The person who stayed has a history that departure does not make less adventurous.

Leaving is the story that photographs well. Staying gets described as caution, though it can mean caring for someone, holding a place together, or building something slowly in one location while everybody else moved on. Those are risks too, just without the airports. A life is not measured in distance covered.

If you stayed, resist the habit of apologising for it in conversation and describe what you actually built instead. If you left, ask the people who remained what happened in those years rather than assuming nothing did. Both accounts usually turn out to be more interesting than the shorthand.