Thoughts on Islands and Belonging

I recently returned from visiting my husband's parents on the island in the Hebrides where they live. My life is really tough, I know. It was a beautiful trip book-ended with a few days in each of the Scottish main central belt cities, Edinburgh and Glasgow.
I love both cities and we were relatively busy, seeing friends, family, and doing some sight-seeing. We generally spent long days walking around and nights either dancing at a ceilidh or having some drinks out. That kind of activity led to me passing out immediately when I got in the bed, jet lag notwithstanding.
But then we took a car to the train to a bus to the ferry to a car to his parents' house and I couldn't sleep; I felt really tired and almost drugged. I guess jet lag caught up with me, or the change to quiet and slow days unsettled me, but I had some midnight thoughts about what was going on there.
His parents retired to this island - they spend most of their working lives, and my husband's childhood, in Edinburgh and it's suburbs. This island has maybe a couple thousand year-round residents but also many tourists and part-year residents. They come to the Scottish islands mostly for whiskey but there are many retirees from around the UK. I asked around and there were maybe one or two American residents. My husband's parents have been there for probably about a decade and have many relationships and community ties on the island; it helps that his mom is very outgoing. However, to me, there's a strange sense of striving for authenticity and belonging, in a place that reeks of history and traditional industry (literally you can smell whiskey all over) but is also only fully populated because of people who moved there because they admired it. Maybe there's a part of me that believes you aren't fully and authentically from a place if you don't kind of hate it and want to leave, even if just to find a better job or something. Maybe I'm just from a boring place.
My paternal grandparents also lived on an island. Theirs was a barrier island between the Gulf of Mexico and Mobile Bay, a little spit of a sand with houses on stilt. Again, there were whole parts of the island that were almost exclusively holiday homes and a small group of year-round residents. For many years my grandparents were part-time residents - my poppa commuted off island for work, and eventually they built another small house inland where they lived during about half the week. It was my grandma who wanted to live on an island. I recently found out that she grew up on the water in Florida and she was the kind of woman who got what she wanted. She told me once that we have salt water in our veins. They were also very involved in the community, going to church, friends with other fisher-people, participating in local clubs.
I think the sense of unease is that on islands there are usually few jobs, and the jobs that exist tend to be rather working-class - shrimp boats, hospitality, whiskey warehouse, farmer. Islands, like any rural area, tend to lose population to the mainland, they always have trouble hanging on to young working-age people and families. The schools are adorably minuscule. Perhaps this is changing when now many of us can work from home as long as we have good wifi? Regardless, it's strange to be in a place where many of the homes are full of people who couldn't ever have made a living there, and many of them made a really good living elsewhere and are now enjoying the lifestyle that made possible. I have a sense that some of the islanders might resent this - especially when I see many abandoned homes and farms. However, I think many of them don't mind because the money of the newcomers is being spent largely in their local economy and in their businesses. It just seems ironic - you grow up in this beautiful remote place, you have very limited job prospects if you want to stay there, and it's now full of people who have money who weren't there when you were small. If there was a class-based resentment, I wasn't close enough to sense it.
I'm definitely showing a bias here which is that "real life" is the life of working-age people. Of course the lives and economies of older folks are just as valid - but in order for an island society and economy to function, you need jobs.
I'm from a small but less idyllic place, which I left not because there were no jobs but because it didn't hold the excitement, and yes, educational and vocational possibilities, of a big city. If you want to be a lawyer or professor, you probably can't stay in your island home.
And it isn't that to be a true resident you should show a jaded disdain for your home. You can't really pretend to be a life-long generations-old resident of a small place like an island as a transplant, but you can make it your home if you want. Maybe I felt unsettled by this simply because I haven't made that choice yet - to move to a small but beautiful place that might be a new home for me.