I can't imagine living in a place for three years and not making any friends. For me, regular in-person contact with friends is essential to feeling motivated

I can't imagine living in a place for three years and not making any friends. For me, regular in-person contact with friends is essential to feeling motivated and connected with the world. They don't have to be close friends, and they don't need to share my career or understand the work I do as a web developer. Most of the programmer friends I would sling code with on a weekend project are global — scattered across the world. Whereas, many of the friends I hang out with the most locally use feature phones, have old or no computers, and think Twitter is pointless. But that doesn't matter because what I need them for is to sit down and have a good conversation. Or play a game of table tennis. Or ride our bikes out to the suburbs and back. If I don't get these kinds of outlets, a week spent sitting down and coding leaves me feeling strangely unphysical, unhinged from the world around me. I've grappled with the local/global issue because my life does feel like a duality, where local (mostly offline) and global (online) are separate. I'm not sure how to resolve that (maybe living somewhere with more early adopters of tech would help). But Derek's solution is an extreme one. You don't have to be exclusively local or global.