> Which is super unattractive in much of regular life

Which is, imo, one of the primary reasons of the stagnation of US society over the past 50 years.

We are at all time lows for internal migration. This reduces dynamism drastically. People used to chase economic and social opportunity. Sometimes multiple times through a well lived life.

The whole point of states was you could relatively trivially pull up stakes and move for better opportunity. Once people decided that was impossible (and historically speaking, it's actually less risky than ever before) things really went to shit.

Overall and in generally speaking terms: US citizens have chosen comfort over every other metric when it comes to every single daily decision they make in aggregate.