but non-city areas are cultural wastelands. theyve been hollowed out. does it really have to be the case that nice cities by the sea can only be the playground of the elite and the workaholic childless?
People say that a lot but I'm not so sure. Half of my American friends had to move to the SFBA not just for a job, but because nobody understood them back home, or they'd be literally persecuted for being who they were. And these aren't always tiny rural towns.
The coastal cities embrace some kinds of individualism for sure.
No worries this is a common topic - city folks can't comprehend what the heck is so great in non-city life, and folks that grew up close to nature, open places and good old lack of concrete everywhere can't see an appeal in living in city.
I'd say look for a cross-section of both if you can - city so vibrant that it offers 10x (or 100x) more culture, events, activities, jobs etc. than you can possibly cover, while having walking distance to amazing swimming (at least in summer), great nature and mountains within quick drive distance for the weekends, or where traffic jams mean usually at most 1 bottleneck street getting slow a bit twice a day for an hour. Those places are rare but they do exist.
I think a lot of city dwellers fail to realise not everyone is attracted to urban life and some people actively disdain it. I really don’t like being in built up areas for more than a few days, if I lived in one I’d be a miserable alcoholic within a month. If you listened to half the people in discussions like this they’d pile us all into Warhammer 40k style arcologies!
Urban life genuinely holds no appeal at all for me, I’m just not wired for it. I know this isn’t true for everyone or even the majority but it is for a lot of people, I’d honestly rather emigrate to a foreign country with all the stress and work that entails than live in a city even for a year. My dream house would be an old stone cottage somewhere overlooking the sea with no light pollution and the nearest neighbour at least half a mile away! It’s not that I’m antisocial, it’s just that cities are sensory overload par excellence and I just feel really uncomfortable after a while of that. I’m social enough, but I prefer to have the choice to keep the world at arm’s length if necessary.
I've chosen to live outside of large cities, in suburban areas. I think of cities as the noisy, hectic places that I'll visit occasionally for some specific purpose, then want to leave as soon as possible. They feel like crowded, hostile places to me.
A big part of that is probably that I wasn't raised in a city, so my contact with them has been while on vacation. Living somewhere and vacationing somewhere are certainly very different experiences.
I live within walking distance of about a dozen restaurants and a bar. I've never been a nightlife guy. There are museums and concert halls 30-60 minutes from here. My home is fairly cheap for the area, and I live under 15 minutes away from work. I don't feel like I'm missing out.
So while I understand that a lot of people would like to live in a city, I don't see the attraction. I feel like the downsides outweigh the benefits.
This is what people overlook when they trash the Midwest or "flyover country". I guess they may think it's cool to ostracize people who live in "Provo, UT" (which is nice, by the way) because they don't go to enough art festivals, but the business of day-to-day living is much less complicated in those places. If you just want to raise a family and go do simple recreational things together, your life will be immensely bettered by not living in a high-population urban district; you'll have a lot more money and a lot less headache. Image-obsessed twenty-somethings, like the ones often employed by tech startups, may think it's cool to ostracize suburbia and ignorantly claim that no one with "real talent" will want to live there, but most of them will be singing a different tune as they enter their 30s and try to live an actually significant life.
Big cities are the pits at offering these. While they offer a wealth of culture, it's not really culture, it's some simile of something that looks kind of like some interpretation of what the presenter thinks culture looks like... the food, the art, the music. It can be awe inspiring and suck you in. You can get your hands on anything you want at a moment's notice, from fast food to "love" [you know that doesn't mean "love", right?] and anything in between, all you have to do is get out your wallet. Relationships are fast and loose, you barely know your neighbours - if indeed you've ever seen them through the peephole on your door, because lord knows you've never knocked on their door and said "Hey, I'm your neighbour, I just wanted to say hey, here's a cup of sugar". Your shoe box is worth a million bucks, you can stand in the middle of the room and touch both walls without moving. Your bed is hidden in a bookcase because it's the only way you can have living space and a bed. That's a million bucks... for a shoe box because *location, location, location!" For what? Because you can earn more money and climb the corporate ladder... except you get your pay cheque each month and it's all gone because living expenses in the city are through the 36 square feet of roof you can afford.
Meanwhile that guy living on minimum wage out in the country because that's the only job he can get has a shit paycheque that goes just as far as yours which has 2 more zeros on the end, he doesn't have to fight for room on the subway for the hour each way it takes you to get to work, he can drive to work in 5 minutes, his 1,500 square foot house costs him barely anything, it's on an acre of land, he grows all his own produce and has a cow for milk, yogurt and cheese and chickens for eggs. He hunts now and then to put meat in his freezer and needs for nothing. He knows and loves everyone and they all know and love him right back. If he has a fall or loses his job, everyone around him rallies to help him get back on his feet. What happens when that happens to you? [Of course, I don't mean you you, I mean hypothetical you that lives in the big city chasing the dream]
Coming from a rural area I think the ignorance goes both ways - hence the overly broad “coastal elite” narrative. I have adult family members that didn’t even realize institutional poverty (ie working poor) existed in cities because they only ever visited the more touristy areas.
I had a whole long thing typed out. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt instead, and assume you didn't mean to generalize suburbs and exurbs as racist and homophobic, artless, desolate and uncivilized places.
I live in a quaint little town by the water, a decent drive away from a major city. I'm a tech worker that chose to move, because city perks didn't outweigh the city stress.
I would say that for anyone considering the change, think about what you want out of your everyday life and move wherever gives you that. Do not lock yourself into an expensive city because it has something that you don't see yourself enjoying every day. In my town, I can walk with my daughter to a local beach that has zero tourists. I have a garden, and a detached home office, and a garage wood shop, and two cars (one for hauling family, one for hauling lumber). I live close to my suburban in-laws, who get great joy out of seeing their grandkids on the weekend. Those are things that no major city in the world could give me, reasonably, and are the reasons why I would never move back.
I don't understand the extremely vocal hate for cities that comes up constantly on HN.
I love living in the city. I can walk to two different movie theaters, two grocery stores, a huge number of restaurants and stores, and a number of my friends' houses within 15 minutes. I can hop on a bus or the subway and expand that even more. I don't have to waste half a day every weekend mowing a pointless lawn or trimming tree branches, but I have parks, rivers, ponds, etc. easily accessible any time I want to enjoy them.
I grew up in a place where you had to drive 30+ minutes to go anywhere. It was incredibly isolating and I'd never want to go back to that.
It's fine for people to want to live like that, but it's obvious that for many (if not most) people, cities are somewhere nice to live.
It's always some rich fellow from these towns or some crunchy dude from the coastal towns who has this opinion.
Dude, there are a plethora of non-descript towns in America. My friend got married in one. They don't have cell reception. They talk on walkie talkies.
If you take the California money for your house, you can just retire there by buying and building enough homes for you and your friends.
This is always some imaginary pipe dream from the coastal elites. Life in the middle isn't idyllic. You guys always put up some imaginary plinth and then build this massive statue representing The Country Life So Beautiful and put a plaque on it and worship it like it was handed down by Moses.
But seriously. Life suuuuuucks there. These people will make it better.
I completely agree. I'm a big city person myself. I like having access to culture, art, music festivals, restaurants, social events, economic opportunities, etc.
However, it can wear on you a lot. I would absolutely love to own an off-the-grid second home. That's very appealing to me.
But to live like a hermit out in the middle of nowhere full-time seems crazy to me in the long-term.
> (do you want to live for a few years in a city with no real friends and no nice bars or restaurants?)
As someone in a mid-sized heartland city, we've got nice bars and restaurants (no, seriously). Main pain points:
1) decent "ethnic" cuisine of certain types falls in the mid-range-and-up category, price-wise, for the most part, with few delicious but cheap options like larger coastal cities may have (Indian food, for example). I do not know why this is. Actually-good bread is also weirdly expensive. We do have surprisingly-good fine dining and good bars, and a ton more food variety than a coast-dweller might think, so there's that.
2) Really far from any decent "outdoorsy" stuff unless you like fishing on kinda-ugly lakes, or hunting in kinda-ugly woods. Hiking? Most of a day to reach mediocre mountains, a long day to reach real ones. Local "hiking" is largely indistinguishable from a neighborhood walking trail in terms of what you'll see (which is to say, not much). Beautiful desert vistas? 1.5 days or so. Any part of the ocean? Again, 1.5 days of driving, minimum. Great lakes? Not close enough to those either, 1.25 days to reach parts of those other than Chicago (1 long day for that). No such thing as a long-weekend getaway to anything outdoorsy that's much fun, let alone single-day trips of that sort.
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