Close to half of Hawaii’s young adults are thinking of moving away because, as the researcher Richard Florida puts it, they are “stuck.”

“Stuck” is the term he uses in a recent nationwide study of mobility. It describes people who are mired in places that offer little economic opportunity.

And mobility has become a more crucial and definitive marker. “Economic opportunity in America,” Florida says,” increasingly turns on where we live, and our ability to move.”

But calling people here “stuck”? How very insensitive toward Hawaii where, the prevailing story goes, folks stay rooted because of the strengths of their roots.

People here are attached, not mired. If so, then “stuck” seems, what, way too cold, too mainland?

In fact it’s not. Here are four reasons why Hawaii is in fact stuck and why moving from Hawaii is a good thing for all sorts of reasons that go beyond economics.

First, a whole lot of people here are considering moving away. According to a recent poll, 45 percent of Hawaii’s voters live in a household where people are thinking of leaving or have already left.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

The state has approximately 400,000 households, so in close to 200,000 households people have left or are thinking about it. The high cost of living is the main reason.

Second, the changes that would make living in Hawaii easier — affordable housing and a more diversified knowledge-based economy — are either quite far down the road or highly unlikely to happen at all.

So the usual things-will-get-better argument does not seem too convincing to a large number of people who are at a very crucial stage of their lives with underpaying jobs, young children and too little space.

Plus, according to the survey, over half of the young adults thinking of moving have children in private school, another big expense that they probably could avoid if they left.

Third, moving away from home is in itself a good thing because it encourages important traits like risk taking, adventure, self-reliance and learning from others.

Hawaii’s own history is so much about mobility and risk, from the canoes sailing across uncharted, open waters a thousand years ago, to the immigrants who came to work the plantations, to Barack Obama.

Building A Diaspora

Hawaii ancestor stories are about roots, but they are also about movement.

Of course mobility is not for everyone. There are many good reasons why people want to stay in Hawaii. And damn certain leaving home can be tough.

But it’s an insular conceit to assume that Hawaii is so special that people who grew up here and want to leave are some kind of cultural outliers or simply victims of Hawaii’s economy who deserve pity.

It’s also pretentious to think that this place is so special that it should be the ultimate end of your journey even if you’ve never had a chance to journey anywhere else.

Fourth, the wistfulness we have about people leaving reflects a view of home and community that’s way too narrow and dated about what sense of place means.

It ignores the power and presence of what Benedict Anderson called “imagined communities”, in this case the imagined Hawaii.

People who leave Hawaii are not simply a scattering of migrants. They are really a diaspora. That is, these leavers have strong, collective memories of Hawaii, which they display in all sorts of ways.

You can think of your own examples of these ties. Here are mine: Hawaii clubs; Hawaii expats living in mainland retirement communities wearing aloha shirts and muu muus to dinner every night; halau in Milwaukee; watching live streamed local sports (last year my son had a conversation with a bellhop in Vermont about the Leilehua High School quarterback); reunions in Las Vegas.

Sure, some of these people long to come back. Some will.

But most Hawaii folks on the mainland may feel the longing, but only as a part of their ordinary everyday lives. They’ve made their choices. Life goes on with Hawaii in their hearts and in their imagination. But not in their future.

The point is that these vicarious ties to Hawaii are not just strong. They will more and more be the way “Hawaii” is defined both by those who stay and those who leave.

An Old-School Vision

What I am describing is not an exclusive way to think about Hawaii. In fact, my point is the opposite. There is no one way. People have compelling reasons to stay. Folks make amazing adjustments in order to be near family and to make Hawaii an even better place.

So ultimately, it’s not about one vision or the other. It’s about the fuller acceptance and pride regarding a variety of visions.

But it’s also about getting real about what I’ve described.

Gov. David Ige, who talks eloquently about Hawaii’s sense of community, means it in the old, geographically based way.

His vision reflects his own life: father served in the 100th Battalion; a public-school kid raised in Pearl City in a close family who turned down a chance to go to MIT and went to UH instead. A successful career in his home state and ultimately settling in a home in the neighborhood where he grew up.

Such a resonating old-school vision, but …

His three children? They went to private schools, excellent mainland colleges, and have remained there with very good jobs.

I bet that they imagine Hawaii all the time and still have strong emotional ties here. They no doubt miss their parents, the weather, and the friends they left behind.

But I am guessing that they won’t move back. Can you blame them?