Interesting observation. When looking at his timeline, it's clear that he has lived a nomadic remote-worker lifestyle from 2021/2 until the murder. He has no long term lease or rental responsibility - no roots. He rents for a few months, moves on, travels and so on.
I wonder whether that nomadic lifestyle contributed to his mental deterioration. There was no continuity in any part of his life other than his job. When he lost his job in June 2023, he may have been unsuccessful in finding other employment, or he may have received a severance that he chose to use for travel and adventure lifestyle.
He had nothing that anchored him in life, nothing where he had to be accountable, no real responsibility to anyone or anything.
That's not to say that everyone who lives nomadic can go off the rails, but that disconnected lifestyle may be a factor in Mangione spiraling into obsessive thoughts about the insurance industry.
LM finished college and grad school and began working for TrueCar in 2020. I would be very surprised if the engineers at TrueCar were not required to WFH at that time and possibly for years. Many of my engineer friends (not at TrueCar) were mandatory WFH until anywhere between Fall 2021 and Summer 2022. Because LM almost definitely started as a remote worker, it might also be the case that he didn’t live near a TrueCar office, even if they eventually had an optional or mandatory return to office initiative.
For West Coast company tech workers, it was not unusual during that time to work from Hawaii rather than WFH. Why not, right? That LM chose to rent a live/work cooperative space instead of a solo space suggests to me that he valued the social aspect.
There are fixed terms at the live/work place in HI, so it is not surprising to me that he stayed only 6 months and later rented an apartment. While renting the apartment, he also joined a shared work space outside of his apartment. Everything suggests to me that he enjoyed social interaction until he very suddenly didn’t sometime in 2024.
As for long-term friendships, some were observable. In one case, a long-time friend posted about him in caring terms immediately after his arrest and it was observable from each of their instagram accounts that they’d been friends for many years, celebrating birthdays together, etc. He has since made his account private and I can understand why. For starters, his caring sentiments were polarizing and garnered negative attention.
I personally have not seen any indication that LM did not have long-term, stable friendships, that is until he suddenly isolated from friends and family in 2024.
The only nomadic element that stands out to me is that he posted about his goal to pare down to one backpack for travel and expressed pride in April 2024 that he had achieved that goal for the previous two months while traveling through Asia. He thought it made it easier to be fully present and made travel feel more like an adventure. So it is possible he would have embraced a nomadic lifestyle in a sliding doors universe in which he did not commit murder and throw away his freedom, but I don’t consider his move to Hawaii to be indicative of a preference for a nomadic lifestyle as it was likely an appealing alternative to WFH, at least initially. He appears to have rented two places while there over a period of almost three years, both in Honolulu, which also doesn’t seem particularly nomadic to me.
Even setting the pandemic aside, in my experience, it’s quite common for young adults of that age to move around a bit, often for work related reasons, and without the intention of embracing a digital nomad lifestyle.
MOO.
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