From a practicality standpoint making a new friend can be easier but it won't have the same spiritual and emotional connection as a lifelong one. If you are 80 a friendship of 60+ years will be something that invokes real satisfaction and lends depth to your life. Being friends with someone from down the street for 6 months doesn't really mean anything.
It might be that for some old friends add extra richness and depth to relationships, but that has not been my experience at all and I'm glad I've found local friends with common interests - I certainly prefer them to people I happened to go to school with. I know some folks from my job from long ago, and seeing old friends is nice, but still I mostly want to talk to the few that I still have some shared interest in common now.
"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today."
I was going to say that I think more of us should be figuring out how to make connections with the people in the communities we live in.
But I do think moving might make sense for lots of people (maybe including me), in order to have a better local community. Instead of moving to be close to past or current friends, I might suggest we should be moving to places where people are like-minded about valuing a tight knit community, then making friends with those people.
These places seem to be very few and far between, though, and it's hard (impossible?) to find them on Zillow.
personally i am going for friendly and tolerant. likeminded people (for me maybe the kind of people that read hackernews) are hard to find, and are a reason for me to prefer big cities.
Where did this idea that early friendships are not as good because they weren't formed intentionally with carefully curated people come from?
Isn't the fact childhood friendships can endure despite people changing a clue that maybe it is doing things right?
I would never become homeless as long as I have my childhood friends, none of my curated friends would let each other move in without a second thought. I've made more new close friends in a year of hangout out with anyone willing to spend time together than I did in the last 5 trying hard to find like minded people.
Tight and close knit communities are not just going to let you join them. You have to basically commit to fostering those relationships for years and years, and generally speaking that kind of commitment is not getting more prevalent, but less.
Now jobs are the most common reason to move away. However that is still a minority situation, the majority find a place to live and then a job there. Even when looking for a new job people tend to prefer jobs where they don't have to move.
And as someone else pointed, friends living on the RER or opposite side of Paris might as well live in another city, unless meeting up somewhere halfway instead of at someone's place, but that can quickly get expensive.
Instead they come away with "get your high school friends to pick houses on Zillow together and live an 'enclave.'" Weird indeed.