No Expansion Means No Progress!

In Scott Russell's piece "Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World, Russell expresses his opinion of the expansive nature of people, especially Americans. He says Americans can't be satisfied with what they have and therefore are always moving to new places, taking the value out of the places they pass through in the process. I agree that there should be a point when a person settles down, but the urge to progress isn't a bad thing. If people were always satisfied with what they had, no would have strived to improve society and the world would be a very different place than it is today. Many discoveries probably wouldn't have taken place, like the progression to modern medicine and science, and people would probably still be using outhouses! The Europeans wouldn't have discovered the Americas, there would have been no French Revolution, there would have been no American Civil War. If people didn't have the urge to move forward, literally to different lands and with ideas and technology, the world would be primitive. It's true that chasing an impossible dream can consume a person's whole life with no reward, but simply settling is not the solution. Russell criticizes this aspect of human nature too heavily. The urge to improve is a part of human nature, and it's not something we can get rid of, or something we should.