But don’t take this lowlier angel for granted, Welty pleaded. All good stories are “bound up in the local”; all good stories are “bound up in place.”

  All good stories have a where.

  Welty’s admonition certainly applies to work stories. The American work narrative has always had a strong connection to place: the factory floor, the cubicle, the C-suite. The American Dream has always been deeply infused with physicality: the house, the yard, the garage, the picket fence. Even the American success story has always enjoyed a rich association with what the popular nineteenth-century Baptist firebrand Russell Conwell called acres of diamonds.

  For some, those acres are metaphorical.

  For others, they’re real.

  Carolina Guillen Rodriguez was the daughter of Mexican farm workers who emigrated to California’s Salinas Valley in the 1940s. “My earliest recollection of working was when I was seven years old picking carrots in the field. I was paid twenty-five cents an hour. The winters were OK, but the summers were over a hundred degrees. I thought, I can’t cry because if I do, it will only get hotter.”

  Carolina’s mother was the hardest-working woman her daughter ever saw. “She’d get up at four in the morning to make tortillas for everyone to eat in the fields for lunch.” Her father, though, was drawn to drink. “After work, he’d walk over to the local bar with his buddies and spend whatever money he made.”

  The family was paralyzed by his habits. “My mother begged my father to buy her a house, but he would say, ‘No, we’re going back to Mexico.’ I was always very respectful toward him. But one day, when I was fifteen, the roles got reversed. I don’t know what possessed me, but I scolded my father like I was the parent and he was the child. We need to buy a house! Seven of us are living in this tiny, five-bed, five-hundred-square-foot rental. My mother was expecting another child at that time, but no one would rent us a bigger house because our family was too large.”

  Carolina’s father just stared at her. “I thought he was going to hit me. Then he turned around and walked away. The next day he came to me, ‘Carola, get dressed. We’re going to look for a house.’ ”

  The two of them drove around the community. “We spotted all the for sale signs, and if the homes looked vacant, we’d peep through windows. No, this one’s too small; no, that one we don’t like. Once I knocked on a door and the family said, ‘You’ll have to talk to a Realtor.’ I didn’t know what that meant.”

  Finally, Carolina and her father drove onto a tree-lined street and saw a house that had “great curb appeal.”

  “We called the Realtor; the next day he picked us up in this big, black Cadillac. We lived in the poorest part of town; my father thought it was a heist! He sat in the front seat, my mom and I in the back. We looked at the house, which was a three bedroom, one bathroom, for $13,000. We all fell in love with that house. I had to do the translating because my parents didn’t speak English. My mother cried at the closing. She called that house Paradise.”

  Carolina was smitten with real estate, but as a girl in a traditional family, that dream was out of the question. “My parents were very, very strict. I had to be home every night. I knew there was no way I was going to a four-year college.”

  Instead she attended a local business college and majored in bookkeeping. She got a job at a book publisher, then a beer distributor, then a frozen food plant. She also got married and had a child. “I stayed home for a month on maternity leave, then shocked my husband by saying I wanted to stay home full time. We had already closed on our own house by then; we had bare furnishings. I told my husband that if we paid off our MasterCard, which was eighty dollars, we wouldn’t have any bills.”

  Her husband, an ironworker, reluctantly agreed.

  Carolina stayed home for the next five years and had two more children. “I was a penny-pincher. I wouldn’t drive anywhere. I would drop off our payments at the utility company to save on stamps.” When her youngest child entered second grade, she started part-time bookkeeping at their school.

  But all this time Carolina was nursing her childhood dream. “I kept telling my husband, ‘Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a Realtor.’ He kept giving me all kinds of excuses. Finally, when my youngest son was in seventh grade, I said to myself, They’re teenagers. They don’t want their mother around. My husband tried to stop me, but I said, Nothing on earth is going to stop me now.”

  Carolina earned her license. She was hired by Century 21. Like her mother, Carolina got up at four every morning to make lunches for her family, then headed off to work. For her specialty, she chose entry-level homes like the “Paradise” she grew up in. “I met this Realtor who said she was so frustrated that a buyer didn’t want to spend more than $135,000. I said, ‘I’ll find her a house for less!’ I started going to the worst neighborhoods, knocking on doors. I approached this gang of boys and asked them where their mamas lived; I didn’t stop until I found a seller.”

  Carolina, who went by her maiden name Guillen professionally, did face discrimination. “I took this listing from a white lady. She told me, ‘The only thing I’m asking is, whatever you do, don’t sell it to a Mexican.’ I said, ‘I just want you to know, my full name is Carolina Guillen Rodriguez. I am Mexican.’ I ripped up the listing and dropped it on her feet.”

  But Carolina’s ghost job was not race; it was the secret she kept from everybody. “My biggest regret in life, which I still have nightmares about at least once a week, is that I never got a college degree. It just bothers me so much. When I write emails, I have to really check my sentence structure. I always feel so intimidated by people I work with; I had no choice but to run circles around them.”

  Which is exactly what she did. In her first year, Carolina closed twenty-five sales. In her fifth year, Carolina started buying investment properties using debt, beginning with three duplexes for $43,000. “I was so scared.” In her seventh year, the girl who once didn’t know what a Realtor did was named Realtor of the Year in Ventura County. She became president of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals. “My motto was ‘Don’t just sell, give back.’ ”

  Today, Carolina manages 2,700 rental units and has 14 employees; she owns a number of commercial properties and multiple homes. Those three duplexes she paid $43,000 for? They’re now worth more than a million dollars. When I asked her what places she likes to be in, she said, “Any place surrounded by family.”

  What places do you like to be in? Which environments make you feel most whole? Where is the ideal setting for your work story?

  These three questions will help you discover your answer to Where is your where?

  Past: Where Did You Most Want to Be as a Child?

  In his 1984 book The Role of Place in Literature, the literary critic Leonard Lutwack makes the somewhat unexpected point that place doesn’t really matter in literature. Instead, what matters is what a place says about the people in it. Setting is “intimately related to character,” he writes. “It functions as the detailed and continuous environment in which character is formed and to which character reacts over a long period of time.”

  The same is true for the role of place in our work stories. Just as who locates your story in the context of all the people in your life, what in the context of all you do in your life, and when in the context of all the clocks in your life, where locates your story in the context of all the places in your life. That shaping begins in childhood, which is why the first question to ask when trying to discern Where is your where? is What places did you most want to be in as a child?

  As with role models, what matters about these favorite places is less the setting and more the meaning you assigned to that setting. Someone who liked to be onstage, versus someone who liked to be on the ballfield, versus someone who liked to be in the library, versus someone who liked to be under the hood of a car are all saying something different about their internal scripture. And the goal is to identify the setting of that scripture. Determining what type of sandbox you liked to play in when you were young will help you determine what type of sandbox you want to play in now.

  I asked everyone, What environments were you most drawn to as a child? The answers fit neatly along two axes—home versus away from home, and indoor versus outdoor—so I coded them twice. A quarter of people liked being at home (kitchen, bedroom, garden, garage) while three quarters liked being away from home (gym, theater, museum, church). Just over half preferred outdoor environments (rivers, forests, cemeteries), while just under half preferred indoor environments (honky-tonks, restaurants, locker rooms).

  In eight of ten cases, one of the environments people mentioned as being meaningful in their childhood directly related to work they were doing as an adult. This finding suggests that place may actually be more important in work stories than it is in fictional stories.

  Among home lovers, Cindy Edwards grew up in rural Georgia loving gardening and sewing. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this, but in the sorority house, when everybody was going out, I would be needlepointing.” After raising two children, she opened a skin care line using natural ingredients from her garden.

  Sang Kim, a first-generation Korean American from Queens, said the environment he was most drawn to was the environment he most lacked. “As part of the whole immigrant story, I didn’t have my own room until I was in high school. I always shared a bedroom with my sisters—and a bathroom. In a sense, that was OK. I liked being indoors.” After fulfilling his parents’ dream of becoming a lawyer, Sang left his well-paying job on Wall Street to fulfill his own dream: redecorating other people’s apartments, starting with, you guessed it, their bedrooms and bathrooms.

  Among away lovers, Divya Anantharaman, as a girl in Miami, loved the library and the natural history museum. “If I had to pick one, I’d say the natural history museum edged out the library. I’ve still never seen a live zebra in its habitat, but I’ve seen it and many other iconic animals through taxidermy.” Divya started Gotham Taxidermy.

  Anooj Bhandari, as a boy in Cleveland, liked social spaces. “I was definitely extroverted; I very much loved performing and being onstage.” He grew up to become an actor, a community organizer, and a member of the Neo-Futurists theater troupe.

  Among outdoors lovers, Larry Callies, who grew up on a Black-owned cattle farm in Texas and then became a civil servant, said, “I wanted to be on a horse.” Following three decades as a postman, Larry opened the Black Cowboy Museum in Rosenberg, Texas.

  Derrick Ray, as a boy in Oregon, hated school and loved sports and the outdoors. “I had an English class in high school where if you read four books and did a book report on each, you’d get an A; three books, a B; two books, a C; one book, a D. I got a D. I was like, Hey, I got PE! Let’s go lift some weights. I took every cooking class I could; I took woodshop and metal shop.” Derrick grew up to become a legendary Bering Strait king crab fisherman, with a starring role—as a villain!—on Deadliest Catch.

  Among indoors lovers, Colin Bedell, the Long Island native who moved to North Carolina as a boy, said, “I’ve loved urban spaces. Things that are fast moving, high intensity, like the great experiment of civilization that is New York City.” His urban astrology brand is called Queer Cosmos.

  Shellye Archambeau said the places that she was most drawn to as a child were any places with other people. “I always wanted to belong, so I joined everything. I was a Girl Scout; I was involved in church. In high school, I was a member of the French club, the American Field Service, the National Honor Society. I really wanted to learn about leadership.” She went on to hold leadership positions at IBM and Blockbuster, serve as the CEO of MetricStream and as a board member of Verizon and Nordstrom, and write a book called Unapologetically Ambitious.

  What all these stories demonstrate is that our forgotten childhood inclinations toward place cast a far longer shadow on our adult inclinations toward work than we realize. If you want to know where you should be when you’re older, start by remembering where you wanted to be when you were younger.

  Present: Where Do You Want to Be Now?

  The next question in pursuit of Where is your where? is Where do you want to be now? This question is probably the one that’s been most upended by events of recent years. Through the confluence of flex work, borderless work, Slack, Zoom, higher rents, higher inflation, the Great Resignation, and the Great Relocation, the centuries-old consensus that the only way to do work is to be at work has come under serious threat.

  In what seemed like overnight, where went from being the variable where employers had most of the power to one where employees have a lot more power.

  Again, a few statistics make the point.

  Before the pandemic, 4 percent of Americans worked exclusively from home; at the height of the pandemic, the number reached 43 percent. Among white-collar workers, the numbers were even higher. Before COVID, just 6 percent of white-collar employees worked exclusively from home; during COVID, the number topped 65 percent. After COVID, twenty-three million Americans said they planned to relocate to a new city now that remote work had gained acceptance.

  A big lesson in the global experiment of working from anywhere is that a lot of people don’t like working in the office—at least not all the time. Future Forum surveyed ten thousand knowledge workers and found that only 17 percent wanted to return to the office full time, 20 percent wanted to work remotely full time, and two thirds wanted a hybrid. Those numbers were even higher among women and people of color, who were far more likely than their white male colleagues to see working remotely as beneficial to their lives. The reason, Future Forum explained: women and minority workers face a host of additional challenges in the workplace, from code switching to microaggressions.

  Being in the office is not the only part of work that’s been threatened by change; workplace culture has been, too. The father-and-son researchers Donald and Charles Sull published a study in MIT Sloan Management Review in which they analyzed thirty-four million Glassdoor reviews of employees who left their companies in the 2020s. The number one reason: toxic work culture. The Sulls identified five elements of toxicity. The first was noninclusive; workers felt unwelcome because of their gender, race, sexual orientation, or disability. The second was feeling disrespected; workers felt as if they were being treated like cattle. These workplace challenges were ten times more predictive of quitting than compensation.

  What all of these data suggest is that the greater emphasis on meaning at work is beginning to rewrite the rules of where we work.

  Place is becoming more important in our work stories.

  In some ways, this change should not surprise us. Widespread physical relocation has followed every collective workquake in American history, from the Great Migration to the Great Depression to the Great Recession. Economic crises often result in wherelessness. In America, “none of us seems to know who he is or where he’s going,” Ralph Ellison wrote in an epilogue to Invisible Man. “Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.”

  I asked everyone in my interviews, Did you go through a physical change as a result of your biggest workquake—a new office, a new company, a new city? Ninety-one percent said yes, one of the highest percentages of any question I asked. Those physical changes included a new workplace, a new home, a new travel schedule. Many of these changes were neither anticipated nor welcome. But they’re a reminder that if you do change your work, you’ll likely change your surroundings, too, so you better consider that variable.

  Among those who changed workplaces, Michael Smalls, after he left his job at a South Carolina rug plant to make sweetgrass baskets, faced enormous physical challenges. First, he had to battle alligators and rattlesnakes as he hunted for raw materials; next, he had to battle his own body while weaving the baskets. “I’m doing what I’m passionate about, but with that passion comes sitting down for hours. My doctor tells me, ‘Michael, you have to get up every couple of hours for circulation.’ But sometimes I get too focused on the work. My hands are OK, but my shoulder, my hip, and my back all hurt.”

  Meroë Park, when she left the CIA for the civilian world, was shocked by the changes. “In my first job, I had a little office with a window. It was nice, but if anybody had seen my previous office, they would have laughed out loud. I had a suite and a staff of eight.” The biggest change, though, was the lack of secrecy. “I’d look over and see my phone on my desk and think, Oh my God, I committed a national security breach! I can’t tell you how many times I took a piece of paper out of the office and had a moment of panic. Oh no. It’s classified! When you live in a world for twenty-seven years, even the smallest changes can feel life changing.”

  Among those who changed residences, Rishi Chidananda, when he walked away from his investment banking office in Cleveland for an ashram in Germany, renounced far more than air-conditioning and catered lunches. “I gave up all my possessions. I took a vow of poverty and celibacy. I no longer ate meat; I no longer drank alcohol; I no longer did drugs. But I found the energy peaceful. The whole point of going to a place like that is to apply what you learn to the rest of your life.” After seven years, Rishi relocated to New York City, where he lived in a bare room and taught meditation.

  Jordan Reeves, an Alabama theater geek raised in a conservative family, was still closeted when his acting teacher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham shared his own coming-out story. “I started sweating; my heart was beating fast. I can pinpoint his story as saving my life. Afterward, I went up to him. ‘I gotta tell you. I’m a homosexual, too.’ ” The two became friends and when Jordan graduated, the teacher told him, “You need to leave Alabama.” Jordan moved to Queens, worked at a Christmas tree factory, and then got a job curating educational conferences at TED.