The whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life.

Ozick’s line treats Florida—often imagined as a retirement haven or a place of reinvention—as a landscape of collective afterlife, where the people who arrive have, in some sense, already departed from their former selves. “Weighted down with regret” suggests that the peninsula bears the emotional gravity of countless private histories: ambitions abandoned, relationships ended, identities simplified for comfort or survival. The blunt follow-up, “Everyone had left behind a real life,” frames relocation not as liberation but as diminishment, implying a trade of complexity for ease, or of meaning for mere continuation. The sentence’s sweeping generalization is part of its sting: it reads like social satire sharpened into elegy.