When you talk to people from a major metropolitan area about culture outside of a major metropolitan area, they're very often not talking about culture. They're talking about entertainment, and a specific kind of it.
I live in semi-rural Michigan and the idea that there's no culture here is just kind of absurd. The culture just doesn't consist of having a constant stream of touring musicians and restaurants for you to spend money on.
Agglomeration effects are real and there are centers of dance and music around the country that exist in self-reinforcing cycles of training and performance. These scenes come and go but they don't arise by themselves in isolated dying towns.
Some styles of dance and music, which are a component of an overall culture, are totally centered in large cities. Music is a bizarre thing to bring up -- bumfuck nowhere Midwest smalltown is the origin and inspiration for plenty of music that is listened to well outside of the geographical region it's from. Hardcore punk has plenty of representation from gutted Rust Belt locales, and Midwest emo is straight-up named after it. They do arise and perpetuate themselves in isolated locations, all around the world.
Of course there are cultural aspects that large cities will have and more rural areas won't, as well as the other way around. Neither are lacking culture by virtue of lacking the other's culture.
If you're looking to be involved in culture for just a few hours at a time by going to a restaurant or show and not being involved much past that, you're going to be painfully bored here. I don't think doing that is a moral shortcoming or anything like that, but there are a lot of people that are doing that, don't realize it, and misinterpret the lack of opportunities to do so outside of a large city as that place just not having any culture at all.
Even that is only true in a very narrow sense. My great-grand parents built a 600sqft house in a small town and lived their most of their lives. But they built that house right next to their parents. They lived within 5 miles of their combined 9 siblings. They were within half a mile of their church and half mile from the my great-grandfather's union hall. The town was small, but thriving, with multiple department stores downtown. My great-grandmother worked in two of them.
They did not isolate themselves into a dying town with few opportunities far away from their friends and family.
What millinials and zoomers are really struggling with is the hallowing out of the social and economic institutions that supported our collective wealth and well-being. These struggles may manifest as complaints about the individual ability to afford housing, healthcare, education, etc. But there are not individual solutions to these problems. They are structural.
The flourishing town probably grew that way organically, not because of government support or because some company opened a big facility there.
It's true that land is more expensive now, but even if you could buy your own town and settle people on it, organic growth is basically illegal or impossible nowadays.
They have a publicly operated utility that seems to be working well for them. It's a good story! Direct link: https://nysfocus.com/2023/06/21/public-power-utility-massena...
It's multi-dimensional, not even limited to just that. We are living in a world of increased scarcity. The deleterious effects of an increasing population are very real. From a labor point of view, it's not just increased labor supply resulting in devaluation of said labor. There are tighter margins in the managerial and corporate level of things as well. Modern societies are complex things that attempt to cover all of their bases by inventing whole portions of economy through structured, financial support from the top down. This means that on a fundamental level, additional capital must be appropriated by the organizational arms of society, including the cost of labor to organize and implement such a thing to begin with, which further reduces margins for the managerial class and for the labor class. On top of that, these can be counted on to compound the effects of increased competition at all levels in the relevant industry through artificial flow of capital sustaining said competition that otherwise wouldn't exist. The idea is that more people, more labor, more value, win/win/win. But in practice, we're already burning a mind-boggling amount of entropy attempting to establish some sensible bare-minimum degree of equity. More labor just means a greater degree of a fake and "manually" structured economy to stop whole swaths of society from collapsing in on itself. It's not to say these systems of equity are bad, but they prop up an inflated population number and THAT reduces the relative importance (and thus power) of everyone as a result.
We also have to account for changing climates. Celestial systems aren't static in the slightest, and the status quo changes quite radically and quite frequently. We're currently living in an ice age. During a hot house period, the overwhelming majority of earth's surface ends up being about as habitable as mercury. Even without anthropogenic climate change (which probably just tipped the scales), the fact of the matter is that the climate changes by itself too. It wasn't that long ago that MENA was a lush, green paradise. Only 8000 years or so which is an infinitesimal drop in the bucket. At some point, we were going to enter another hot house period where only a couple coasts are habitable. Wanna guess what that's going to do to scarcity?
Of course, to whatever degree these things exist have no linear, predictable relationship with some single-value macro (or even micro) economic KPI. The highly chaotic system of society is full of nth degree causal feedback loops which are completely beyond prediction. There are nigh infinite more problematic effects of growing populations as a result, I can't hope to be exhaustive about it, or asterisk every permutation of these abstract causes and effects.
There's a lot of rhetoric to be found which assures and assuages that thermodynamics isn't real. There is no relationship between population and scarcity, or if it does exist, it's very minimal. We're not operating efficiently, and we need to do that before we start to examine the relationship between population numbers and quality of life. The convenient part that they leave out is what a society built around "efficiency" (in the sense that they mean) actually looks like. We already have places where humans live according to extreme principles of efficiency: Submarines. It really is efficient to live in bunk beds and eat in cafeterias. Not sure many people want to live like that though, so why the fuck are we trying to build such a world?
Don't forget the free fishing rod/equipment.
So yeah, you do have to have some timber available. But if you live in the kind of place he's talking about, there's more than enough to go around. Most of the land where I live is in crops, but there are enough trees along the creeks and in rough areas that all the people burning wood don't make a dent in them.
My parents would heat their home this way. Actually, I think they still do. They'd gather all sorts of wood from fallen trees on other peoples' land as a sort of "service" aka- they haul it away and you don't deal with it. Is it worth the cost savings? I highly doubt it. They're just not good with managing time/money.
From what I can tell both of his services are pretty popular.
Of course it depends on the land and the house. But here's some Reddit comments also estimating the need at < 1 acre
https://www.reddit.com/r/homestead/comments/1jnpbug/how_much...
Wells are not "free water" unless you never have to worry about any sort of repair or maintenance.
And I'd use a heated vest.
I've got a relative who lost his job last year, his wife gave birth in Long Island soon after and they paid pretty close to nothing.
Their expatriate buddies down in Mexico probably aren't shivering through an upstate New York winter with nothing but a wood-burning stove for warmth, the way this guy proposes.
Considering that the property has a well on-site, water is free, and as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a little extra in electric for that — or they could have the Amish deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in a wood stove, very cheaply.
Maybe "a little bit of electricity" or "very cheap scrap wood" appear to be the vague plans for how to handle heat.
You could run a 1.5 kW heater 24/7 for roughly 40 USD a month. Just make sure the space is well insulated and not too large - but we’re talking about basic living, so that should be easy.
Sincerely, someone who moved from Buffalo NY to Northern California and has never once regretted it.
> as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a little extra in electric for that — or they could have the Amish deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in a wood stove, very cheaply.
Also, conveniently, neither appear to have an associated cost so we don't have to worry about whether the financial math works out.
I live in the northwest, so I can't speak to upstate NY, but downed trees on state and federal land near roads is free to take. Every day there's people posting rounds of wood for free to take.
It's hard work, but it's good exercise and rewarding.
There's some upfront investment: $200 chainsaw, an old maul, and an old pickup truck, but those amortized over a decade is practically speaking $0 heat.
There's some upfront investment: $200 chainsaw, an old maul, and an old pickup truck, but those amortized over a decade is practically speaking $0 heat.
I feel like this is really stretching the definition of "$0".
.. a cargo bike might be a better choice
If you're living on $432 / month and working 30-40 hours at this cashier job then using your off days to grab and process wood is honestly pretty miserable. There are slums in developing countries with higher standards of living because they can heat their "house" (read: tent or hut) with oil.
He also mentions other forms of employment, like raising rare herbs, so maybe he's got a little homegrown operation going that doesn't take much time.
Other than that, again, not sure how different it is from living slums in underdeveloped countries. Me, I'd rather just save up and buy some oil.
But that means you don’t get the latest iPhone, cook basic foods at home and rarely eat out, repair your own appliances, and so on. The hardest part, I think, would be dealing with the social expectations of society at large. 1960 living standards were universal in 1960, but nowadays you’re fighting the entirety of Western marketing machine.
Universal for whom?
Why do people always have to call out "the latest iPhone". Most people can't afford the latest iPhone, nor do they try. You might as well say a Lamborghini. Why can't you be honest and just say "a smartphone".
Using that phone for 5 years would only add like $60 to their total monthly expenses. Is that truly unattainable? Is that really what is keeping people from buying a house?
You can save quite a bit of money by living this way even in high CoL areas. That's how a lot of people without high incomes in those areas get by - by getting handy and resourceful. Through that, they often develop/discover talents and skills, and save a lot of expenses.
For my part, I've done all my own landscaping, installed/repaired/maintained my home appliances, built my kitchen cabinetry and other furniture, etc. I estimate these efforts have saved me at least 100k over the years, probably much more.
I don't think it's nearly enough to offset the housing, education and healthcare unaffordability crises, but it's a way in which regular workers get by.
However, the call-Uber/Doordash/Handyman for everything lifestyle isn't something that works unless you are highly paid and have no kids.
I am glad people like this exist because that means there is less competition for the climate zones I can live in without having to perpetually struggle with the urge to kill myself on a daily basis. I am from the Gulf Coast and the years I lived in Seattle were a constant fight with seasonal depression. Once I left for sunnier climes again all of that just vanished.
Every time I visit the beach, I remember: wow, I really hate this!
Not really no. Cooling always uses heat pumps (air conditioning) while heating only sometimes uses heat pumps. And cooling usually has a smaller temperature delta than heating. It comes down to the relative costs of natural gas and electricity where you live.
https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/why-does-it-take-more-...
I also grew up along the Gulf Coast and live in Seattle now. I've had a bunch of other friends and family who have moved to the Pacific Northwest. Some love it and are still here and some lose the will to live and wilt like sunflowers in the dark. I don't know of any way to predict how the gloom will affect you. You just have to come here for a year and see how it goes.
> Internet: Use library
Ok, funny joke. As if it's actually _reasonable_ to live without a smartphone or the internet in 2025 (or 2015 for that matter). Can you do it? Sure, I guess, why would you? I'm not on TikTok/IG/<insert social network here other than HN>, that's not what I'm talking about here, but it seems almost criminal to not have access to the internet, it would be akin to parents refusing to take a kid to the doctor. Why would you proudly be ignorant and cut yourself from such a valuable resource?
This is strawman to the point of rhetoric and reminds me of the "you can afford a house if you'd just stop eating avocado toast all the time." I'm actually not sure if the article is meant to be rhetoric with a pitch for small town America or if it's an actual argument that happens to have a lot of bad faith claims.
I hope OP is enjoying where they live. I also hope they visit small towns where skilled tradespeople are losing their jobs and businesses due to shifts in America. I don't think telling them to work at a gas station would go over well.
This reminds me of a hunting cabin in Alaska you could rent for 100 bucks a month. One room. Wood fire stove. Outhouse. Only an hour outside of Fort Wainwright. Good luck is all I have to say.
>At the end of it, most people don’t want to live this way. That’s OK — I’m not here to judge them. But I am here to tell anyone who is fed up with the housing market, tired of living the “4HL,” and sick of seeing our country’s heartland regions continue to crumble that there are actionable solutions to their problems. They could do it today. They could make the change if they wished.
No one is angry that they can't buy a piece of shit shack in middle America where they will have to walk an hour each way to work at their (as suggested by the author) gas station cashier job in the deep snow all winter.
They are angry that in much of the latter 20th century, when the actual "boomers" (rather than the previous generations that the author is disingenuously using in their place) could afford a home that was near jobs and community without being in the top 10-20 percentile of earners. They're angry that this is no longer the case for a number of reasons depending on whom you ask, to include housing as speculation, generational wealth destroyed by medical debt, onerous zoning and regulations preventing housing development, selfish older generations selling their homes (and therefore much of their generational wealth) to fund either lavish retirements or more medical treatments, etc, etc.
Yeah you can live a 1910s rural lifestyle on the cheap, sure. Hell, get a tent and a backpack and you can live the hobo life in any of our major US cities today! But this is ignoring the obvious question, which is: If the productivity of our nation has exploded so tremendously since that time, where has all of the wealth gone that one would even dare suggest that we live a life of sufficient poverty to be suspended in that century-old way of life?
Also, you can make any number of easy tweaks to his formula to allow you to have conveniences that would make your life orders of magnitude richer than the true 1910s were. For instance, a $3,000 car, Internet access, etc. Also, anyone coming into this experiment with savings from a few years of "big city work" has a huge amount of capital to play with to set themselves up. $200,000 in savings would give you $10k a year in interest income to live on at current rates, for instance.
The whole point is mainly one about being honest about WHY we have to work 40-60 hours a week so we can stretch to afford a million-dollar starter home, two luxury cars, designer clothes, and IG-worthy vacations. Some people would arguably be happier working little to not-at-all, or working for themselves to make $10k a year and devoting the rest of their time to whatever makes them happy. Why is that so offensive an idea?
I have never met a single person of my generation for which this holds true. If this is the perspective that the author is trying to refute, fine, but I cannot say that it is a common one.
> $200,000 in savings would give you $10k a year in interest income to live on at current rates, for instance.
Come on. Most Americans will never see $200K in their life. [1]
[1] https://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/resource-library/rese...
And I don't think most people can't afford to save $400 a month. Lots of people save that much.
Only one of those we have control over. If starter homes cost a million what can you do?
This is not what they aspire to, or what 95% percent of the people living there aspire to.
Sure, the fishing sounds good, and the country living, but living without a car? No TV? Never eating out? That's weird, man.
This guy's life is no more representative of how most people in red states live than any blue state office worker who idly talks about going to live on a commune is representative of how people in NYC live.
Sure, lots of folks from any culture have a dream of getting back to the simple life. But it's an idle fantasy for almost everyone.
Wait, so they're angry because people are spending their money on themselves for fun stuff at the end of their lives? Or maybe even using it for un-fun medical care? Rather than handing it over to their kids? I don't know what to say. Except that I'm glad I never had kids.
If you like very long books, you should read "The Power Broker", a biography of Moses that explains how he used his job as state park commissioner to become one of the most powerful (and controversial) people in New York.
Coincidentally, recently thinking of Handmaid's Tale for some reason... I was clicking on towns on Google Maps, on either side of the NE US border with Canada, and was struck by many of the featured photos of these places being abandoned-rural-decay.
Probably because overgrown abandoned human activity is interesting to photographers. And maybe that constitutes the majority of photos from those places being shared with Google Maps.
But I also had an idle thought of what-if there was a conscious effort to discourage people from going there, like a town that's kept off of maps. So I started looking around for hints of sensitive government facilities, developers buying up large swaths of land, etc. The first thing I found was an industrial marijuana-growing operation.
I didn't know what to make of it, other than that land might be affordable, and hopefully Amazon delivers.
Access to healthcare is also a serious problem. Also the people may be hostile to anyone who is “a liberal” or “woke”. I wouldn’t recommend being openly transgender in one of these places.
> Electric: ~$30
> Water: $0
> Heat: (no, it's really blank)
> Transit: $53 for a 30-ride pass for each person living there, assuming you go to town 3x per week at $2/trip. Multiple options to take the bus to town each day from this location.
> Food: ~$300/mo.
> Telephone: $8/mo
> Entertainment: Fishing and library, free
> Internet: Use library
This author cannot be coming at this from a serious point of view with this absolute embarrassment of a cost breakdown. There is no accounting here for heat (which is sort of important in the middle of "American Siberia"), property taxes, homeowner's insurance, healthcare, or saving for retirement.
> I’ve known men who grow rare Chinese medicinal herbs in greenhouses on a tenth of an acre to sell via the mail; or my uncle, who takes lumber from old barns and crafts it into shelves to sell online.
Damn, I be that would be a lot easier with an Internet connection at home and a smartphone.
I'm in literally the middle of nowhere in a one-horse town and it has 1Gbps wired to my house and they just put in a second company with 5Gbps the other day, which is wild.
Convincing people to move to a remote area while at the same time seeing literal ghost towns develop, is not something I would recommend. What happens when the public utilities fail? The roads need repairing? One of the _many_ blizzard-like seasons can knock out critical infrastructure.
This part has me screaming shenanigans. Unless you basically don't leave the house, you need a car outside of like 8 American cities. More believable would be a pair of used bikes.
It seems like they have a good number of routes and do route deviation within 3/4 of a mile of the bus stop.
Most of the bus routes here seem to run maybe twice a day, once early in the morning and then once late in the afternoon. There's a few more frequent ones that run on the hour but it looks to be closer to the denser cores.
You change your schedule to handle that, and they usually will drive the van (barely a bus) up to your door.
Okay but the dude is making $5K/y which means he basically has no job and he sits around in his house all week or goes hiking etc. His most exciting day of adventure will literally consist of taking the bus to the library to check out a book, and bringing it back home (while reading it on the bus, perhaps). He can totally afford to plan his entire day around the event.
There are thousands of American towns that are about 10k population - large enough to have a Walmart and other stores, small enough to walk across in an hour or so.
If it's snowing or just cold out I'm still ordering food.
If I'm mildly sick, ordering food.
I'm going to guess that you're a really good shape that a 2 km walk isn't a big deal, but I don't think most Americans can do that.
Shit that's horrifying.
I have health issues and walking 2km a day to try to help fix. So I see 2km a day as basic. 6-10km run a day would be "fit" IMO. things as humans are designed to walk.
Living in suburbia means I have to walk "for the sake of it" although I cam make it useful e.g. get some milk!
As for cold. Anything above minus 5 should be OK just wear stuff like skiiers wear which can be got cheap off brand.
2 km of walking in a day, even in great weather is exceptional for me. I probably average 1km or less.
And I'm not a car owner. My family members will literally hop in a car and drive 30 minutes over walking .5 km to the grocery store. They like the other one more they say.
Like a lot of comments have already mentioned these towns don't even have sidewalks. You'll be walking on the side of the street risking an accident
How? It just doesn’t compute to me that someone would ever see that as onerous.
https://www.ssa.gov/ssi/amount
So you have a ton of people trying to make it off that.
The cold weather is really the red flag for me.
>Considering that the property has a well on-site, water is free, and as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a little extra in electric for that — or they could have the Amish deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in a wood stove, very cheaply.
He glosses over heating, but for a full house that can easily be 200 or 300$ dollars.
Snow tends to cause problems. Now if he wrote this living in Florida or something it would be more practical. No risk of freezing. Walking or biking is possible year round.
I'd actually love to see a bike first city, but outside of a few college towns I don't think it exists in the states
Assuming it's not high income but a real scrounger, this is leaving out way too much. Out of pocket health insurance will easily quadruple that number. Utilities could too, depending.
All I know is that it's gone up tremendously since then, and my family plan costs about $2100 a month.
> there’s never been a better time to try to “make it” in America and live the older version of the American Dream. If we can’t see that now, it doesn’t necessarily mean that things have gotten bad — it might mean that our perception has become grossly skewed by an era of hyperabundance, marketing, reality TV, and social media comparison syndrome.
With an extremely strong emphasis on "older version." This vision of life is not the life that most "black pilled" people were raised to expect or plan for. It is very accessible and is extremely discoverable thanks to the internet (with electricity costs like that I'm surprised crypto miners haven't moved in) - but it's a level of self-dependence and isolation that most people do not want. However it's absolutely true that it's never been easier to live a "frontier" lifestyle, only now with 3d printing and amazon and other bountiful resources to fill in traditional gaps.
Real "billionaire goes homeless for one night to prove the stupid poors are lazy and stupid and need to hedge their expectations" type of energy
We have never been more productive in this country's history and yet we cannot even meet a bar set in the 1950s.
It's frankly ridiculous as is this piece.
> utter failure of local, state and federal government to provide housing, public transit, education and healthcare
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per...
1. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/globalization-did-not-hollow-o...
From the article:
> Note that this includes taxes and transfers, including in-kind transfers like government-provided health care.
So excluding housing, health insurance and student loan repayments etc.
And he does sort of have a point. You could probably afford an apartment _somewhere_, just not in any of the places you consider desirable.
I don't think that this approach is "scalable" and I don't think it's a good idea for most people (perhaps not for anyone). I do think it usefully focuses attention on how so much of cost of living is not exactly one line item, but the massive interconnection of modern life. Living in a place where you can have access to the networks (literal, social, medical, etc) you need for the rest of your plan.
I wouldn't want to live like this! But the fact that one could until one got sick (a common limitation on many creative ways of living the modern US I find) is interesting. I think the fact that there are similarities to traditional frontier living (wood stove heating included!) makes it a particularly interesting.
Edit: Arguably, I think the problem is that the USA achieved the original "American Dream" and simply stopped thinking about how the world was changing and what a modern re-envisioning of that dream should be. Pointing out that you can be an impossibly good frontier pioneer in 2025 could be a way of pointing out to people that we need to move on and stop imagining a thing we can active as the pinnacle. We need to imagine living in a world where everyone who works full time can afford housing and healthcare, where performance is rewarded but isn't required to simply live and where we can let living in the woods safely fade into history as a thing we can certainly do if we prefer but should stop idealizing.
I don't buy lunch. I don't eat "nice" food. I don't drive nice cars. I don't eat out often and have never in my life run up a bar tab over $30. I have under $20/mo in streaming services, buy used/free furniture etc, etc. If I did to all those things the monthly cost would not even make up the ~1k/mo difference between my "got in early" mortgage and what rent on a shitty 1-2 bedroom costs these days. I live in a 1200sf house (in a post-industrial town with an industry more or less killed by globalization, so not like it's somewhere nice) and have the biggest house of anyone I know under 50. This is not a "people won't settle" problem.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely am "making it" in that I'm hitting milestones like home ownership, retirement contribution, etc (at the expensive of day to day material conditions, of course) but if everyone behaved like I do to do it the economy would collapse.
There's a discussion to be had about laws, codes, zoning, etc. and how they've done the same things for housing that the same people's regulatory legacy has done for cars.
And to address rural New York specifically, it is a goddamn dump. You think coal country is bad? You think a bad part of Detroit or St. Louis is bad? it ain't got nothing on <shuffles cards> Oneonta. We're talking boarded up to occupied houses ratios one step short of abandoned mining town. You either work on a farm or live off welfare up there. Oh, and the property taxes are pretty crushing in NY, you'll be better off in a comparably crappy town in just about any other state.
If (and only if) you aren't socially different from the communities you'd be moving to. Being gay or trans, for instance, might mark you out as a target in a lot of the places where you could live this cheaply. Plenty of race, religions, or political beliefs that would make it untenable.
It's hard to claim that any American can achieve this.
Political beliefs do divide the town, but national politics are actually less divisive than I've experienced in larger places. Trans folk do have it harder, but we seem to judge the few we have as individuals. I'm sure there are other towns where these things are much less true, but I wouldn't automatically assume it couldn't work in Massena for anyone with the right attitude. I think it would come down to the individual.
But plenty of places will absolutely run you out of town for having the wrong religion, race, or sexual preferences.
Clearly this breaks down at a certain size, and it may still suck for people on the minority side tho.
Honestly it still sucked to be trans in Vermont, it's extremely isolating especially if you dont have a car or live in Burlington/Brattleboro. The reason why so many queer people move to cities is that cities are really the only place queer people can have a semi-normal social life, and not because they're fleeing Westboro Baptist Church style bigotry
Not only that, but there certainly aren't enough cheap houses in cheap areas like this to meaningfully make a dent in the large number of Americans struggling to afford housing.
It's a lot harder to hate a group when your kind neighbor is one of them. Debate and rational arguments dont actually convince most humans. Kindness without the expectation of anything in return and possibly even hate does.
The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise. …
Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs. They tyrannised over the paidagogoi and schoolmasters.
BeWelcome.org is free accomodation for travellers, so if you need somewhere for just a couple of nights, you can stay. It’s safe; there’s an entire safety team dedicated to handling complaints.
If you settle down for too long though, it is recommended to share in paying the rent or utilities, out of politeness.
It has a Walmart, Home Depot, BJs (similar to Costco), a main street with several businesses. A walkable grid with sidewalks in that main town area....
Feels like reaching that this place is so desolate and depressing.
Check out these pleasant-looking houses in the summer: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Massena,+NY+13662/@44.9264...
Edit: I've spent a few more minutes on Street View. This is not at all the podunk backwater that the author makes it out to be. They've got plenty of commercial streets, and big blocks of houses with nicely trimmed lawns.
I suppose this actually makes the author's point more strongly -- even if you have very little money, you can live pretty nicely in Massena!
Massena is small but not that desolate/small
FWIW, I grew up in rural nowhere (population 150, nearest town 45 miles away) - and I honestly don't know how anyone can live out in the boonies without a car. Taking the bus that goes 3 times a day is one thing, needing to move stuff is another thing. I mean, obviously there are plenty of people that do manage - but sooner or later you'll become completely dependent on others for certain types of transportation.
Also, there's clothes, house maintenance, and lots of other things.
Are there bus lines in the middle of nowhere?
The author is being somewhat misleading in the sense that this is not the type of bus service that one would use for your weekly commute to that 10 hour shift at the gas station, never mind the three or four times per week that you would need to cover the bills. It may be fine doing errands in town, where the arrival time and departure time don't much matter. It may also be fine for spending a day or two in the city, assuming you have the budget to stay over night.
I'm not saying that the type of lifestyle alluded to is impossible, but it is not going to be the type of lifestyle accessible to young people. Then there is the question about whether they are equipped to live that type of lifestyle.
Even Ottawa is not out of reach at only 80miles.
I've done some riding on rural roads with no shoulders, and it can be as scary as heck. At least on winding roads in wooded areas. That's from the perspective of someone who is fine riding on fast and busy urban roads during all seasons. Winter maintenance is also a huge issue if you are riding to work. If you're doing seasonal work, that's fine. You just wait until everything is plowed for winter forays. If you're working all seasons, you cannot maintain a job when you cannot reliably reach the job site.
I guess, if the math holds, you would be paying around $50/month to heat it in the winter months.
E: changed kW/h to kWh per the nice commenter who suggested as much below.
That said, it might be a better use of time to work, then get the wood delivered.
But it is extremely important to point out that the American "rat race" cities subsidize areas like this. There would be no road in front of this house without those subsidies. These areas are net negative economic contributors that depend on federal and state funding to exist, including that bus transit that this person is relying on (not to mention the American factory workers who grind out their shifts in urban centers to make those buses).
The author claims to be living the life of great-grandparents, but it’s not like he’s a subsistence farmer or something. As a metaphor it’s kind of like claiming you’re a wild animal living out in the wilderness living a simple life of virtue when in reality this existence is more similar to a raccoon living out of the dumpster of modern society’s surplus.
Why bother building a self-sufficient community like the Amish where they build their own homes and grow their own food and build their own buggies, clothes, furniture, and breed their own horses when you can survive in a cheap depreciated house someone else built, use the library and transportation that other working people pay for, and the roads that were built by the workers who actually work some significant hours?
I am sure it works on some level but it doesn’t seem to me to be a very positive alternative to a lot of other lifestyles.
Apart from all that, there are so many flaws with this article.
The budget didn't include mortgage/housing cost, I guess it's just assuming you're paying cash? How does a person with this kind of lack of gainful employment come up with $29k?
Water is $0? Even well water requires some level of upkeep and potentially replacement and re-drilling.
Most rural towns in the US absolutely do not have this transit available. You'll need a working maintained car plus insurance almost everywhere that looks like this.
Internet, use library - again, with what car? Aren’t a lot of the methods available to make income dependent on internet access?
The heat budget is just blank which makes no sense, heat in upstate new york is not cheap as you need a lot of it.
Education for your kids? How is that going to look out there? Are they going to be trapped here? Will they even have the option to opt out of this lifestyle? How easy will it be to do homework at home with no internet? You’ll rely on a rural bus schedule and use the library during open hours only?
I might also point out that a lot of modern society lifestyles that aren’t so far on this side of extreme of frugality are really easy and comfortable lives. Not all of them, a lot of people live difficult modern lives, but at the same time the “most people” who left the farm to get a job in the city did so for a reason.
I guess you could say that the extremes of society can make for some interesting reading.
It's even more important to point out that places like this grow the food and do the manufacturing that those "cities" you like would collapse without.
> The budget didn't include mortgage/housing cost
True, but I don't think you can get a mortgage for a $29K house. I'm guessing the guy is saving up for his house by sticking in the rat race until he's got his $29K saved up (presumably made easier with his wife?). Then, he shops around for a house on a bus route. I suspect it is possible, especially in a state like NY.
> if the author of this article gets cancer I bet they'll want to visit a hospital where doctors are working 12 hour shifts grinding out the era of "overabundance."
This is one point where I disagree. I'd really rather that doctors were working shorter hours. I don't want someone taking care of me if they're at the end of a 12 hour shift. Forget about the fact that it's so bad for her, it's also bad for me and the level of care that I get.
> Water is $0? Even well water requires some level of upkeep
Oh yeah, we just paid $800 to replace our pressure tank. His roof will need to be replaced one day, the gutters will leak, etc.
I actually think I detect a bit of tongue-in-cheek in the article. I think this guy will do this for a while, enjoy his adventure, and then go do something else.
It's one of those cases where the "freeloading" is more miserable than just working, which is why abuse isn't rampant.
That's the first thing I thought about.
His budget of $432/mo doesn't include health insurance. But $5K/y probably gets him Medicaid eligibility. Let's assume he's on Medicaid, then. In NY state, that covers quite a lot of dental care, if you believe this: https://www.health.ny.gov/health_care/medicaid/program/denta... Not saying it's a good option, but it's there.
> Taking the bus that goes 3 times a day is one thing, needing to move stuff is another thing.
What kind of things do you think he might be moving? He probably has just about no possessions with that budget (and a 600 sq ft house). In a pinch, perhaps he can rent a truck from Home Depot. Apparently, there is a Home Depot in Massena, NY, so maybe it's not quite so far out in the boonies as it seems.
Personally, I wouldn't do it - the lack of choice would get very unpleasant very fast. But it could work for some.
And working 5 more hours would get him a some better garden tools, and 20 more he could support a family of 3 And if he just got a higher paying job, he could even get a car!
If he is on medicaid then he isn't "living" on 432/month. That would be living on 432/month PLUS whatever medicaid is worth, likely well north of another 500/month.
Then the kids need schooling, either in-person or remote. that is another 10k/year/kid. And you need some sort of local police/justice system to ensure nobody boots you off your homestead. But even once you account for all those local costs, there are things like national security. Living a peaceful life on a remote farm is only possible because the country is ringed by police and armed forces. Those things may be a thousand miles away, but someone still has to pay for them.
Well, not for long at this rate.
Oy vey
Him and his wife were also in their 20's, and their kids I think were already a few years old when they moved to the boonies. All healthy.
It's an extreme example, but this is a good read:
If you (generic you, not parent) happen to be one of those who flagged it, maybe you could explain why?
You also have money in the bank so if you feel the need to burn a few thousand on something you can. It will shorten the vacation but who needs 6 years seriously?
>often enough, the “boomers” are the scapegoat; the ones who lived their American Dreams and, as the allegations go, pulled up the ladder behind them as they tasted their successes.
>They’d merely need to content themselves with a manner of living that would be more in line with that of their own great-grandfathers
The problem isn't that we can affordably live like our great-grandparents. It's that we can't affordably live like our parents and grandparents did.
Somehow I think grandpa would be suspicious of this tale of bootstrapping just being socialism. But why not? I think people in the left have been insisting that if we gave people a robust baseline for free (by taxing the rich), we could revive this sort of lifestyle.
Whether that is giving up living in comfort or making small changes to their habits.
I think the relevant commentary here is to look at what happiness looks like for you. For a lot of folks they are just going to mentally masturbate to alternative ways in life. For the select few that make those changes content like this is critical.
Thanks for spreading the seeds.
> The living conditions there were miserable. Due to the construction method, the room was difficult to heat, it was damp and teeming with vermin. (...) The Housing Act of 1901 prohibited living in sod huts.
If the author says "you can live like your grandparents" to mean "in conditions that were already considered miserable for the standards of 1901", that's not a great selling point. And while I sympathize with the underlying message to a point, I would argue against romanticizing the past. Sure, my grandfather lived in a cheap house he built himself, but he also came back home every day with bleeding fingers that my grandmother would treat.
Why do you assume that they are no kids in the neighborhood?
I suppose another option is that they don't actually care if their kids have friends. Perhaps parents are enough, in their view.
You could make the payment trading options with an almost meager portfolio. Evil stock market and corporations could buy you a free house.
I didn’t bother to check if the article gets any more serious from there.
The authors point resinates for me, and I've seen a different but related model by friends - A couple (Dentist and small business owner) living in semi-rural Kansas (city pop ~40K). Their contention was that normal people in a normal week eat some food, go to work, do kid stuff (school, practices, etc), workout, watch some TV, and sleep a bunch... And theres really nothing about that that is needs to be in a major metro, so they moved to a place where college educated adults from the coasts dare not go- Kansas. The recognize the useful stuff from the metros are the food, culture, etc... and what they did was take a trip one a month to live like kings...
Can you imagine how much more fun you can have with ~400K of disposable income (after living expenses)? Seeing the trips they've taken and the adventures they were able to afford because their 7 bedroom 5 bath house cost ~400K (movie theater and all)... was mind boggling to me. It was all for the small cost of not being able to get access to the metros during the week. Seems worth it to me...
Probably most importantly, a thriving job market
What would you judge them for even if you were here for that?
For me, one of the biggest issues with living out in a small rural town like this is the culture. From my experience, the majority of rural areas in the United States are now extremely politically conservative. Going anywhere outside of the Puget Sound metroplex always reminds me of this reality... lots of MAGA and confederate flags, billboards promoting the latest ultra right wing candidate, etc.
Going into the armpit forgotten realms of the US is, however, not appealing in the least despite its financial practicality on limited means.
Massena's about the size of the town we moved my parents from after my father had a stroke, though it's a lot poorer (in 2013 nearly a third of the population was below the poverty line, and that's before Alcoa closed a chunk of operations there). It does have a hospital (25 beds, not-for-profit) and given the demographics I'm 100% positive that it's one of those hospitals that *needs* Medicaid to survive.
I'm pretty sure that doing this really would feel a lot like going back and living like your grandparents or great-grandparents did - all the joys of the 1950s.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was data center work available though - with cheap power there's probably someone there doing cryptomining or maybe even hosting AI processing.
>Electric: ~$30
>Water: $0
>Transit: $53 for a 30-ride pass for each person living there
>Food: ~$300/mo.
>Telephone: $8/mo
>Entertainment: Fishing and library, free
>Internet: Use library
>Medical costs in case a moose kicks you in the nuts while fishing: ~$500000
Someone help me manage my budget, my family is dying.
Supposing I've made peace with the main gist of this: Cut living expenses to a point where you can work ¼ or so of the time most of us spend working by living somewhere cheap and not being so materialistic.
The missing piece here is social connections. Family and friends. If I could take my in-laws and my 2 best friends and their families with me, I'd sign up to move to a rural place like this tomorrow. But it's impractical for nearly everyone in the whole country to make such a thing happen. This limits its appeal. This place is 90 minutes or so from the Montreal airport, which is actually not bad for rural places, but flights are not cheap, certainly not accessible on the budget described here, so for you to have contact with anyone outside this town, they're likely going to have to drop about $500 per person, per visit, and will be staying at the Super 8 since you probably don't have a guest room). So, implied but not acknowledged in this piece is the assumption that you are almost definitely going to only see your family and friends a few more times (maybe once a year each, if you're super lucky) for the rest of your life.
And unlike questions of money; food, entertainment, family and friends aren't fungible. You can start over and hope to make new friends out there, but you can't replace people. This is what would make this life untenable to me, and I'm not even all that extraverted.
But that aside, I suggest this is front page and meaningful not because it brings up a third option (to stay home, move to a city, or move to rural NY), but instead because it advocates accidentally for just staying home. Your family probably already lives in an area that is more affordable than SF/NYC/Paris, and they are there waiting. It's entertaining as an extreme data point but motivating for other reasons
This article is most interesting to me because I tried moving to the big city to be a big shot techie, and have been substantially happier living outside a major city in Minnesota.
Absolutely nobody that I knew in those cities lived near their family, absolutely all of them moved away to chase fortune and fame.
The NYC metro area is 23 million [1] which is about 7% of the country (23/300). There's a good chance somebody who works in NYC grew up nearby.
That said, if you chase fortune and fame for a decade and then retire to Minnesota you still come out ahead... Even if rent is twice as expensive in SF, if your salary is twice that then your savings are also twice as much which will go a longer way anywhere but SF.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
The demographics of NYC require and support the idea of a huge and constant flux of people from distant areas moving into and out of the city which matches people’s observations. Even the gender divide is abnormal, the largest age group is 25-29 for women and 30-34 for men despite more men being born vs women living longer.
And the locals start to hate you for buying up land and generally raising prices enough that working folk are squeezed out of the market. Some areas are starting to enact laws to prevent productive farmland becoming condos and hobby farms for retiring city people.
But yeah, this lifestyle is mostly madness. I watched others stay at home and they have decades of memories, families, and paid off houses. Grass is greener.
FWIW, I've crossed the border at both Cornwall and Ogdensburg when driving to Ottawa, and they were quiet when I crossed. Going from the US side to Canada was fast and easy, but the reverse wasn't true, and that was several years ago when crossing the border was quite a bit less stressful.
This is one way gentrification happens.
The IRS estimates per-mile deduction at well over 60 cents per mile. If you have to drive 15 miles to the grocery store and back, your grocery bill goes up $18/trip. If you need to drive 15 miles to work and back, take $90/week out of your paycheck.
Then there's the fact that whoever is The Employer in that region - if you lose your job there, you're fucked. So The Employer gets to abuse every rule in th book because who's going to complain and risk losing their job? If The Employer decideds to drop everyone's pay by 25 cents/hour, what are you all going to do? Answer: nothing.
Meanwhile in the city you can go anywhere you want within a 500 square mile area (or more) for well under $100/month and commuter rail will take you even further for not a lot more. And you can do other things while using said transportation. No "self driving car" needed.
As a sidenote: the same author complains about the "loss of the $50 motel room" and laments they're 3x more expensive now. Days after complaining that housing isn't actually that expensive. The guy has to be a troll...
Oh, and also not factored in: almost every aspect of rural life is heavily subsidized, and I don't just mean direct assistance. I mean literally everything you stare at when you roll through a rural town was subsidized in some way by the federal government, and most of them either don't know or will never admit it.
For fucks sakes the government actually runs a program to subsidize rural Americans getting to fly around on barely-occupied turboprop planes. But heaven forbid a city get some federal funding for electric or hybrid transit busses that will serve several thousand people a day.
It’s because rural voters are both active and reliable regardless of their party affiliation, they get out the vote. This in turn for the fact that many rural counties account for a great many house seats and can swing senate elections, they have more power than numbers suggest.
If urban voters were as persistent and consistent as rural ones they could easily flip the narrative, but in my experience (and by looking at a lot of election statistics) a huge chunk of apathetic eligible to vote voters live in urban areas, so you don’t have the same en masse consistency and persistence
I also wonder how close it is to the nearest hospital or urgent care.
Your comment does focus in on the interesting point in that connected places have perhaps not scaled as well. Or perhaps there is some pareto front of locations on cost vs connectedness we need to imagine in our heads. Very interesting.
Unfortunately the appeal to ancestry fallacy is always a terrible idea.
You see this in the nutrition space where “influencers” go on and on about how our ancestors ate, forgetting that our ancestors died extremely early relative to modern humans.
Similarly, our grandparents lived pretty terrible lives in many ways.
The reason to complain about the high cost of living is that the U.S. has an incredibly high GDP and yet Americans live highly precarious lives, not that in certain very specific ways our ancestors had it slightly better, which as you point out leads to all sorts of issues.
Starlink and a local grocery store means the vast majority of the US is able to support a lifestyle most of humanity could only dream of until fairly recently without actually being that expensive. Year round bananas for dollars per pound is a fucking miracle of logistics.
Not that long ago one of my coworkers was effectively living in minimum wage in a major US city and tossing everything else into savings. Excessive number of roommates, no car, cooking simple vegetarian meals at home etc. At the other end if he had a major medical condition, drug addiction, etc he’d have been “fucked,” except for the fact modern medicine simply wasn’t available at any price again until recently so should we assume it’s normal.
No they didn't, stop using averages.
You lost me here. Weather is probably the most important thing to me. Cold weather gets into my bones and leaves me low and uncomfortable. My body physiology is such that even if I wear appropriate clothing, I end up sweating under them and paradoxically get even colder. Winters for me just mean being cold, wet and uncomfortable and is not worth it for me.
I was in South-Eastern California just visiting desolate areas. One place I stayed at had absolutely nothing: the nearest place to get food or gas was Bishop, CA, a 50-minute drive. Coming from a big city the desolation is appealing at first, but gets tiring pretty soon.
New Mexico, Arizona, even Florida if you're into tropics - have pretty amazing weather, no? And there must be low COL locations there. Now, imagine living in Canada. The warmest place in all of the country is south-western BC and it rains most of the time (the nature is amazing though).
Some anecdotes from that time:
I had a $30/mo phone plan that got me 100 minutes, and 5GB of data at HSPA+ speeds. I basically never worked from home, even if that had been an option, because one too many `npm install`s or video conferences would've set me over the edge. I brought my personal laptop to the office to install OS updates, and took downloads back home on a flash drive. And if I had an unexpected call to a 1-800 support hotline - one that I knew would take an hour - I'd literally go find a payphone, where you could call it for free (although it's a much higher charge to the recipient).
I developed a strong love of free-to-me media and entertainment. I was a voracious reader of library books, got my news off broadcast TV, listened to FM radio for music (to be fair, I'd always - and still - done that), and so on. I was attending one or two tech meetups a week.
I didn't have a car. Being a 15-minute walk from a train station helped drastically, but I wasn't as close to the city as most of my colleagues were (maybe 20min over others' average). Visiting my parents took 115 minutes (30 minutes by car) and I did it every other week. Twice a week, I'd take a commuter rail train south of the city, then walk 20 minutes to get where I was going. Most of the time I'd bum a ride back to the station with someone else there. All said, it was probably two extra hours of commuting whenever I did this. There were even times where I'd carry odd things home from Home Depot on the train.
And then, as we got older, many of my friends started to move far out of the city, to places unserved by our transit system. I was totally dependent on my friends still in the city to carpool, even though I was almost certainly making more than they were. I wish - truly I wish - that I could say that this was the straw that broke the camel's back, what made me snap out of it.
Sadly, that honor went mostly to both my work changing (much more teleconferencing / Zoom), and my family situation changing (needing to commute out to the burbs regularly, sometimes with little notice).
I still remember some of the jibes I'd get while doing this - "why do you make life so hard on yourself?" and "you don't know how to have money".
I look back on that time and do think it was an interesting experiment, and to an extent, I'm glad I did it for the perspective. But really, I was naive. I wasn't doing something that somehow made me more independent, or less wasteful. I was dependent on much of other's output, and really only wasting my own ability to be productive.
Top ten occupations, 1920: Farmers, farm laborers, clerks, salespeople, servants (bellboys, butlers, cooks), textile workers, machinists, carpenters, and teachers. All of those jobs, even the less respected ones, had infinitely more societal respect than the common jobs hiring in rural America today - such as stocking shelves at Walmart or working at a gas station. You could be a simple farm laborer and have a wife and kids and a place in society. Today, though, a young man working at a Walmart or a gas station will struggle to attract a stable partner or the respect of the world around him.
The kids slept in two sets of bunk beds in the bedroom. The parents slept on a pull out couch in the living room.
I’m not saying I want to live that way. Just pointing out that people have lived that way before.
Especially tenable for the tech crowd, where salaries are high and potentially scales well with more effort put in, even if for a short duration.
Lots of HOA communities exist with condos or townhouses. Example prices would be $175k for 3 bed, 2 bath condos. These can be found all over the country. Add a little more on top of it, say $250k-$300k and you've bumped up to a 3 bed 2 bath townhouse with a garage. For the price of a downpayment for a dump in a major metropolitan area, you can own a 20-30 year old construction fully paid off. And that's a mid-case scenario.
In a low tax area a place that's paid off like that might cost you $400-500/mo between taxes, homeowners insurance, and HOA fees. The big "GOTCHA" everybody comes up with is health insurance. Well between medicaid and Obamacare you can get sizeable tax credits up to fairly high incomes. If you're making around $50k/yr in my state PA, you can get around $1500/mo in credits with a family of 3, and end up paying ~$1200 in premiums per year.
There's literally nothing blackpill about this lifestyle. It's as walkable as any suburb, with the same CHATGPT-style standard of care healthcare that exists across the country, and it's actually more convenient to get from point A to point B in a car than in most major cities or in high density suburban areas. Fiber internet is likely more accessible and reliable too, unlike how it would be in decrepit city buildings.
A lot of pros, and not many cons - sure it isn't $432/month, but you can make situations like this work for $2-3k, which opens up an endless number of careers, projects, and opportunities to live off of.
xeromal•9h ago
I don't really see a point in living a big city with the remote job I have and that many others have if I can live in a smaller area that still has humans but much cheaper way of living. Everyone claims it's about living in a city with available services but I see those same people decry how much the food costs and also that they have no friends and can't find someone to date. My thoughts aren't as articulate as I'd like them to be but I guess I'm ultimately trying to say is if I'm going to be miserable, why not do it on my own land for a lot cheaper.
aaronbaugher•8h ago
I'm sure some city people do take advantage of all the diverse options the city gives them, but it seems like a lot of them ended up there for other reasons and then use that as a rationalization for staying where everything costs so much more.
keiferski•7h ago
However – I do think there is a sweet spot. If you can get a remote job that pays decently well and doesn’t require an excessive amount of time – and live in one of these cities – you can actually manage to see and do everything.
For example - I lived in New York for a while doing exactly this. I worked remotely and so could avoid rush hours on the subway, at restaurants, etc. and I had enough time and pocket money to explore the city.
trollbridge•4h ago
xp84•2h ago
> a recession hits and you can’t find another job.
Suppose you avoid all remote work. You live in San Francisco. If a recession hits and you're laid off, now there are 10,000 local unemployed tech workers trying to get 5,000 local jobs. Similar risk of unhappiness.
I don't believe that remote positions as a class are more likely to be eliminated than any other, so I just think of jobs located in "Remote" to be just like jobs in any other city, "Remote" just happens to have more jobs than any one city, and has unlimited housing for sale or rent at every price point.
I went remote in 2018 and couldn't be happier with my choice. I'm on my 3rd job, although Job #2 required me to be onsite for about a year starting in 2019.
7thaccount•7h ago
The bagel places were indeed good, but not noticeably different than the hipster bagel places in my city.
Wood fired pizza was good at several places, but again...none were noticeably different than the wood fired oven fancy places in my small city.
The game stores are much bigger in my city due to lower real estate prices.
Times Square was the biggest disappointment. It's literally just standard big box store crap like GAP and M&M store and stuff like that. I guess that one's on me as it's a tourist trap.
Central Park was cool, but not as good as the multiple large parks in easy driving distance.
I could go on and on like that, but essentially I can own a home for a fraction of the cost to rent there. The only real difference is in a metropolis like NYC, you can meet up with people for any interest you want practically. You want to learn Klingon? I'm sure there's people doing that in NYC, but not like a city of 150,000.
Edit: the tap water was superior to my towns.
keiferski•7h ago
The great thing about New York is the prevalence of basically every nationality, with its own designated neighborhood. Places like Flushing, Corona, Brighton Beach, etc. These are also the areas that inexperienced tourists don’t visit.
If you visit again, definitely try to venture out to those areas.
RHSeeger•7h ago
Pointing out that it's the same old big box stores doesn't really connect to the draw of it. Most people don't go to Times Square to shop, they go to _experience_ it, and its entertaining. But it's not the place you're going to on a normal Saturday night with your friends.
7thaccount•1h ago
anon7000•7h ago
But I grew up in a town of less than 5k in the Midwest. The nearest cities and towns were all less than 50k population. Rent is, of course, incredibly low. There are even dozens of small universities in the area. The nearest city of 100k plus is more than an hour away.
There are vanishingly few hipster spots in these places. You get chains, more chains, suburbs, and a couple of mom & pop restaurants. Some of which are decent, but most of which are disappointing. The variety of cuisines is extremely limited. To see any kind of major entertainment, like comedy or concerts, is a two hour drive. The major airports are two hours away. Your options for outdoor recreation and activity are extremely limited: not enough people for lots of recreational sports. Too much farmland for beautiful parks. Too flat for winter activities. Too few people to have a variety of cultural events or festivals.
You can, of course, be very happy living here. But what you get is extremely different from city life.
Like you say, there are small cities that can check a lot of boxes. But I’d go out on a limb and say that’s not typical for small town America, and not everyone is happy in suburbia either, even if they have their own cookie-cutter home!
trollbridge•4h ago
Driving to smaller airports - just arrive 50 minutes before departure.
7thaccount•1h ago
onecommentman•12m ago
1. People who like the mega cities/metastacities. They genuinely enjoy the idea that they could never “fit into their head” the city in which they live. It’s just too big. You can never possibly exhaust all the possibilities, much less keep up with all of the changes. They can be intensely loyal to their abstract city, abstract because they can never physically/socially experience the entire city, so it mostly exists only in their head. But the endless horizon of that abstract city is where they really live, and why they like it so much. Never boring…of course neither is a war zone.
2. Smaller right-sized cities, defined as cities/regions that you can just about fit into your head. Big enough that they are rarely boring, especially if you take advantage of the third dimension of time/local history. But small enough that you can experience the coziness and stability of fully living in that one space…in other words, a home.
3. Smaller towns of which you can exhaust the possibilities in just a few years. If you grok the place, it is supremely cozy, and you can deepen the sense of that by raising a family and becoming (an old phrase) a pillar of the community. You go deep socially instead of craning your neck across an endlessly broad horizon. You also have the third dimension of time/local history. And you have the additional option of defining your location not just as the small town, but rather a whole surrounding region as your actual home. For Americans this is easily an area of 60-100 miles/100-160 km radius, given our love affair with the automobile. That regional view then gets you into the second level of a small city, enough stimulation so it’s rarely boring.
And there’s always cyberspace. The small town life isn’t so extremely different when that part that is online is so similar for everyone, big city or small town.
For extremely different, try 19th Century Western life, or 20th Century non-Western life.
chasd00•7h ago
RHSeeger•7h ago
NYC pizza (and even north of the city) is generally a step above most other places. You can find similar quality pizza most places if you look hard enough, but it's nice being able to stop almost anywhere in NY and get good pizza, better than the best you'll find without having to do real research in most places. The common open-front place in NY has great pizza. Where I am now (suburbs of another fairly large city), I have yet to find a good NYC-style pizza.
Bagels in NY fall into a similar bucket. If you search, you can find good ones elsewhere, but it's downright easy to find good ones in NYC (though that's less true outside NYC/Long Island than it is for pizza).
And man, the black-and-whites. To date, I've never found a good one outside NYC.
Times Square is an experience, not a place you go to shop. And not a place you go to wander around on an average Saturday night. Yeah, it's a tourist trap, but that's the experience it is. It's entertaining to walk around/through; on a rare basis.
I loved working in NYC (I lived about 90 minutes north of it at the time, but didn't need to go in every day, so the commute was less of an issue) and I very much miss living in NYS. Rarely, I'm there on a business trip (it's been years) and I plan my time out so I can have pizza for dinner.
7thaccount•1h ago
tacheiordache•6h ago
yupitsme123•6h ago
When I was a kid I was drawn to NYC by the little hole in the wall restaurants, delis, coffee shops, funky stores. All owned and frequented by colorful local people. Technically these things still exist but they're mostly corporate chain versions of what used to be there. The unique experiences that the city still has to offer are too expensive and exclusive to be accessible.
Ironically, if I want unique food or local weirdness nowadays, I can find more of it in my lame hometown than I can in most cities.
pempem•5h ago
There is a growing divide and there are many towns (and many parts of metropolises) where its a weird class inverted food desert. There are tons of boutiques and vintage shops, and more tatoo shops than you'd think is necessary. Maybe there's a upvamped "bodega" with fishwife tinned fish, and apples for .80 each. "Main street"s that seems pulled out of Disney's imagination and Rick Caruso's execution. Six coffee shops and a bunch of restaurants but no grocery without driving, no affordable gas without driving, no public schools without driving etc.
cschep•4h ago
ryoshu•5h ago
You'll also find some of the most ambitious people in the world.
Does the cost of rent justify it? Depends on what you are looking to do.
kjkjadksj•5h ago
alexjplant•7h ago
Before I moved I owned a house and justified living where I did by saying stuff like
> country people can make a day trip to do that too.
...but I was lying to myself. Rounding friends up to drive 90 minutes then hop on light rail for a half hour before even getting in the vicinity of where you're going has a very real chilling effect on planning fun time. Most people just end up drinking Mai Tais that a bartender pours out of a plastic jug at a riverside dock bar instead.
Different strokes for different folks, but I think everybody should give each paradigm a shot and decide what they like.
xp84•6h ago
Hard agree. I think the article is right that most people haven't even come close to trying the lifestyle he's suggesting.
FeloniousHam•6h ago
1000%. I would complain about driving the 12 minutes just to get out of my subdivision (before moving into town). Just what you say, there's a "chilling effect" when everything you want to do is 30 mins away.
bombcar•4h ago
If you have a “friend profile” and you want people to match it, a city is wonderful - more people, more matches.
Thing: all friends within 5 years of my age, similar jobs, education, etc. Go city! Or college maybe.
But if you’re old country or old rural and want to be friends with those around you a suburban or rural area can be fine. You end up making friends with the ten year old next door, and his parents, along with the retirees on the other side, etc.
rufus_foreman•4h ago
Good point. There's no possible way to have fun in a 27-bedroom house on a 100 acre lot.
Karrot_Kream•6h ago
This hasn't been my experience at all. I live in an urban area and I haven't eaten at a chain restaurant outside of road trips in years. I only eat at chains when I'm on a road trip and need a bite in the middle of nowhere. Once I drop into where I'm staying for vacation off the road trip, I'm eating local restaurants or cooking for myself if I'm out in nature. The fantastic food scene in my area is a huge factor in why I live here.
FWIW one can make the same comment about large US suburban home dwellers. Most of them just store stuff they rarely if ever use. Most of their less frequently used things are in varying states of disrepair and many of these folks would probably be better served by using communal amenities kept in good condition rather than storing sports equipment that they use once every 5 years in a dusty, mothball filled storage closet. Most folks in car-oriented US suburbs use their cars as mobile living rooms and do all sorts of illegal things (like makeup or doomscrolling their phone) in their car and only incidentally use them as transportation vehicles. But that doesn't stem the demand for folks who want to live in these homes.
The fact is, aside from job considerations, there are people who choose their density based on their actual preferences. One set of preferences may seem silly coming from a different set but that doesn't make them right or wrong; it just makes them preferences.
JKCalhoun•5h ago
I grew up in Kansas City, lived 27 years in the Bay Area, and now back in the midwest (in Omaha).
Guess what I miss most about the Bay Area? (It's not the traffic and it's not In & Out.) It's all the amazing Asian restaurants. C'mon Omaha!
Having said that, the wife and I have found a decent Asian grocery store and figured out how to make some pretty good bulgogi....
Karrot_Kream•4h ago
This is the move. My partner and I are Asian and we participate in Asian community things in the Bay. A lot of asians that came from less urban areas made their own food sourced from the high quality but unknown-outside-the-community Asian grocery store!
bobthepanda•4h ago
trollbridge•4h ago
woodruffw•3h ago
tomcar288•3h ago
datavirtue•3h ago
bluefirebrand•7h ago
The reality is that it's mostly about living in a city with available jobs
What's the job market like near this lovely little $432 per month place described in the article? How am I going to pay for it?
kemotep•7h ago
I have had to travel across the country multiple times to “live where the jobs are” so I find it hard to believe that the whole time I could have not done that and just picked some remote isolated corner and live like my great grandparents homesteading?
DrillShopper•7h ago
Sure, I could live in the middle of goddamn nowhere, grow my own food, make my own clothes, build my own house, etc, etc, etc, but at the end of the day it's never over. I'll be out in my 70s and 80s doing that until I die. Sure, that might be an ideal life for someone, but that someone is not me.
xp84•5h ago
First of all, unless you're 18 you should, if you're playing the game correctly, be saving for retirement already, right? That money, which you get to bring with you, will go a lot further in the country.
Plus, Social Security exists, and again, that check will be the same amount regardless of where you live in retirement, so that'll go a lot further there too. The longer you've worked for "city money" already, the bigger your SS check will be.
Even if you wait until you're just before retirement, moving out of the expensive market is one of the best ways to ensure a retirement secure from the worry of having to keep being economically productive till death.
DrillShopper•5h ago
I think you underestimate the financial resources of those who most need to take a route like this. They're not likely to have anything saved and likely have lot of debt, too. Which leads into...
> Social Security exists, and again, that check will be the same amount regardless of where you live in retirement
That is no longer a guarantee, and my retirement planning assumes that it will no longer exist in the near future. I have spent the last 25 years paying for it money I could have saved for retirement instead, and likely won't see a dime in return because the Republicans want it gone. We're realistically looking as a full elimination, means testing to receiveh benefits, massive cuts to benefits, or a work requirement (or some combination of these) all in the name of giving massive tax cuts to the group of people who will never have to work ever again in their lives, and neither will their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.
> moving out of the expensive market is one of the best ways to ensure a retirement secure from the worry of having to keep being economically productive till death
Let's constrain ourselves to just the location that the author of the original post suggested. How far away is the nearest hospital if I need treatment for cancer, a heart attack, or a stroke? What are the healthcare opportunities out there? Will friends and family be able to get out there to visit?
The author is so disconnected from reality that its wild that none of this crossed their minds. It just seems like a "those damn millennial and their avocado toast and Macbooks" instead of actually looking into what it means to move out there
The author also commits what to my parents, would be a cardinal sin - suggesting that the next generation have a worse quality of life than their parents, which used to be something that got you disqualified from running for dog catcher in most of this country.
xp84•5h ago
To me, it's advocating that "number of dollars you earn per year" and "number of dollars spent on luxuries" is not so simply correlated with "quality of life." That's one aspect, but "number of dollars it takes to satisfy each level of Maslow's pyramid in the place you live" and "number of hours you have to work" and "how stressful is your work" are huge contributors to whether you can be happy (have a good QoL).
Many people work 40-60 hours per week and hate every minute of it, despite earning six figures. Some of those people might be much happier working 5 hours a week and living in the country.
DrillShopper•5h ago
Have you ever lived out in the country, grown your own food, made your own clothes, and such? That's so much more work than five hours a week, and at peak times, much more than 40 hours a week for a harder life that you do not get to retire from when you get old.
dmonitor•7h ago
kemotep•6h ago
Have more amenities, not live in a shack, and sure it would cost 4x more per month but certainly not as decadent as the author claims living in “the city” (read city of 25,000 more than an hour away from anything larger) is.
xp84•5h ago
onecommentman•3m ago
codeplea•7h ago
>And for those who might be quick to point out that there could be a dearth of jobs there, note that when people say “there are no jobs” in a given area, they generally mean that there are no jobs that could produce a normal, upper-middle-class lifestyle there. Which, even in Massena and Ogdensburg isn’t entirely true. But even if it were, the Stewart’s gas stations in both towns are actively hiring part-time cashiers at $17/hr. These places will let you work just one day a week if you like, and seem to be pretty good about flexible hours. In this case, you could work just one ten-hour shift per week, and in so doing, earn more than 30% of what you need to live well at this particular house with just four days of work per month.
bluefirebrand•7h ago
xp84•5h ago
1. Buy, repair, and flip MacBooks on eBay 2. Do stuff on Fiverr 3. Mow lawns 4. Clean gutters 5. Set up a little stand and sell baked goods or tamales 6. Make YouTube videos or shorts about (insert your nerdy interest) 7. 3D print something and sell it on Etsy
All these things are things I'm sure I could do personally, but don't have time to do because I have to work 40 hours a week to earn enough money to pay for my mortgage in the expensive place I live. But all that goes away when the only thing you need to shoot for is to clear maybe $800 on a good month.
And also, if you have modest savings for a city person you could do with far less earnings, as interest on $200,000 = $10,000.
bryanlarsen•5h ago
Those might pay well in the city, but nobody making $17/hr is going to pay more than $10/hr for lawn mowing.
xp84•5h ago
skyyler•5h ago
No internet at the house in this scenario, so that's a lot of trips to the library.
>2. Do stuff on Fiverr
See above.
>3. Mow lawns 4. Clean gutters
These are both viable in the summer, provided there is some "landed elite" in the area that makes more than the $17/hr the gas stations pay. I guess you could shovel snow in the winter.
>5. Set up a little stand and sell baked goods or tamales
Doing that legally requires licenses and registration, but good idea. Do the people of upstate New York enjoy tamales?
>6. Make YouTube videos or shorts about (insert your nerdy interest)
The first point again.
>7. 3D print something and sell it on Etsy
The first point again.
xp84•5h ago
> licenses and stuff
What? No, nobody selling tamales outside in the country (or probably the city either) has a formal license to do so. Nobody cares unless they're trying to get you shut down because you're being a jerk (say, selling them right outside their restaurant). Also, what if I told you, you could pick whatever kind of food the people in the area do like, and teach yourself to make it?
skyyler•5h ago
Great financial advice happening on the orangesite.
Really good stuff.
potato3732842•4h ago
When you're at the absolute bottom, you're not gonna make ends meet by playing by the rule and the enforcers generally leave you alone because you can't get blood from a stone. So for the people living on $400/mo running an unlicensed tamale stand or parting out cars or breeding pitbulls or whatever isn't as risky as it would be for someone making real money.
But yeah, the advice here is generally out of touch.
potato3732842•4h ago
dmonitor•7h ago
nkurz•7h ago
Are you possibly confusing "per week" with "per month"?
hyperpape•5h ago
He should've said either "one 10 hour shift per month will make 30% of what you need to live here" or even "one 10 hour shift per week will make more than what you need to live here."
theendisney•4h ago
I think hé means one should do all kinds of small projects.
dghlsakjg•4h ago
trollbridge•4h ago
hyperpape•3h ago
> In this case, you could work just one ten-hour shift per week, and in so doing, earn more than 30% of what you need to live well at this particular house with just four days of work per month.
What he probably did was write that one shift is more than 30% of what you need, then switched gears to write about four days of work per month, but forgot to remove the 30% number.
bluefirebrand•6h ago
40 hours per month is much less than 40 hours per week
viccis•6h ago
"Why aren't more kids embracing a life of poverty? How dare they ask for anything better in a country that produces more wealth than any other?"
xp84•5h ago
"live of poverty"
You're really doing a great job exemplifying the attitude which guarantees misery.
The whole point is that living a simple life in the country, with minimal amount of time spent working (thus maximum free time) is arguably a much richer and more fulfilling life than, say, a life where you and your spouse each earn $200,000 working 40-50 hours a week at a Very Important Job that you drive to in your Range Rover and BMW, and getting to spend 1 hour most nights with your family before falling exhausted into bed in a house that cost $2 million, just to wake up and do it again tomorrow.
hyperpape•5h ago
pempem•5h ago
How are we the homes of the largest economies in the world, cities known not just by name but by brand, around the world and: - day care worker can't make enough to move beyond improverished and day care is expensive - teacher can't make enough to move beyond lower middle class and school (even public once you add in all the trips, certs, childcare for non-school days) don't make enough - your burger is $15! but the person making it apparently should live in a wifi-less shed.
Not very long ago at all, this economy was about finding opportunity. Now it seems to be about aiming to reintroduce feudalism.
pavel_lishin•7h ago
xeromal•7h ago
pavel_lishin•7h ago
tacheiordache•7h ago
rufus_foreman•4h ago
>> the Stewart’s gas stations in both towns are actively hiring part-time cashiers at $17/hr. These places will let you work just one day a week if you like, and seem to be pretty good about flexible hours
432 / 17 = 25.4 hours a month. A few more hours than that to pay social security, but no income taxes and they would get the Earned Income Tax Credit.
aaronbaugher•7h ago
Of course, it depends a lot on the job. Some jobs only exist in cities, while others are almost exclusively rural.
bluefirebrand•6h ago
xp84•5h ago
for certain values of "a life" of course. The article alludes to our 'great-grandparents' and indeed, we wouldn't be here if the majority of people 100 years ago didn't build "a life" in rural areas without any of the things most of GenZ (and if i'm honest, millennials too) think "a life" requires.
But the word "build" you used is telling. I think you mean "buy a life" -- that's what pursuing only the City Life is doing. In the country you would indeed have to build a life. To figure out what would make you happy and build it, whether that's a club of fellow board game enthusiasts, or a restaurant that you open, or a small chicken farm, etc.
I don't blame the young people, they've only ever been shown a fashionable, extreme-consumption-based narrative of what "a life" should be. Expensive vacations, designer handbags, luxury cars, kitchens bigger than that whole $29,000 house (and that cost $100k for the kitchen alone). That's what we've been told happy people need.
I'm just deeply unconvinced that any of that automatically brings happiness, and I am very convinced that the amount of work it takes to pay for all that is 100% bad for those of us who weren't just born into wealth.
financltravsty•4h ago
That gas station in the article? Gone once the corporation that owns it deems it a frivolous expense no longer worth the upkeep. Now what are you going to do? Find a job at the diner? Ok, how sustainable is that -- the town is not growing, the economy is dying, and the incomes are stagnating.
The author made his way by hitchhiking and vagabonding after leaving his folks' home. Guess what, surviving like that relies on civilization's infrastructure remaining viable and maintained -- it's leeching off others work and toil to selfishly sustain oneself without giving anything back.
And what about how the author currently sustains himself? Is it by humbly working at the gas station? No, he maintains a substack and social media presence to pay all his bills. He's an entertainer larping as an outbacker. He's an older Christopher McCandless -- developmentally arrested and antisocial.
It's not about fashion or luxury or "buying a life," it's about securing a means of self-sustainability, managing risk, and being a part of the growing world around you -- and not recoiling from it, shutting one's eyes, and pretending everything will be alright (tell that to anyone whose nation transitioned into communism -- hah!).
abhiyerra•7h ago
RHSeeger•7h ago
nurettin•5h ago
bryanlarsen•5h ago
aaronbaugher•5h ago
titanomachy•3h ago
It sounds like they’d find a way to be miserable anywhere. I live in a medium-density neighborhood of a large US city. I have multiple close friends within a five-minute walk, and I’m constantly meeting new people who share my interests. The music venues, restaurants, and yoga studios are nice too, but having so many potential friends in close proximity is what really makes the city great for me.
It’s not necessarily easy to start making friends though, it definitely doesn’t happen automatically. Maybe in small towns, people are more likely to notice you and spend time with you, because they also have fewer people to choose from.
When I’ve lived in small towns I found dating almost impossible, though.
> if I'm going to be miserable, why not do it on my own land for a lot cheaper
Bro. Please go make some friends, or find a hobby or vocation you like, or get religion, or something! You don’t have to be miserable, at least not all the time. Renouncing society will probably just make things worse.
bradlys•3h ago
They’re terrible if you don’t. There’s inherently less diversity within a smaller population.
I grew up in a small town. (4000 people, largest nearby was about 15 miles away and 20k. The nearest “city” was 100k and 80+ miles away. Maybe visited that city region once a year. Major city (500k) that was 180 mi away I never even saw growing up.) Even being a straight cismale nerd was considered the bane of my existence. There wasn’t anyone else I met who shared my level of interests. I saw how people who were gay were treated and it was quite grim. Imagine now you’re adding in multiple facets like race, politics, etc.
These small places work well for those who fit a certain mold. You’re not gonna have an easier time dating either if you have any modest requirements either like education, income, beliefs, etc.
The main issues with cities is that they’re very competitive. If you’re not a competitive person or don’t have whatever attributes the market rewards, it will be very challenging. Especially with dating as the pool to most people feels “unlimited” and therefore people will keep looking than settle for someone who is ugly or whatever issue you have.