Leave home. Move to the city. Find yourself. Collect a few sexual experiences. Rent a shoe box in a postcode you can’t afford. Call it independence. Congratulations you are not an oik; you are upwardly mobile. Mobility is freedom. Deracination is sophistication. Financial precarity is character building. Positive steps on life’s journey? More likely, bitter social control. Leaving is often less self-actualisation than swapping affection, kinship, stability and belonging for administration, landlords, stale anecdotes, and a cubicle job from which you can be fired on a whim.