Just the title
Seen lots of people moving to big places , but im from a small town and id go back there in a heartbeat if i had WFH option (not possible with current job)
To clarify, im a European and its a question for everyone , not just americans!
European
As an American, it’s because there’s nothing out there. We have SO much land. A small town means you have to drive everywhere. It means the local grocery is 30 min away. It also means 300 people in the town, one library (maybe), but at least three churches. Very much not my vibe :-)
Not everywhere, obviously, but it’s a thing.
-
Poor infrastructure in many of these communities, and no way to get to larger towns and cities without a car. So you’re stuck with crappy chain stores and terrible quality food, harming your health. And it’s boring, because it can’t support many kinds of entertainment.
-
Smaller communities tend to skew towards conservatives, and there’s little way to escape from it (due to the distances and the lack of high speed rail). So expect more religiosity, more discrimination, and politicians that are even shittier than the average.
Huh , i forgor about americans and their shit-frastracture … im from europe and our villages/small towns are dying even tho most of what you said isnt true for us.
Idk whats it about , as most people my age (late 20s early 30s) want to live in a smaller town nearby but noone is moving there just staying in the big cities.
Well, I lived in such conditions most of my adulthood before having a kid to care for, and it was possible precisely because it was just me. Either it was a small town not even close to a big city, or it was a small town at the outskirts of a big city, some 20-30km away. I loved it. Still do.
But it’s so hard to uproot once you have all the other stuff like not only your own job, but also your partner’s. And kid’s school or daycare or whatever. And then having to work out the bus routes for the small humans and figure whether or not it’d be plausible for them to adjust to that and not get burned out or lost or confused or whatever.
And once you need more space, it’s much harder to find places to rent in the small towns. Mostly for sale, if it’s beyond two bedrooms. And in that case it’s much more complicated since you need to go to the effort of getting the place evaluated, arranging the loans and finances so you can pull it off, and that’s a big decision since it’ll probably lock you in there for quite some while, because small towns don’t move houses fast if you decide to go, so you could be looking at years before you get the sale done and another mortgage.
It’s just so hard. Once you are in the city, it’s hard to leave. And the more you root in the city, the harder it gets.
I hate it. I hate the city. I hate most about it.
But I love my family and would suffer in a city until my death if that’s what it takes to keep it together.
But as a positive anecdote, in my life prior to rooting down, as a younger and more adventurous human, I found that maintaining a community and a good group of friends even somewhat far away from the rest of them is easy and most importantly, comes easy. Its natural. I never found community a problem, because I always had a few groups of friends and it was always enough for us to touch ground together only monthly or every other month, so our location wasn’t really a concern. Most of us lived apart anyway. And the actual day-to-day sense of community came from work or uni or that kind of thing. I was never alone, though I lived blissfully far from most everyone.
So the only thing that really makes it difficult is trying to find a way and a good timing for not only one, but three+ people to move at once with all of them being happy with it. That’s a puzzle I’ve found near impossible to crack.
If we had a lot of money saved or good enough jobs to get a nest egg going, the problems likely wouldn’t matter and could very easily be worked around. But alas, we are just lower middle class, and while we are well enough off, moving is a completely life changing and paradigm shifting thing. It’s not something to choose lightly.
Maybe that plays a part within your group of acquaintances too? My work is even WFM and my partner could likely commute easily from most of the options we have within 100km. So technically we have a lot going for it. Should be easier.
But it’s not. Life is complex.
Edit: For context, I’m in Europe too.
-
I’m weird as fuck. Other people who are as weird as fuck as me are possible to be found, but a small community makes it unlikely if not impossible. People as weird as me can only really be found in a big enough place with enough people.
And yeah, there’s also just much more to do than in a smaller town. Taking 30-45 minutes to arrive at something you wanna do is a significant hurdle compared to 5-10 minutes.
I don’t like conservative communities, i get threatened for not being a white man
All small communities left in the US are just the angry conservatives who were too stubborn to leave.
The career opportunities for my partner’s career are basically only available in this region of our country.
The more wealth inequality grows the less important 99% of the population is as consumers and the more important the 1% becomes. As our governments go increasingly into debt to the benefit of only the rich, infrastructure will continue to suffer. As wealth inequality grows the standard of living for the 99% will continue to decline, making the ability to own assets like housing an impossibility.
Add these factors together and you can see why people are forced to move to where the rich are, because that’s where the business is, because they’re the only people with enough money to constitute a customer, and because everyone else doesn’t have the money or infrastructure to go where they’d like to regardless of business smaller communities get choked out.
The only way to get the life you deserve, a better life for everyone in your country regardless of where you are in the world, is to tax the rich out of existence. Remove the possibility of becoming a threat to organized society, to democracy. Remove the threat of amassing wealth beyond reason and watch as your country becomes profitable, your job pays you more, the price of goods and services go down, and the quality of life for everyone begins to rise instead of plateau or decline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization?wprov=sfla1
See “Causes” and the link to rural flight.
If I could get a fully remote job and move to the middle of BFE… Well, I’m considering doing that without a remote job, and just accepting that any job I can get will take a longer commute and probably earn pay less. I lived in Chicago for more than a decade, lived in San Diego a few years. Currently I live in a rural part of my state, but the city keeps creeping nearer, and I’m seeing farms in my county get bulldozed to put in yet another housing development “…starting from the low, low $600s!” of identical, oversized, characterless houses with 1/4 acres plots of land and no trees.
I don’t want neighbors. I want trees, deer eating my hostas, raccoons trying to tear open my garbage bins, and bears being oversized raccoons. I want candles and laterns in every room because the power goes out every time there’s a thunderstorm, a woodburning stove that I can feed with trees that get blown down, and enough land that I can raise goats, chickens, and do a little dirt farming, in addition to my job. I want to opt out of this goddamn rat race, and just have a quiet place where I can offer people refuge from the bullshit that’s happening around us.
My mom came from a small town and said she’d never raise a kid in a small town - her cousins, all save one, were in jail or pregnant before they graduated high school. Because there was literally nothing to do.
I like having restaurants, a good library system, concerts, bars, not needing to drive to get anything. I like living in a mid-sized city, but if I couldn’t, would go bigger not smaller.
Usually those places are lacking (unfortunately). Food deserts, lack of infrastructure, sometimes even poor medical facilities. Also, locations like these tend to be more conservative, and conservatives are not always the most friendly. I personally did move to a smaller area, but I don’t have a family/kids so I’m able to be more indifferent towards the lack of resources. (I also moved to the hood 👀)
Related meme:
Omfg , im stealing that meme for future use
Australian here; I much prefer living away from cities. I like having a big house on a big block with lots of nature and as few other people around me as possible.
The catch is while the housing and land is wayyyy cheaper, other stuff is more expensive and inconvenient. The biggest thing people don’t consider is trades people; you’ll have plumbers, sparkies etc just refuse to even come out when they find out you’re more than half an hour away from civilisation, and if they do come out they charge for the travel.
The majority of jobs simply don’t allow any sort of WFH: if it involves creating or transforming something, people have to be physically manning the tools. Healthcare can’t be WFH, education sucks when it’s fully online.
Smaller communities are great for peace and quiet, but terrible when you need anything they don’t have (or don’t have in decent quality), like jobs, transportation, healthcare and education. If you happen to be “socially weird”, you have to adapt and “unweird” yourself
WFH isn’t available to most people. To have a WFH opportunity, you have to have a job that’s almost entirely done on a computer with no need to be on-site almost ever. That’s just not a reality for most people. For some? Sure. But even most people with jobs that are largely WFH still have to go into their office once or twice a week.
TL;DR: capitalism.
I’ve put some thought into this and I don’t have a good answer other than because of how society is designed to keep us from doing it now.
Evolutionarily speaking, we are designed to thrive in smaller communities. It’s only in the more recent part of humanity that we seem to have moved away from that. I mean, there were still cities a long time ago, but within them were what could be thought of as smaller communities.
I myself am of European descent, but currently live in a place where there is a thriving native community and realizing that I sometimes have envy of some of their ways of life is what got me thinking.
For instance, in western society becoming elderly is almost seen as a problem, like a burden that needs to be “dealt” with. For them it is a station of respect and reverence. If an Elder walks down the street, they are taught to show respect and pay heed to their wisdom and guidance. If the rest of us are lucky, we can get a seniors discount at select stores by declaring they we are among the needy.
I’ve even went as far as researching communal living, intentional communities and cooperative housing, but I keep chickening out when it comes time to pull anything into action.
The idea of finding 4-6 like-minded families to share resources with and use our individual talents and skills to help each other really appeals to me. It makes sense to build resilience against harder times.
But to answer your question, smaller communities helping each other is against the capitalist ideal and is/will be thwarted at any scale by corporations and corporate influenced governments alike at every turn. So I guess that’s the most likely reason.
Seniors who show they deserve respect should be given it. But plenty do not.
I hear you and agree, but part of me wonders if that is solely because they were always nasty people, or they are actually reacting to the awful way they get treated.
They are already probably dealing with failing health, burying most of their friends, not understanding most of what is going on in the world, feeling left behind, etc.
In their shoes I’m not sure if I could be very cheerful myself. Maybe I’ll get the opportunity to find out and hopefully I’ll not be one of the ones you mention, but who knows.
Most of us are tired from all the crap of the world already, imagine 30-40 more years of that on top of the things I just mentioned.
Be careful. Having ownership of your resources allows you to take your stuff, or sell it, and try something else somwhere else. If all the resources are communal, it is harder to escape if the things go south. One of the reasons why is it difficult to leave certain kind of cults.
Absolutely, which is why cooperative corporate structure appealed to me. Everyone has there same stake in it and still maintains their own separate lives. Only things that are agreed upon as shareable would be shared.
Like bulk food, equipment, etc.
As an American (not that it’s particularly unique from Europe) living in a city feels much better because I’m not completely tied to my car. Living in suburbs and rural areas makes it far less tenable to walk or bike anywhere. Cities are the only place with any sort of public transportation or even pedestrian infrastructure that is remotely walker-friendly. Walking is not only more physically healthy it also makes me feel better emotionally
