantastic book. Um, if you want
00:41:32.620
to learn more information about the book, you can go to her website, melodywarnick.com. Also check out
00:41:37.500
the show notes at aom.is slash place for, um, links to resources. So you can delve deeper into this
00:41:43.220
topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and
00:41:59.100
advice. Make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com. And if you enjoy the
00:42:03.060
show, I'd appreciate it if you'd give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher really helps us out a lot.
00:42:08.300
Thank you for your continued support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay