During the pandemic I moved out to the middle of nowhere in NY State. I am surrounded by nature, wildlife, and my neighbors are barely within shouting distance. I rarely ever see friends, go to coffee shops, restaurants, clubs, movies, shopping, etc. And I have never been so not-lonely.
My time is filled with activities and projects so I barely have enough time to just sit with a cup of coffee. When I do, I have a whole backyard full of flora and fauna to look at and listen to, like one of those YouTube channels streaming nature sounds. Country folk have the right idea living out here. You don't miss what you don't see.
And relatively few people are going to voluntarily stay confined to their small city apartment for weeks. I live in a semi-rural house and I can easily go out my door and walk in the woods for an hour or two. (Or drive somewhere else quiet which I mostly haven't been doing.)
The only real contact I've had with people is having gone to the grocery store a couple of times--and I could probably have used delivery for that (although with the lack of stock, that might have been challenging).
I think there’s possibly a fundamental preference disconnect here. Some people like being around people. I’d never even consider living in an isolated house in the middle of nowhere; I like being able to walk places and have people around.
To be honest if I were to become a hermit, I would go live in middle of a forest. Then one can be alone AND enjoy fresh air & nature with no people around. At this point lots of rural places have adequate internet connection for remote work & any entertainment needs.
Cities are kind of pointless if you don't enjoy participating in live activities with other people. Just worse housing at higher price.
Have you tried living in rural areas close to surbubia? Can get your own large property which no one will come near, no randoms walking down the street, and lots of privacy.
In my experience, very few people have a similar life style to mine, which is to say, complicated. And when explained, most people don't understand how or why I would live like that.
I sometimes go on Google Maps and explore remote areas and I always wonder what life is like in the bleak wilderness; and I think how helpless I'd be if I lived there. I grew up in the SF Bay Area and the thought of being so remote scares me. I crave being near humanity, or at least having a good enough internet connection to pretend I'm near. It's a fault, for sure, but I am what I've been made to be.
Locked inside? You can step out any time you want. Such a silly exaggeration.
Personally, I very much prefer country living where I can go to many hiking trails and campsites, have clean air, a quiet environment, and not be beholden to my neighbours for enjoyment of my own property.
I've gone over to the darkside. I live in a suburb 20 minutes from my favorite neighborhood for entertainment, 30m from my parents, 20m from endless fields, 1 hr from the rest of my family and friends. I have a yard, access to a lake, a riding mower, and no utility lines in my backyard so I can dig and build to my heart's content.
I also have Gbps internet and a job at a startup as a principal. This literally is the best of both worlds for me. I'm not particularly wealthy and not particularly clever - I'm sure everyone is doing this and the best part is, there's _room_ out here, at least in the USA.
Very true. and although i'm in the midwest you can still find forest preserves, hiking trails, lakes, rivers etc. Get out, find some big wide open space, no other people around. You get to zone in, decompress a little bit. personally i like fishing so i can stand around in silence for hours casting a little bait around trying to bag a fish.
Alaska. You can move out there by yourself, do whatever the hell you want (as long as its by yourself and doesn’t impact others), and no one will notice or care.
I've done it at the edge of a small town (~12k inhabitants). My grandparents' home was sitting uninhabited for a few years and it once had a beautiful vineyard, a big orchard, and generally a wonderful view. At the edge of a forest.
I've always wanted to live close to nature. I was burned out with my corporate programming job, and I was dreaming of starting out some life-style businesses/SaaS/ something of that sort. I already had some investments that allowed me to live there without financial stress (i.e. the passive income more than 2x covered my living costs).
I was within walking distance of grocery stores, ~1-2km from downtown.
Did it work? Hell no. The biggest issue was I think that I was single, knew nobody in the area, and basically the time spent with just maintaining the house and the surroundings would take more than half of my energy and time.
5 months out of 12 I had to take care of the fire for heating. The whole garden and vineyard were invaded (still are) by a few species of trees such as black locust, that were growing faster than I could cut them, but also oak, birch, basswood and so on. I had a chainsaw and still couldn't keep up. Even after I had a big stack of dried firewood, I still had to spend 40 minutes every morning with actually setting up the fire in the woodstove and so on. And then the snowfall. It was not like in my grandparents' time, when they occasionally had 50-80cm of snowfall, but if I didn't want to be completely stuck there, I had to shovel a lot. The house was about 3 flights of stairs and about 10 more meters away from the street, so it was a bit of work.
Doing the groceries, while not that far away, less than 2km, the return trip usually meant about 150m of ascending. I didn't use a car at the time, so it was a bit tiring. Cooking also takes a big portion of your time.
Then the house itself. I had to do a lot of repairs as the house had been uninhabited for a few years, after my grandparents passed away. The roof. Humidity problems. I had to do some concrete underfloor, that meant carrying tons of sand and bags of ciment uphill, again really hard tasks.
The house had electricity from the grid, and while all the other amenities were available, I chose not to connect to them. I was using water from a well.
In late summer, autumn, I was picking fruit, making jam, also spending a lot of time with that. I tried my hand with organic agriculture, planted vegetables such as tomatoes, potatoes. But then I had issues with wild boars that would come and ransack a lot of it.
I spent about slightly less than an year there, all in all. Did I accomplish much of my main goal (that is business-wise)? Not really. It was a nice experience that maybe I'll repeat some day, but probably only with a partner so that we can split some tasks, and not be almost completely isolated.
Going there for the purpose of having a really low cost standard of living so that I could focus on my priorities didn't really work, because I had to spend a majority of my time just to live there. I could have invested money to make it easier. There were a lot of things that simply made living there harder than it should have been and could be fixed with some investments. I decided that I would be better off in a bigger city at this point in my life.
I'm basically FI and could do that, but the problem is I'd be leaving everyone I know to live alone in a middle of nowhere. Granted, a pretty and picteresque middle of nowhere, but still, it sounds like a recipe for misery. That's why I endure living in a loud and smoggy city...
Maybe all your friends are there. I don't know why I'd want to be in the middle of nowhere with no socialization especially with no external force like a job motivating that I do so, as in retirement.
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