Gregory Warner is a reporter at Marketplace, the public radio show about business and economics.

A FRIEND of mine named Eugene who is 28 and an investment banker lives at home in Connecticut with his parents. He can afford to live on his own, but he doesn’t see the point. He’s putting the money he would have spent on rent toward co-ownership of a pizza restaurant. And when he wants to stretch his limbs, he drives to his girlfriend’s apartment.

Prolonged adolescence? Extended dependency? Neither. My friend, who was born in Russia and moved here as a child, is more future-focused than most American-born people his age. Chalk it up to culture. Ex-Soviets know how to survive in stagnant times. My Russian wife, after graduating from Cornell, moved in with her grandfather in Brooklyn; in this way she stretched the salary she made in one year as a paralegal for the three years it took her to write her first book.

I, on the other hand, celebrated my first job after graduation by promptly signing away half my take-home pay on a $1,250-a-month rental. I grew up with an unspoken assumption, just as my parents had, that I would live on my own after college. My parents shared that assumption; they sold their large house for a smaller apartment that was big enough only for the children to visit. I couldn’t have moved back even if I’d wanted to.

In some ways our parents see “success” and “independence” as synonyms, though no such conflation exists for many immigrants.