Loyalty became a personality flaw.

Do not let the fear of looking loyal do the deciding. Looking loyal is not the same as being trapped.

Staying used to be a virtue.

Now it needs an explanation.

If you have been at the same company for six years, someone will ask, gently, whether you are stuck. If you have been with the same person for a decade, someone will ask whether you have stopped growing. If you still live near the people who knew you before the bio, it can read as a lack of ambition rather than a choice. Motion is the default proof of life. Stillness has to defend itself.

This did not come from nowhere.

A lot of old loyalty was a trap. Companies that demanded decades and returned a watch. Families that called control love. Towns that punished leaving. People were right to stop treating endurance as automatic goodness. The correction was necessary.

The correction overshot.

Now the suspicious thing is the person who does not keep refreshing. Their résumé looks slow. Their relationship looks unevolved. Their city looks like a failure to optimise. The culture has a new diagnostic for them: fear. Fear of the market. Fear of being alone. Fear of finding out there is a better version one tab away. Sometimes that is true. Often it is a story told by people who cannot…