Just the title
Seen lots of people moving to big places , but im from a small town and id go back there in a heartbeat if i had WFH option (not possible with current job)
To clarify, im a European and its a question for everyone , not just americans!
Usually those places are lacking (unfortunately). Food deserts, lack of infrastructure, sometimes even poor medical facilities. Also, locations like these tend to be more conservative, and conservatives are not always the most friendly. I personally did move to a smaller area, but I don’t have a family/kids so I’m able to be more indifferent towards the lack of resources. (I also moved to the hood 👀)
Related meme:
The majority of jobs simply don’t allow any sort of WFH: if it involves creating or transforming something, people have to be physically manning the tools. Healthcare can’t be WFH, education sucks when it’s fully online.
Smaller communities are great for peace and quiet, but terrible when you need anything they don’t have (or don’t have in decent quality), like jobs, transportation, healthcare and education. If you happen to be “socially weird”, you have to adapt and “unweird” yourself
The reasons I moved from a town of 3,500 people to around 100,000 people after 2 years are
More dating options: most of the women in the small town I lived in were already in relationships or weren’t compatible. I started dating my wife a few months after I moved
Better access to services: if I wanted to get groceries on Sunday I would have to drive 30 minutes to the next town over and banks would be closed before 5. The local restaurants were good but there were only a few.
Better access to fun stuff: I train jiu jitsu and the closest gym to where I lived was a 50 minute drive 1 way and the closest 10+ mile bike trail was 30 minutes away. I would stay at my friend’s house overnight or get a hotel so I could have a decent night on the town since it was also 50 minutes away from home
There are opportunities to have fun and build a happy life in small towns but if you have niche interests then it can be a little lonely. Plus some of the activities are private so it can be harder to find them and access them.
The upside was the people there are really nice and it was really cheap to live there so I paid off a ton of debt.
As an American (not that it’s particularly unique from Europe) living in a city feels much better because I’m not completely tied to my car. Living in suburbs and rural areas makes it far less tenable to walk or bike anywhere. Cities are the only place with any sort of public transportation or even pedestrian infrastructure that is remotely walker-friendly. Walking is not only more physically healthy it also makes me feel better emotionally
WFH isn’t available to most people. To have a WFH opportunity, you have to have a job that’s almost entirely done on a computer with no need to be on-site almost ever. That’s just not a reality for most people. For some? Sure. But even most people with jobs that are largely WFH still have to go into their office once or twice a week.
Australian here; I much prefer living away from cities. I like having a big house on a big block with lots of nature and as few other people around me as possible.
The catch is while the housing and land is wayyyy cheaper, other stuff is more expensive and inconvenient. The biggest thing people don’t consider is trades people; you’ll have plumbers, sparkies etc just refuse to even come out when they find out you’re more than half an hour away from civilisation, and if they do come out they charge for the travel.
Semi-unrelated: I I love Aussie slang.
Block for lot? Sparky for electrician? Whippersnipper for weedeater? Barbie for BBQ? Cunt for everything else?
Fucking YES lol I want more
I have found the opposite in rural Michigan (northern US). My wife’s family has a vacation home, and skilled tradespeople are slightly cheaper around there. The place is more than an hour from any large towns, but 30 minutes from several small towns.
Maybe population is distributed differently here due to the way infrastructure is funded?
My mom came from a small town and said she’d never raise a kid in a small town - her cousins, all save one, were in jail or pregnant before they graduated high school. Because there was literally nothing to do.
I like having restaurants, a good library system, concerts, bars, not needing to drive to get anything. I like living in a mid-sized city, but if I couldn’t, would go bigger not smaller.
I don’t like conservative communities, i get threatened for not being a white man
All small communities left in the US are just the angry conservatives who were too stubborn to leave.
I’ve personally been thriving since moving to a big city. I never want to go back to the middle of nowhere. I enjoy urban exploration, I love the diversity of business and people, and I love the sheer amount of community that exists. I love that there’s always new things to find. That just doesn’t exist outside of cities.
As someone who has lived in a couple of small places before, for me it’s accessibility. The first place I lived at for the longest since birth pretty much, there were so few places to go to. You had to kill 45 miles back and to, to get anywhere and that ate a lot of gas to do so. My place of origin, didn’t really put anything interesting down that would attract more people to want to go to, converse in or conduct commerce in. Yeah the small community may have bonded people together, but it was all still relatively small.
Where I am at now, it feels bigger, there’s more opportunity around and everything. I’m having a bit of a difficult time imagining where I could go if I decide to move that equals where I’m living now.
I don’t drive. Where I live, you can really only “not drive” in cities. And even then, it can be hard at times.
At the same time, I live within reasonable commuting distance of multiple friends and family members. I can walk to a few of them. I don’t need to be closer to my community.
I might want to retire someplace quieter, but I like being able to hop on a train or a bus to get to somewhere fun, or to be able to walk across the street to a store if I need something. Heck, I can even easily get takeout if I don’t feel like cooking – I don’t even need delivery.
I can even easily get takeout if I don’t feel like
And I’ll take that up a notch. I currently live in a small city outside a large one, and I can walk to get takeout, from
- American diner
- Greek kebabs
- Pakistani kebabs
- several Indian restaurants
- several Chinese restaurants
- several Mexican restaurants
- at least one Salvadoran
- at least one Chilean
- some sort of African thing I haven’t yet tried
- …… and so many more
Our new family activity for pandemic was to walk for takeout from the new Punjabi restaurant, and eat dinner on a bench in the town common…… try that in your small town
When we lived in a bigger place, we got used to going down to the massive Asian supermarket, the French bakery, the Balkan place down the street, the dirt-cheap Salvadorean/pupusa place. I admit I did start taking it for granted, then moved away and remembered, “Oh, right, they don’t have cool stuff everywhere.”
Remember when American tax payers gave billions to telecoms to install fiber in rural America?
Don’t worry they conveniently forgot too.
That plus other services like rural hospitals and education are huge drawbacks to living in most of rural America.
Also a bunch of other issues with small town living like lack of privacy/anonymity, entertainment, restaurants, government services, etc… And these problems get more severe the smaller the community.
But people really did spread out to smaller towns during COVID. Property values went crazy in a lot of small towns around me.
I live in a small mountain town, and property values went apeshit. Like a house/cabin that was $150-250k is now $4-500k. It’s insane.
Privacy and anonymity is definitely still a thing as long as you keep you business to yourself, because as I’m guessing you’re alluding to, people are pretty chatty as it is and a smaller population makes it more difficult. It also helps to not be an asshole and give people even more to talk about, especially when most everyone knows each other.
Even without direct interaction, it’s easier to know someone as “the guy in the cabin on hillside road with the blue Honda CRV and the beard”. I assume that’s what the comment meant since they tied privacy to anonymity
I mean yeah, it’s not uncommon to know where each other live, there’s also that unspoken respect of leave people alone. Also yet another reason to not be an asshole in a small town lol.
Remember when American tax payers gave billions to telecoms to install fiber in rural America?
It’s actually happened multiple times…
I remember two off the top of my head, but it’s possible there was a couple more
There is not enough stimulation in a small community. In the US, they are also usually full of hateful/ignorant people.
European
As an American, it’s because there’s nothing out there. We have SO much land. A small town means you have to drive everywhere. It means the local grocery is 30 min away. It also means 300 people in the town, one library (maybe), but at least three churches. Very much not my vibe :-)
Not everywhere, obviously, but it’s a thing.
I live in a city of over 100,000 people and my grocery store is 25 minutes away. About an hour if I walk.
I grew up in a small town and had two grocery stores within 8 minutes. Everything was a lot more expensive and there was less selection.
Moved because of the lack of services (no hospital, volunteer FD and ambulance, no high school, no college nearby, no taxi service, no bus service, everything shut down at 6 PM).
I feel you on that.
I live in a town of about 71,000 The nearest grocery store which is a little bit more expensive is seven minutes by car. The other one that’s a little bit less expensive is about 15 to 20 minutes by car.
Out of curiosity, what region are you in? I live in a city of ~80,000 in the northeastish US and I’m not even sure it’s possible to be more than 5 or 10 minutes from a grocery store here.
West… there’s a lot more sprawl here AND rush hour traffic that lasts half the day, even on weekends.
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Poor infrastructure in many of these communities, and no way to get to larger towns and cities without a car. So you’re stuck with crappy chain stores and terrible quality food, harming your health. And it’s boring, because it can’t support many kinds of entertainment.
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Smaller communities tend to skew towards conservatives, and there’s little way to escape from it (due to the distances and the lack of high speed rail). So expect more religiosity, more discrimination, and politicians that are even shittier than the average.
Huh , i forgor about americans and their shit-frastracture … im from europe and our villages/small towns are dying even tho most of what you said isnt true for us.
Idk whats it about , as most people my age (late 20s early 30s) want to live in a smaller town nearby but noone is moving there just staying in the big cities.
I think you need to specify your European country, because small French villages have awful infrastructure while their cities have amazing infrastructure.
But even here in the Netherlands, if I’d live in a village and I wanted to go to another village further away I’d need to take the train to the nearest city and then take another train to said village. This often takes much longer than by car. Also, while basic shopping needs like a supermarket, greengrocer and some basic repair shops might be there (maybe just the supermarket) you don’t have access to… Anything else really, and need to take the car there, too. Sadly, necessary non-commercial facilities like hospitals and higher education are also missing from most villages here.
Yeah, even in the Randstad, for distances up to like 15 km it’s often faster to cycle somewhere than take public transport.
Well, I lived in such conditions most of my adulthood before having a kid to care for, and it was possible precisely because it was just me. Either it was a small town not even close to a big city, or it was a small town at the outskirts of a big city, some 20-30km away. I loved it. Still do.
But it’s so hard to uproot once you have all the other stuff like not only your own job, but also your partner’s. And kid’s school or daycare or whatever. And then having to work out the bus routes for the small humans and figure whether or not it’d be plausible for them to adjust to that and not get burned out or lost or confused or whatever.
And once you need more space, it’s much harder to find places to rent in the small towns. Mostly for sale, if it’s beyond two bedrooms. And in that case it’s much more complicated since you need to go to the effort of getting the place evaluated, arranging the loans and finances so you can pull it off, and that’s a big decision since it’ll probably lock you in there for quite some while, because small towns don’t move houses fast if you decide to go, so you could be looking at years before you get the sale done and another mortgage.
It’s just so hard. Once you are in the city, it’s hard to leave. And the more you root in the city, the harder it gets.
I hate it. I hate the city. I hate most about it.
But I love my family and would suffer in a city until my death if that’s what it takes to keep it together.
But as a positive anecdote, in my life prior to rooting down, as a younger and more adventurous human, I found that maintaining a community and a good group of friends even somewhat far away from the rest of them is easy and most importantly, comes easy. Its natural. I never found community a problem, because I always had a few groups of friends and it was always enough for us to touch ground together only monthly or every other month, so our location wasn’t really a concern. Most of us lived apart anyway. And the actual day-to-day sense of community came from work or uni or that kind of thing. I was never alone, though I lived blissfully far from most everyone.
So the only thing that really makes it difficult is trying to find a way and a good timing for not only one, but three+ people to move at once with all of them being happy with it. That’s a puzzle I’ve found near impossible to crack.
If we had a lot of money saved or good enough jobs to get a nest egg going, the problems likely wouldn’t matter and could very easily be worked around. But alas, we are just lower middle class, and while we are well enough off, moving is a completely life changing and paradigm shifting thing. It’s not something to choose lightly.
Maybe that plays a part within your group of acquaintances too? My work is even WFM and my partner could likely commute easily from most of the options we have within 100km. So technically we have a lot going for it. Should be easier.
But it’s not. Life is complex.
Edit: For context, I’m in Europe too.
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