I've often felt this way about some of today's complaints. I grew up in area like what was mentioned in this article and I long for the day I can go back there. I would in a heartbeat if my partner shared the same mentality as me.
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.
I've lived most of my life in (or outside of) small towns, and some of it in a city. I've noticed that my small-town friends who moved to the city would often talk about all the culture and food choices, but when it comes right down to it, they mostly eat at chain restaurants and go to the movies, same as they could in a smallish town. They might occasionally go to a pro baseball game or the zoo or something that's only available in the city, but country people can make a day trip to do that too.
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.
I agree with you for the most part, and think a lot of people think they need to live in NYC/LA/London/etc. because of unstated social pressure, not because they actually utilize all of the megacity’s amenities.
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.
> 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.
I recently visited New York City for the first time and honestly wasn't impressed. Outside of a few neat things like visiting the cronut place, I could do nearly everything the same back home.
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.
No one that lives in New York goes to Times Square, save for the subway station.
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.
I always found it kind of fun to wander through Times Square in the evening, every now and again (on the order of once every few months).
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.
Thanks. Yeah, if I do go back it won't be in Manhattan. I was alarmed by how every place was pretty much closed by 6-8 PM near me. Again...my medium city has plenty of cool stuff open much later -especially on a Friday/Saturday night.
Sure, medium cities that aren’t shitty and still have some vibrancy are a solid middle ground. Bonus points for being somewhere close to nice natural areas or outdoor recreation.
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!
Yep. My airport has less than 20 gates and is a 30 minute drive and 10 minutes to get through security. You frequently have to fly through hubs though.
This is my thesis about the size of where you live. There are three types of people:
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.
i did the same but had my wife as a guide, she dated a musician who lived there before we met and so she had been a lot of times. The different neighborhoods and just the scale of it all were pretty cool but, yeah, no desire to go back or live there. Is it required by law to play that Jay-Z/Alicia Keys "New York" song at all times everywhere there?
With the caveat that I've only really visited a dozen or so states, and only lived in 2, my experience is pretty different than yours.
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.
What did you find interesting about times square? I'm asking seriously as there isn't anything to do other than shop or ignore the annoying 50 people on every street corner asking me to get a bus tour.
The lights in every direction, the people interacting with the performers and each other, the naked cowboy, the hustle and bustle. It's just a very unique location. It's like watching a human fish tank.
NYC lives on the fumes of its former reputation. Corporate chains have changed the city into basically a shopping mall.
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.
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.
This isn't a good take. When was the last time you lived in NYC? Surely maybe there were glory days at one point, but there used to be a LOT more crime too. NYC is still one of the all time great cities.
Food is next level in the NYC area compare to most other places. It's not just pizza, it's Ethiopian, Afghani, Iranian, real Chinese food (Szechuan, Hunan, etc.). The music scene and clubs can't be beat outside of other major cities, if you're into that sort of thing. The museums and galleries too. It all exists if you want to find it.
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.
I guess my palette is just not sophisticated but I have eaten many times in NYC, in other big cities famous for food, in suburban places with one or two restaurants, and in rural places with only Applebee’s, and I honestly don’t see that much of a difference. To me, food is food. You eat it, you’re not hungry anymore. The only difference I notice is the cost. I’ve had pizza in New York, and I’ve had “New York style” pizza from a no name pizzeria in upstate California and it tastes exactly the same to me.
My wife, on the other hand goes bananas when we visit the city and just can’t get enough of the food. She’ll eat when she’s not even hungry because she just wants to experience this or that meal. I play along because I think it’s cute and we support each other’s goofiness, but I legit don’t get it.
You can go bar to bar to bar to bar until 4am in nyc and then find $2 pizza by the slice that is actual pizza and not 7/11 pizza. You can’t really do that anywhere else what with how the busybodies regulate their liqour licenses and the lack of density justifying many 24hr food establishments. You can do all of this entirely on foot too within a few blocks. Nowhere else in the US is like that with such glaringly obvious economies of scale going on in your favor.
I feel like on the surface this may seem like kind of a facile comment, but this really gets at what makes NYC a special place. There’s a whole day-to-day experience that may be technically replicable in other large cities in the course of a day, but there’s like 100 things to do in New York every 200 feet. It’s just a different experience.
I've had the opposite experience. Having moved from the boonies to a downtown in a Tier 2 US city has caused a lot of my old friends and neighbors to point out that I could buy a 27-bedroom house on a 100 acre lot in the country for what I pay in rent in the city. They fail to realize that not having to drive two hours each way to have fun is worth the 35% premium in housing for me.
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.
> ...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.
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.
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.
>> my old friends and neighbors to point out that I could buy a 27-bedroom house on a 100 acre lot in the country for what I pay in rent in the city. They fail to realize that not having to drive two hours each way to have fun is worth the 35% premium in housing for me
Good point. There's no possible way to have fun in a 27-bedroom house on a 100 acre lot.
> but when it comes right down to it, they mostly eat at chain restaurants and go to the movies, same as they could in a smallish town. They might occasionally go to a pro baseball game or the zoo or something that's only available in the city, but country people can make a day trip to do that too.
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.
> Having said that, the wife and I have found a decent Asian grocery store and figured out how to make some pretty good bulgogi....
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!
there is a huge market distortion in that dense, walkable living is illegal to build in most of the country. i've seen polling that suggests walkability is in demand for about 40% of the population but there isn't 40% of available homes in such a configuration, so there are also a lot of people who get priced out of that and into suburbia.
Most of the country by land area has no zoning and people can build whatever they want. Despite that, where I live the only thing anyone does is the SFH and the occasional duplex.
That isn't especially surprising, given that there's no point in raising (or using) the capital to build urban infrastructure where none exists. It's a flywheel-shaped problem; the fact that the average American lives in a local optima of suburban sprawl doesn't itself indicate the absence of a better optima.
To be fair, my impression is most people have highly contradictory desires along these lines.
They say they want to be able to walk to places more. But they also want a big suburban-style house with bedrooms for everyone and storage and garage and lawn etc, easy parking for them, nice wide roads to drive everywhere on and tons of free parking when they get there. This makes it impossible for the area to be walkable unless everyone else lives in small apartments and there's actually only enough parking for just them to drive if they feel like it.
In my opinion, it doesn't work that way. Yeah everyone wants to be the special 1% like that, but only actually 1% will be. If you really want to be walkable, you personally will need to live like that too.
My understanding of the issue is that while walkable communities are in demand they are a minority and generally speaking, also a minority that is less politically active than single-family homeowners.
Pretty much everywhere has a political majority of single-family homeowners, and if each locality decides on its own it doesn't want to have multifamily housing, then you wind up in a situation where almost nowhere actually allows it.
This is so weird to read. My cultural bias is showing: I'm from the Netherlands. As most of you know, walkability is the norm here. And while the country is flat, so is the area described in this article.
actually, i'm now noticing it may be cheaper for me to buy used skis than to rent them. buying used i can get it cheaper than even renting just once or twice
They suggested working part time at a gas station or seasonally somewhere else which is incredible.
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?
The real trade off here is cheap rural land but no ability to ever retire.
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.
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.
> unless you're 18 you should, if you're playing the game correctly, be saving for retirement already, right?
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.
> suggesting that the next generation have a worse quality of life than their parents
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.
> Some of those people might be much happier working 5 hours a week and living in the country.
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.
All of these articles need to come with an "About the Author" section that describes how the author makes their living. They claim to be living the outlined lifestyle, but I doubt they are working part time at three gas stations.
I could live in my hometown, rent a studio apartment, have an iPhone and a car, and work at the pizza place like I was 23 again.
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.
With a partner, like he mentioned he had, each one could easily be doing a part-time job + some minor side hustle like Etsy, YouTube, etc. The living expenses are about the same for 1 vs 2 other than food, and his food budget was for 2.
This sort of writing has been popular in the US for over 100 years. A historical review of the field (pun intended) can be found in the book Back to the Land, by Dona Brown, University of Wisconsin Press, 2011.
>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.
Have you not read the article? The whole point of it is once you get your costs down to this manageable a number, you have a lot more options for "how you're going to support yourself." You could clear $5,000-10,000 a year, which I should remind you would be tax free money simply due to the standard deduction, doing any number of things either local or remote. Ideas I'm just making up:
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.
That's fine, you don't need them to pay more than $10/hr. You only even need to earn say, $800 a month (I'm assuming you'd want a pickup truck to transport your mower and get around, so padding the $432 a bit) so if you worked 5 hours a week at the gas station for $340 then you need about 11 hours of $10 work per week for another $440 and you're done. If you have any savings, the current interest on $100,000 would alternatively give you $416 so you could just not work at all.
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)
My smartphone plan is $45 (happens to be same company as article suggests, US Mobile) and supports 50GB of tethering which is plenty. This doesn't appreciably change the cost of living but yes, obviously you'd have that as an expense. Who cares? Yes, it would enable like half those work ideas. You could afford it. What's the problem.
> 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?
Ironically, I think this is a "blind squirrel finds a nut" situation.
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.
In my experience law enforcement in rural areas generally are squeezing stones for blood, you think the local cops or judge are going to be living on $20,000 a year? No. And where do they get the money? By extorting poor people that live in the area. Oh you literally can't afford their fines? Well then you can spend the next month or two in jail, now having a criminal record, likely losing your job, and when you are released owe the courts and jail a few thousand dollars on top of all that for the mandatory minimum court and jail fees which will cost just as much as the previous fine you couldn't pay and got sent to jail for.
Sure you might get lucky if you keep your head low, but maybe you won't get lucky and you lose the gamble and are put in a WAY worse situation.
The problem with these lifestyles is that when you have it all finely tuned to live on $400/mo you have no capacity to absorb a $400 water heater expense.
I love the stupid math in this paragraph. One 10hr shift is ~30% of what you need. So multiply that by 3.3 and... oh hey you're working nearly 40hrs a week to afford your impoverished lifestyle in the middle of nowhere. Just like everyone else in this country, only now you get to own a shed. Also you have to take the bus, which runs from 5am-6pm, so you need to beg your boss to not be an opener or closer. Your coworkers will love you for that.
> One 10hr shift is ~30% of what you need. So multiply that by 3.3 and... oh hey you're working nearly 40hrs a week to afford your impoverished lifestyle in the middle of nowhere.
Are you possibly confusing "per week" with "per month"?
Honestly, this is the weirdest way the author could've written that sentence.
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."
Right, which is why it's extremely confusing that the author wrote:
> 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.
I read that sentence three times. Pretty sure he was trying to hide the ball, but still not sure where he was hiding it or what exactly the ball was, to be honest.
I mean we're talking about someone who thinks living on $432 a month with absolutely no government assistance and including housing is a reasonable claim to make. (In the comments, he reveals he goes to Mexico for medical care... I'm really curious how one travels round-trip to Mexico from New York on a $432 a month budget.)
Well yes, it's not a brilliant observation that in the US you are given the option to work at around $15-30k a year ($17/hr part time is going to wind up around there) and use that money to fund an impoverished lifestyle.
"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?"
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.
One wonders why anyone ever left the country to move to the city then. Maybe not everyone wants to live a simple life in the country. Maybe that's considering boring and socially isolating. Maybe some people want more kinds of experiences and even things. Maybe they want a kind of community that's a lot harder to find in the country, or is even discriminated against.
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.
I think it goes beyond that. A city offers a lot more possibilities. If you like plays, museums, going to the movies, being able to find more than three people to play Dungeons and Dragons, or Settlers of Catan with (without driving 1.5 hours) - then being somewhere really rural is going to be unpleasant.
>> With no jobs in the area $432 may as well require to work a lot more for lower pay
>> 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.
The thing about places with more jobs is that they also tend to have more job-seekers. The two tend to vary proportional to the population. It's really the ratio of jobs to job-seekers that matters.
Of course, it depends a lot on the job. Some jobs only exist in cities, while others are almost exclusively rural.
The type of place being talked about in this article is a place with more houses than people. It's the sort of place that children move away from as they mature because there are few opportunities to build a life there
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.
Buddy, the entire world is being hollowed out by globalism and a financial race to the bottom vis-a-vis labor costs. Your entire way of life is predicated upon no one invading the country, global supply chains remaining intact and usable, and a lack of war -- as soon as that changes your way of life disappears.
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!).
Young people might also recognize that there's a lot more going on in big cities, a whole lot more to do and experience. And attitudes tend to be more excepting of differences. They tend to be more cosmopolitan.
I moved from SF to smaller towns around California. I so much more enjoy the smaller towns. When I lived in SF I ended up going to the same 5 restaurants or cafes and while it was fund in my 20s to be around a lot of people my age as I got older and now have a family having more space is nice. Plus, I still go to the same five places in the smaller town I live in and don't have to usually wait in lines.
Living in a city (or other high COL location) also means you can save more. Sure, you're spending more, but that 5-10% of your earnings you put into saving is a lot more when you're making city money vs not. And when it comes time to retire, having saved 5% of $50-150,000/year every year adds up to a much higher amount to retire on.
Don't tell people that. The common belief that small towns are some cross between Deliverance and Children of the Corn is one of the things that keeps small towns nice.
> 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.
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.
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.
It makes a certain amount of sense and I myself bought a little place way out in the hinterlands of Michigan for similar economic reasons ... but I live in Berkeley because subjecting your children to life without opportunities for art, culture, education, sports, friends, etc is cruel. So if you're white, or just don't care that your ethnicity is absent, and if you have no children, and also don't mind living in a car-dependent place where the public transit to the nearest major city is a minimum of 15 hours with 3-4 transfers, then sure Massena NY is dope.
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.
I admit the possibility that your idea of culture is a barren plain of consumerism. If that's the case, it's your problem and only you can fix it.
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.
Where in my comment did you get that I think culture is a barren plain of consumerism?
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.
Large cities have vastly more cultural opportunities than rural areas.
More different kinds of culture (diversity), more examples of each kind (quantity), and usually better examples of any cultural component which is available in both (quality).
Rural areas certainly have cultures of their own. It is not binary.
But you cannot reasonably compare the cultural opportunities of urban vs rural and assert that rural is not lacking, unless you are thinking of your personal preferences only, and the rural area you're using for comparison happens to match up very well with your own preferences.
Different than what's in a city, and generally not as enjoyable if you're just passively consuming it. Lots of motorsport (auto manufacturing was huge in the area, very long tradition of it), fishing/hunting, local music (some styles represented better than others, but that goes for everywhere), hobbyist heavy industry. There's definitely plenty of other stuff going on that I just haven't heard about. Pretty often I run into situations where I'm talking to somebody about a new interest and they say "yeah, there's actually plenty of that going on, look into/talk to X, Y, or Z". Not so much culinary or visual/fine arts stuff happening, so if you're looking to participate/collaborate as far as that goes, I can tell you off the top of my head that the area would be a bad fit.
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.
There is a little bit of a sleight of hand going on in this article by claiming the lifestyle of boomers is within reach, but then actually using boomers' parents and grand-parents as the standard. It would be more honest to say "Most of us can't have the relative wealth of our grand parents, but with some sacrifices and creativity, the lifestyle of our great-grand parents is attainable."
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 communities that they lived in were more self-sufficient and probably lived outside of the influence of large government or corporations or lobbying groups.
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.
Coincidentally, there was an interesting article about the relationship between Massena and their power company here a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992032
> 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.
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?
In what way is wood free? To heat even a tiny home purpose-built for high efficiency you'd need several acres of woods to sustainably harvest. For a falling-apart $30k hovel in upstate NY you'd probably need more like 15 acres, and you don't get a 15-acre stand of woods in the deal for that price.
I heat my two-story, not-very-efficient house with wood. I'm not in upstate NY, but not much further south in the Midwest, where we get some sub-zero weather. For firewood, I cut dead or fallen trees that need to be removed on a neighboring farm, so they're "free" (not counting the cost of saw, chains, gas, oil...).
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.
At these electricity prices bothering with wood might not be worth it. If you get some, that’s nice, but otherwise just insulate the house well and you’re golden.
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.
There's a guy around here (central Kansas) that charges money to clean up unwanted trees or hedge rows (tree row between fields). He then turns around and sells the firewood.
From what I can tell both of his services are pretty popular.
15 acres? It should take far less than an acre. The house isn't well insulated, but it's also small. A few big trees, say 40-year Sitka spruce, should last the whole winter, and you can plant a thousand of those on an acre.
Of course it depends on the land and the house. But here's some Reddit comments also estimating the need at < 1 acre
Perhaps you will be surprised by the lack of Sitka spruce in St. Lawrence County, NY. I think you are significantly overstating the volume of timber that can be harvested from that kind of forest.
As someone who has been burning wood for heat for 35 years, those people are out of their damn mind if they think 1 acre will supply them their fire wood. 1 acre will absolutely not grow enough wood to heat your home unless you are cutting it all down and moving away in a few years. It takes a decade of growth just to get a tree to the point where it is growing at a reasonable rate, it needs a root system built up before it can grow efficiently, and that root system is destroyed when you cut the tree down and the next set of trees needs to regrow it.
And even with a well managed rotating stock of trees, you are going to at best get just over half a cord per acre. And in my area which is as close to the same weather as Northern New York as it gets, I would expect they would need atleast full 3 cords of wood to make it through a mild winter, more if it is a colder winter or if no snow builds up to help insulate or if you live on an open plot where wind can blow over your house.
I wouldn't even consider trying to survive on my own tree wood unless I had at least 10 acres to harvest off of, and it would still depend on the type of trees growing there and is still kind of straddling the edge of sustainable long term.
Maybe if you went full 16th century and started coppicing the woods and maintaining bare minimum heating you could do better, but coppiced woods also takes a decade to initial establish and maintain and nobody has coppiced woods just sitting around waiting to be utilized.
The OP says that electricity there "presently sells for just $0.04/kwh". If it were just me living there, I'd heat one room with electricity just for the sheer convenience (and lack of toxicity from combustion products) and keep the rest of the house unheated. (Yes, I'd probably have to make alterations to make sure the pipes don't freeze.)
"Pretty close to nothing" can still an absolutely massive expense when you are living on 1/4 the pay as others in more urban and prosperous areas though.
> any American could live an earlier iteration of the American Dream — and could be living so cheaply, they’ve got their expatriate buddies down in Mexico beat.
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.
I've been following this guy for a while on X. He does live this way. This isn't a hypothetical. He lives on his writing and has plenty of free time to chop all the wood he'd ever need.
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.
Apparently electricity is 4c/KWh there, so it really is only a “little bit extra” even if you’re heating with resistance heat (at least for a 600sf house).
At 4 cents per 1kWh heating will not be an issue, even with regular resistive heater. It’s almost free electricity.
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.
It seems like you'd need more than 1.5kW of heat in upstate new york, even for a small place (which is more than half the size of my suburban home). Also, while I agree that $40 is cheap to me, it's also an additional 10% on their budget.
Of course it’s more space than I need. My point was that heating 600sqft doesn’t strike me as a trivial task, given my context of heating a house that’s less than double the size in a temperate climate.
Not to argue (?) that their house is too small (??)
And their $30 electric budget explicitly excluded heat.
> 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.
It's because when you live rural like this, wood stoves are common, and wood is free.
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.
If that's what you do in this situation, why didn't the author write that instead?
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".
Well water being free also means amortizing the potential maintenance costs of the pump, filters, and testing to make sure you aren’t drinking arsenic or lead.
To add to the sibling comment, collecting this wood takes time. I've collected wood the forest service takes down for use in a stove I use but processing all that wood takes time. You bring it home, cut it into small bits, keep it in a dry area to make sure the green wood dries out, and then you meticulously rotate older and newer stock to make sure you use the driest stuff for heating.
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.
Well, minimum wage in NY state is $15.50/hour. ($432/mo)/($15.50/h) is about 28 hours per month, i.e. 7 hours per week.
https://dol.ny.gov/minimum-wage-0
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.
I grew up in a 1300sf wood heated house, so I have relevant experience here. It does take time to buck, split, load, unload, and stack the wood. It goes faster if you have a small child (me) to help!
We cut wood for our own use and also sold it, so it didn't require 100% of our time to keep the heat on.
Wood is not free, and you have to consider the time and gas and tools to cut it, also this guy doesn't even have a car not to mention a truck to haul it, and he is living on a lot, not a wooded acreage. 90% of wood people want to get rid of for free is pine or fir which takes 4 times as much to match hardwood heating, and takes more careful stone pipe maintenance to not build up creosote and get a chimney fire, a lot of people exclusively burn hardwood just because of the risks of burning softwood and causing a fire from buildup. Even myself being "lucky" to have Emerald Ash Bore which has killed 95% of ash trees and given me "free" dead hardwood for the last 25 years wouldn't consider it free.
Say you do have a wooded plot, the first year or two it might not be so bad, lots of wood near the edges where you can drive up to to load and move, but what about after that when you have to go deeper into the woods? You need to get in there, it may not be accessible by truck or get swampy where you will get stuck, and now you are considering a tractor or other vehicle, a decent expense to obtain, in order to not have to carry all your wood an armload at a time through the woods longer and longer distances. Chains and gas and oil for cutting it aren't expensive but not free, nor is maintaining a gas chainsaw if you seriously use it for all your heating wood, doubly so if you aren't already mechanically inclined enough to repair engines. And then you still have to split it. There are cheap splitters, but cheap spliters will only split the wood that took little effort to split with an axe, and less than half the wood you cut is going to be that easy to split straight grain wood, so you are either going to need more for a splitter or to be physically fit and capable enough to split a lot of gnarly wood by hand. Some people enjoy it for the exercise, I do, but not everyone is up to it, and it is such a hard physical activity that you need to be in good health to maintain it.
Also splitting mauls are a gimmick, they take far more effort than a long handled axe and are only a good option if you are otherwise incapable of using an axe. Speed applies more kinetic energy than mass, kinetic energy is half of the mass times velocity squared, so doubling the mass you are throwing around is far less effective at applying force into splitting than trying to double your swing speed. And that is the biggest "trick" to a good axe split, swing speed, which is why you want a long handle. Mauls are far slower than an axe, take more energy than an axe to lift and swing, and are far less capable of splitting more gnarly wood as the more aggressive edge angle has a much harder time splitting into and separating the grain as much of the energy merely crushes wood fibers before it bites in and starts wedging. If an axe can't do it, a maul won't do it even more, and then you are getting into a sledge hammer and steel wedges anyways, and a wedge and sledge are easier to set and more maneuverable than a maul with a big ass handle on it.
Burning wood is a decent way to heat a house if someone is always at the house in regular 8 hour intervals or more, but it has a lot of caveats and is not what I would call free. More like subsidizing a portion of the cost of with hard physical labor.
Wood is free if you scavenge wood from an uncertain source, ignore fuel, equipment, time, oh and labor. Never mind it's green wood, so you need to manage stockpiling to dry it.
I live in a country where for half of the population wood is the default fuel. There's a reason it's a lot of peoples job.
Existing on the living standards of say, 1945, or even 1960, is very possible and allows you to make less money and presumably work on what you truly care about.
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.
I think the author is very comfortable fighting the Western marketing machine. I also don't think they are capable of understanding why other people have other needs.
You would not be able to afford any kind of property insurance or medical care with this budget. You won't be able to have a well dug or a septic system maintained either. We're going back a few decades farther than 1945 to make this work I think.
I wrote that to imply that the living standards of 1960 were normal in 1960, but wouldn’t be normal today. Don’t over-focus on the word universal and miss the point I was making.
Sigh. Again, that has nothing to do with my comment. My point was that living standards at X point in the past were normal for the time but aren’t normal for today. 1960 was a random year I picked. The point is that if one can manage to live “behind the times” materially, life is cheaper.
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".
Even a brand new iPhone 16 is “only” $800. Plans for unlimited internet can be had for less than $40 a month.
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?
That is a shit ton of money for someone living in a poor rural area living on the bare minimum. It is only cheap if you are living in a city where you are earning far more money.
I do believe that's a privilege to throw an extra $60 per month at something for five years straight. It's not truly stopping us from buying a house, but this mentality that everything could be bought on credit, this consumerism is where we are hurt.
They sell phones and data plans for cash that you prepay for. The 50-60 bucks was taking a monthly amortization over what would likely be a few thousand dollars upfront in expenses. Paying thousands upfront and using something for 5-6 years versus buying on credit for zero dollars down from the consumer perspective can have the same costs. Maybe it is more beneficial to not use credit long term. But unless you are also paying cash upfront you need credit and a credit history to buy a house.
> 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.
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.
The point is that you don’t need many of those things to have good quality of life. Not having a TV or being on social media would help a lot with resisting the relentless consumerist pressure.
they’d need to leave behind the idea that snow, overcast, wind, rain, and long winters are all that bad to contend with, because in all truth, they’re actually great.
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.
That's exactly how I feel about hot climates - the idea of moving to Texas instantly makes me flash back to being constantly sweaty (alternating, of course, with freezing anywhere indoors as people crank the AC down to somewhere in the 50s), and to the dreary winters whose palette is washed out browns and dirty greys.
Every time I visit the beach, I remember: wow, I really hate this!
Definitely a different strokes for different folks situation. I am also from the Gulf Coast and I genuinely love the cool rainy Seattle weather. In fact, I was just lamenting having to squint to see in the “hot” (65 F) sunny day this morning in Seattle.
> Heating a space is easier and cheaper than cooling one.
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.
It's not though. Even though fuel to heat is vastly cheaper than electricity to cool, the winter thermal difference in a cold climate is an order of magnitude more than the summer thermal difference in a hot climate.
That article is misleading because it only considers outdoor air temperatures.
Every electric and mechanical device we use produces waste heat. Humans and pets produce waste heat. The sun shining on a roof and through the windows heats a house.
Take the example of DC with average summer highs of 87 and winter lows of 28.
If it’s 87 outside a house with no AC full of people and pets, running appliances computers and lighting with the sun coming through the windows will easily get up to 100.
You AC needs to effectively move the temperature from 100 to 74.
The same thing applies in the winter. If it’s 28 outside a well insulated house full of people and residual solar heat would likely never drop below 48 or so.
Also the article picked 74 degrees which is fine for the summer but insane for the winter. Especially at night when the low temperatures hit.
If you pick something more reasonable like 68, you now have 20 degrees of heating and 26 of cooling.
Then when you consider that adding 20 degrees to the outside temperature means that in the summer you will need to run the AC pretty much all day. While in the winter day time temps + 20 degrees puts the indoor temperature right around 70 with no heat.
The way Seattle affects some people isn't about temperature. It's the long dark.
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.
If you are living near New York im not sure how dry you can consider it. You are East of the Great Lakes which makes it rain. In the middle of summer it might be dry, but both the spring and fall i expect to be very wet and humid, and unless the Great Lakes freeze over in the winter, which is happening less and less by the year, you will have a wet slushy winter.
Living in rural areas is probably very different now with connectivity options like cell phones and Starlink. I went to HS in a small town ( pop. < 1k ), it has advantages and disadvantages just like going to HS in a big city. However, entertainment in a small town was vastly different then vs today. It's probably a lot easier to live out in the middle of nowhere now without going crazy as long as you have power and something like Starlink.
So many problems with this, including "Live like a boomer" -> "Actually, live like their parents or their grandparents" but this one:
> 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?
> Yes, startling as it could be to many “Zoomers” and “Milennials,” it just so happens that if you really want to become a member of the landed gentry, it’s really not so far out of reach just the moment you decide that you like the snow, don’t need access to the hottest clubs and the biggest cities, and can be more than happy with getting cozy in a smaller house.
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.
Trailers in trailer parks in my rural census designated micropolitan statistical area of Ohio go for 60k at the minimum so there certainly is a lot of modern amenities you would have to accept to live without in the house described in the article. And by modern amenities I mean heat and potentially running water.
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.
This almost seemed like it was going to be a Modest Proposal style tongue-in-cheek skewering of this "old man yells at cloud" style of curmudgeonly generational finger wagging. The breakdown of that $432 itself was almost enough to be a farce. But no, the author really does believe this. (Please correct if I'm wrong, as it still seems hard to believe such a fatuous piece could be written and submitted here)
>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?
You seem really certain that the older 'way of life' is categorically bad, but you seem very unhappy and angry in the life that you reject it in favor of.
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?
> 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.
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]
Okay, but we are reading this on HN. Anyone working for the past 10 years in tech should have that much saved up easily. If for the past 10 years you put just $400 a month into SPY and did nothing else, you'd have about $95,000. About 126k for QQQ. [0]
And I don't think most people can't afford to save $400 a month. Lots of people save that much.
I didn't mean to assume anything about the whole world, but we are talking about ourselves here, so our situations matter to us. I read the article as a thought experiment that is available to me personally and many others, even if it isn't practical for literally every human being.
If you're so concerned about class warfare, as I agree we ought to be, you need to get along with the people from middle America or anywhere else who consider this a perfectly respectable way of life. Many of them are equally fed up with things.
Huh? My in-laws came from industrial maintenance/construction companies in rural North Carolina. They vote for Trump, majority of them go to Southern Baptist churches. I spent two years living out there and working for one of their industrial maintenance companies.
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.
> They're angry that ... selfish older generations selling their homes (and therefore much of their generational wealth) to fund either lavish retirements or more medical treatments, etc, etc.
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.
There are a lot of specifics HN can and will nitpick in this piece, but the perspective is useful and not invalidated by these specifics. Personally I would never choose this lifestyle, but I like that OP highlights how clearly it can exist.
The article mentions that the Moses-Saunders International Power Dam is nearby. A bit of a tangent, but this was built by Robert Moses, who isn't as well known as he should be. Moses built a huge number of projects that reshaped New York City: the state parkway, lots of bridges including the TriBorough and Verrazzano-Narrows, multiple NYC expressways, Jones Beach, Shea Stadium, Lincoln Center, United Nations headquarters, large public housing projects, and so forth.
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.
> Massena is one of the poorest, least-desirable places not only in New York State, but in the United States at large. [...] on the flip-side, it’s within very close distance of two major Canadian cities, [...]
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.
You definitely have to be a certain type of person to do this. Not everyone is physically and mentally capable and has a “socially-acceptable morality” to live that kind of lifestyle.
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.
> 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.
He overpriced the phone. Good2Go have a 1GB data plan for $5/mo that I use. I only need data when I'm outside the house. You can buy a half-decent Android phone off eBay for $30-50. But, you still need some sort of Internet. If you can't get wired, then that means having to fork out for Starlink or Hughes.
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.
True. Verizon and T-Mobile both had really awesome 5G home Internet plans for $25/mo. I had the T-Mobile one for a while in 2022 and was getting 800Mbps which was wild.
Perhaps the author heats with a wood stove. You have to get wood through your labor or buying it though, so it's not truly 0$. Plus the time and effort to keep it going.
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.
>Though I and my wife do not presently live in Massena, we live nearby, and we’re doing exactly this — we do not have an automobile, nor do we want one. We use the rural county transit bus, which we have found to be extremely cheap and quite reliable; and it has certainly saved us thousands and thousands of dollars by liberating us from the onerous expense of keeping a car.
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.
Agreed, looking at the map of Massena this seems like bullshit. I've lived without a car for my entire life across multiple states and it is incredibly onerous in even mildly dense areas.
Frequency is often as important as the route from experience; because a route that's reasonably distant from your location can be walked to/biked to etc but a low-frequency route means it's something you need to plan your entire day around. And if you miss any bus then you're stranded (which, given that they don't have internet I'm curious how they manage...)
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.
> a low-frequency route means it's something you need to plan your entire day around.
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.
That’s obviously not true, if you change what you “have” to go to.
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.
My admittedly unscientific survey of small Midwestern towns with Walmarts (that are NOT suburbs!) is that you can walk to the Walmart on sidewalks. At most, you have half a block to the nearest sidewalk, or have to cross the street.
Some of the middling-old sections only have one sidewalk. The oldest have them on both sides of the street, and the newest developments have them also, usually.
The two smallish towns I've spent significant time in (Tomah WI and Palestine TX) both have difficult to walk to Walmarts. But glad to hear it's not universal!
I see from Google maps that here in Illinois the situation seems to be a bit better... (E.g. Morris, Rantoul and even Du Quoin). Du Quoin seems very inexpensive and seems like it would make a better argument than somewhere truly rural (it even has Amtrak service)
The Walmart in the area from this article is separated from the main town by a four lane road with no sidewalks, across which the nearest crosswalks are more than half a mile away in either direction—so you’re either playing high stakes Frogger, or, depending on your starting location, you might conceivably have to walk nearly two hours out of your way round trip along the shoulder of this road to use a crosswalk. They also get five feet of snow per year, so a good part of the year that walk is extra dangerous and miserable.
I can’t say for sure, but I think this is much more typical of American Walmarts than it is to be able to easily walk to them.
Once it gets cold you won't be walking much anywhere. I guess grocery delivery from Walmart can mitigate this, but that fundamentally changes the situation.
One way (not the only way and I get this won't work well for people with medical needs or kids) to handle this is stock up on rice, beans, nonperishables and have a good first aid kit. You go out to get your "freshies" but it's not an issue to be stuck at home for a week except in the most dire circumstances.
> 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.
77% percent of young Americans aren't fit for service.
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.
Are you sure you mean .5km? That's only 0.3 miles, 1500 feet. That is the distance if you drive to a Walmart supercenter and park in the center of the parking lot and walk to the door.
Huh? I'm not in great shape but I get 2km of walking a day just with my commute. According to my watch I've averaged 13k steps a day this week (something like 9-10 km a day, I think?). Ironically the days I walk the least are when I decide to bike to work instead of taking the train...
I am sitting in front of PC probably around 10hours a day and drink and sit rest of my day (excluding sleep) and still it is not a big deal for me to have a 7km walk to the city or back is not a big deal.
I think in US it just cultural. "You are walking?! With your feet?! How?!". Unless you more likely to get shot walking via some neighbourhood I can't understand that.
500 hundred metres? This is long for you? If there is snow you can't walk? Why? Snow is much beteer than rain. And still it is just a couple of minutes. You most probably would not get wet with proper clothes.
Are you from US by the chance?
The average American walks 2.4 miles per day according to the CDC, this person is truly exceptional even among people the most car centric American towns.
You’ll walk more than 500m through the aisles in Walmart buying your groceries.
..in what National Weather Service described as "once-in-a-generation storm". Walking 2 km on a normal winter day (or even a mild blizzard) is not dangerous.
Right, I mean obviously the scenario in the article is unrealistic budget wise (and good winter equipment is going to be at least several hundred dollars), but I'm pushing back against the idea you can't walk when it's cold ...
This is true. I recently read that the real reason that the Vikings left North America was that the Native American authorities informed them that their site on L'Anse aux Meadows was not zoned for boat repair and construction.
I agree that his deliberate deletion of a car and Internet access from the example budget undermines his point, but adding $200 to support the cost of owning a cheap car and $45 for a prepaid cellphone plan with ample tethering doesn't change the overall equation significantly.
So you have a ton of people trying to make it off that.
The cold weather is really the red flag for me.
>Considering that the property has a well on-site, water is free, and as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a little extra in electric for that — or they could have the Amish deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in a wood stove, very cheaply.
He glosses over heating, but for a full house that can easily be 200 or 300$ 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
You can bike year round in Florida and bike or walk to work if you are in vicinity. Even go to grocery store or in some cases use a golf cart. At least one car is still preferable.
It's just a tradeoff. ~20 hours of low wage employment is more than enough to cover a car. Instead they choose to spend those ~20 hours walking/waiting for the bus. Certainly not a trade I would make.
Higher income employees would pay way more than that in taxes alone. This is why properties in low and no income tax states skyrocketed.
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.
Out of pocket health insurance 1400 a month? Really? It that’s true, that is criminally ridiculous. Why do people accept that, when even in developing nations basic health care is free, and there are plenty of private choices. Decent health insurance costs about 150-300 a month the world over, except in the USA where it is ten times that for no reason whatsoever besides greed and the fact that healthcare is a basic need that puts people under duress. Get your shit together , Americans, you’re getting piped over a barrel six ways to Sunday and you just take it like it was mandatory. What gives?
The main reason is that the government isn't funding it, like in other countries. I do agree the healthcare system in the US should be reformed. But the cost isn't going to go all away - it's just going to be shifted to higher taxes. Which is fine.
Sure, but I’m having a hard time understanding how developing nations the world over can afford to do this, but the USA cannot lol. I’ve used the healthcare systems in many developing nations, and while it’s not really fun, it is adequate and free for 80 percent of the issues that a person encounters.
For the other 20 percent, it’s best to go to a private clinic, where the care is as good if not better than many US clinics but at 10-20 percent of the cost.
And the private clinics are not subsidized.
My wife just got an MRI at a private, fully for profit imaging clinic. The total cost was $217 USD for a study with and without contrast on a 2023 Siemens scanner. Labs for the contrast approval were $6.
What people pay in the USA is in no way justified by equipment or facility costs. Runaway liability and profiteering, perhaps. But not because of the “quality” of the healthcare or the equipment.
I think there's a bunch of different things going on in the US healthcare system. I think for sure part of it is inefficiency.
But I don't really buy the argument that healthcare quality is the same elsewhere. Like, do you really think you're going to get the same care for, say, long term multiple sclerosis in the United States versus Guatemala? I feel a lot of the "the care is the same" comes from younger people who have had relatively easy interactions with the healthcare system. When you're over 70 it's a totally different ball game.
You can absolutely get the same standard of care for common things, but you might not get it for free. Where the standard of care does vary is where there are only a few specialists in the world for your condition.. they probably will be in the USA or Europe.
You have two elements in healthcare , for the most part: expertise, starting with basic medical education, then gained by reading and being exposed to patients, going to conferences and other experiential factors. People are ill, injured, or old everywhere, so this opportunity is well distributed.
Apart from that, you have technology, and people with money pay to have access to it, and people with money are also everywhere, so that too tends to be distributed.
There are also a lot more doctors per person in many developing nations, because education of doctors tends to be highly subsidized in those countries. You get a lot more of a doctors time and focused attention with your consult.
It’s when things are rare that it can be harder, but even then, sometimes the leading specialists start out off the beaten path.
That's like asking why would anyone buy a Mercedes when they can take the bus for $2.
US healthcare is extremely high quality and timely if you can pay for it unlike the crap "free" Canadian "healthcare" I used to have with 12 month wait times for procedures and 50%+ marginal tax rates.
>That's like asking why would anyone buy a Mercedes when they can take the bus for $2
no, its more like, what if you lived in a country where you were forced to buy a mercedes or die of starvation, regardless of your socioeconomic status.
I dont doubt that Canadian healthcare is deeply broken, considering its close proximity to the US system, leading to extreme pressure from perverse incentives.
I have spent the last two decades living in developing nations in Latin America, and I can say I have been very pleasantly surprised.
Where I am right now, The public systems cover 80 percent of what people need at no cost with government hospitals and clinics. Any community >200 people will have a clinic, and any reasonable town of a few thousand will have a hospital. There are government Pharmacies that distribute most common medications for roughly 25% of the standard (very low) pharmacy price.
Alongside this is a thriving system of private pharmacies and "clinics" Often, these are fully equipped hospitals, with trauma centers, cardiac units, the works.
One of the nearby ones, for example, consists of seven towers and many other buildings over several city blocks and includes hundreds of specialist practices, three separate hospitals, two imaging centers, etc. All fully for profit and privately held.
The cost at the clinics is typically about 10% - 20% of US cost, and includes the use of new, state of the art equipment from Siemens, GE Medical, etc.
Very good health insurance coverage for me, a 60 year old man, runs a little under $100usd a month, and covers 90-100 percent, including a reasonable allowance for vision and dental.
This is not a wealthy country, and the general tax rate paid by most people is a 20% sales tax on non-essential items, roughly 20% import tax on luxury goods and personal vehicles, a fairly high fuel tax for road use. There are other taxes for top 1% earners and corporate taxes, but they are not onerous.
The public and private system is thriving, and is becoming a hotspot for healthcare tourism for the USA and Canada.
Naked Greed is not the only way forward, and private / public hybrid systems can thrive side by side.
Its worth mentioning that the government provided insurance, typically extended mostly to mothers and children, is also pretty good, covering 100 percent, but each usage requires an approval process that may take several days. Anything else, you go to the hospital where they will provide primary care / stabilization if it is a complex situation requiring ongoing care.
On the government side, there is a clear priority towards care that can result in good outcomes. Pallitive care and diseases that inevitably result in near-term death are deprioritised under the public systems, and private insurance or families pick up the tab on those kinds of things.
Some of the claims here are pretty intense, but I do think his closing statement is true enough:
> 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.
What I don’t understand is the authors antagonistic framing. The complaints about moving backward because of boomer greed aren’t any less valid just because caves exist, fire remains “discovered”, and we can clone wooly mammoths.
I think it's absurd. I work full time in the richest country on Earth and I can't afford an apartment and healthcare. The problem is clearly not advertising.
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're all being asked to sacrifice the living standards our parents grew up with because the utter failure of local, state and federal government to provide housing, public transit, education and healthcare, something most of the Western world manages to pull off without issue.
We have never been more productive in this country's history and yet we cannot even meet a bar set in the 1950s.
Median disposable household income is higher in the US than anywhere else in the world [0]. Real median personal income has increased 50% since the 1970s [1].
Officially, disposable income means income minus taxes. Lots of people assume it means minus necessities like housing and food, but that is discretionary income.
My parents bought our house when I was in 3rd grade in 1993 for $80k. A new similar house in their area would probably cost $250k now. But they don’t make 1200 square foot houses anymore so you’d probably need to spend $350k for a 2200 square foot house.
So new houses have more than doubled the pace of inflation in my hometown.
But when we moved in there was no mall, no Best Buy, few jobs. It was much more rural. This happened all over. Things got more developed. Areas that are desirable now weren’t necessarily desirable 30 years ago.
Plus the houses now are so much more insulated and air tight that heating and and cooling costs a fraction of what it did 30 years ago. And the houses are much bigger.
Good news - his plan also includes not being able to afford healthcare and housing while working full time! Are you interested in doing what you do now but different? It just cuts corners in different places than other people do to achieve a result that doesn't seem that interesting to most people but is also bad in interesting ways.
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.
Of course you could afford an apartment, or even a house! You just don't want to move there.
I don't judge you - I also live in a VHCOL area and my wife wouldn't even want to move 30km where the housing prices are half of where we are now. Such is live.
But saying you couldn't afford it is false - you can't afford it where you'd want to live, is more accurate.
If I wanted to be a jerk I could spew the same opinions the author is, but I'm not, so I'm disagreeing with him.
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.
> any American could live an earlier iteration of the American Dream
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.
Having lived in a small town in the South East, it's true. Even being white and male may not be enough. You have to be able bodied, not too ugly, not too short, not too nerdy, the correct religion and denomination for the area. Unless you want to live like a hermet.
Are you asking for data on whether intolerance ore pejudice _exists_ in small towns in the US?
Well, I would have assumed that was well understood, but you know what? Here's some data that shows that rural communities do, in fact, have measurably higher prejudice against others (In this specific case, hispanic immigrants): https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1409896/FULLTEXT...
Maybe you have more direct experience with this than I do, but I'm not sure I agree. I don't follow the lifestyle the author describes, but I do live in an economically and culturally comparable town in Vermont that's much smaller than Massena. The town is full of gay and lesbian couples, and it really doesn't seem to be an issue. The few racial minorities seem to be well accepted. Religion is a surprisingly small factor.
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.
I think Vermont is, in my experience, perhaps more accepting of different identities. I've lived in small towns, and spent plenty of time in small towns. Some have a "don't ask/don't tell" or "live and let live" sense to them. As long as you aren't loud about your identity, you'll be left alone.
But plenty of places will absolutely run you out of town for having the wrong religion, race, or sexual preferences.
I experienced something similar and would posit that small communities accommodate diversity more easily, because you get to know the people, it's no longer "the homosexuals" or "the immigrants" or "the jews", it's "John who works at the coffee shop ".
Clearly this breaks down at a certain size, and it may still suck for people on the minority side tho.
This is not true, in my experience, in rural Indiana. I hear the n word a lot for an area that I have yet to meet a black person. One neighbor was complaining about the California family that moved to town and brought all the drug problems with them, despite our county having been the meth capital of Indiana for years before they moved here. Somehow my first conversation with a friend's mom I met while visiting their rural farm involved how there were no black people in the area. But this is why all anecdotal data should be taken with a grain of salt.
Guess it comes down to the individual's attitude either way and what they're willing to tolerate but I wouldn't underestimate the aggressive ignorance you can find out there. Vermont is a short drive from the so-called lesbian capital of the world, one of the few parts of the country where democrats consistently win a majority of rural voters, and is in the most secular corner of the country. It's almost the complete opposite of the rest of rural America.
Yeah as a trans woman who lived in Vermont for awhile this lines up with my experience. The worst bigotry I encountered was teenagers calling me the f-slur, which is like fine, whatever. I think people dont have a sense of just how massive America is and how different states are culturally.
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
There's a particularly funny anecdote I have in regards to your transphobic dogwhistle.
Back when I was living in Austin I was at the airport getting ready to visit my family for a flight. As I went to enter the male restroom, a woman from behind me yelled at me that I was entering the wrong restroom and sneered at me.
Do you know what my crime was? Being a cisgender male with long hair. That was all it took for someone to assume I was transgender and then proceed to be an asshole.If you're in a rural like that and you stand out in any way, people will notice. And if you're someone that is trans, it'll be far worse.
> It's hard to claim that any American can achieve this.
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.
I would argue is that what we need for healing and understanding is more brave trans and gay people in these spaces.
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.
I mean as a trans woman who lived pretty close to how the article author described their life (rural town, no car, shitty housing, very low income), it's definitely possible to live without too much trouble. In the northeast there is definitely bigotry, but it is very uncommon for anyone to say anything. People keep to themselves, and your biggest issue is social isolation. Though when I lived like that in the south I got called slurs and threatened physically by complete strangers pretty often, so your point stands. I'd imagine its pretty similar for most other minority groups.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 360 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Driving to smaller airports - just arrive 50 minutes before departure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My wife, on the other hand goes bananas when we visit the city and just can’t get enough of the food. She’ll eat when she’s not even hungry because she just wants to experience this or that meal. I play along because I think it’s cute and we support each other’s goofiness, but I legit don’t get it.
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.
Hard agree. I think the article is right that most people haven't even come close to trying the lifestyle he's suggesting.
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.
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.
Good point. There's no possible way to have fun in a 27-bedroom house on a 100 acre lot.
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.
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....
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!
They say they want to be able to walk to places more. But they also want a big suburban-style house with bedrooms for everyone and storage and garage and lawn etc, easy parking for them, nice wide roads to drive everywhere on and tons of free parking when they get there. This makes it impossible for the area to be walkable unless everyone else lives in small apartments and there's actually only enough parking for just them to drive if they feel like it.
In my opinion, it doesn't work that way. Yeah everyone wants to be the special 1% like that, but only actually 1% will be. If you really want to be walkable, you personally will need to live like that too.
Pretty much everywhere has a political majority of single-family homeowners, and if each locality decides on its own it doesn't want to have multifamily housing, then you wind up in a situation where almost nowhere actually allows it.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Those might pay well in the city, but nobody making $17/hr is going to pay more than $10/hr for lawn mowing.
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.
> 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?
Great financial advice happening on the orangesite.
Really good stuff.
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.
Sure you might get lucky if you keep your head low, but maybe you won't get lucky and you lose the gamble and are put in a WAY worse situation.
Are you possibly confusing "per week" with "per month"?
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."
I think hé means one should do all kinds of small projects.
$17 x 26 h = €442
One 10 h shift per week is to much apparently.
> 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.
40 hours per month is much less than 40 hours per week
"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?"
"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.
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.
>> 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.
Of course, it depends a lot on the job. Some jobs only exist in cities, while others are almost exclusively rural.
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.
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!).
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.
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.
And what are the chances you would find an acceptable partner for you in the small town if you didn’t already have one?
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.
More different kinds of culture (diversity), more examples of each kind (quantity), and usually better examples of any cultural component which is available in both (quality).
Rural areas certainly have cultures of their own. It is not binary.
But you cannot reasonably compare the cultural opportunities of urban vs rural and assert that rural is not lacking, unless you are thinking of your personal preferences only, and the rural area you're using for comparison happens to match up very well with your own preferences.
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?
Like even the framing showed how a ridiculous premise it was.
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...
And even with a well managed rotating stock of trees, you are going to at best get just over half a cord per acre. And in my area which is as close to the same weather as Northern New York as it gets, I would expect they would need atleast full 3 cords of wood to make it through a mild winter, more if it is a colder winter or if no snow builds up to help insulate or if you live on an open plot where wind can blow over your house.
I wouldn't even consider trying to survive on my own tree wood unless I had at least 10 acres to harvest off of, and it would still depend on the type of trees growing there and is still kind of straddling the edge of sustainable long term.
Maybe if you went full 16th century and started coppicing the woods and maintaining bare minimum heating you could do better, but coppiced woods also takes a decade to initial establish and maintain and nobody has coppiced woods just sitting around waiting to be utilized.
Wells are not "free water" unless you never have to worry about any sort of repair or maintenance.
In Minecraft perhaps. Wood costs money to get, process and adequately use, the well also has maintenance costs.
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.
They already have 30 USD per month for electricity in their budget. All year long.
> which is more than half the size of my suburban home)
How much space you need for a single person? 30-40 sqm (300-400 sqft)? That’s more than you need.
Sure, middle of winter night you might need a bit more heat, but then in June you’ll be using close to none.
Not to argue (?) that their house is too small (??)
And their $30 electric budget explicitly excluded heat.
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.
We cut wood for our own use and also sold it, so it didn't require 100% of our time to keep the heat on.
Say you do have a wooded plot, the first year or two it might not be so bad, lots of wood near the edges where you can drive up to to load and move, but what about after that when you have to go deeper into the woods? You need to get in there, it may not be accessible by truck or get swampy where you will get stuck, and now you are considering a tractor or other vehicle, a decent expense to obtain, in order to not have to carry all your wood an armload at a time through the woods longer and longer distances. Chains and gas and oil for cutting it aren't expensive but not free, nor is maintaining a gas chainsaw if you seriously use it for all your heating wood, doubly so if you aren't already mechanically inclined enough to repair engines. And then you still have to split it. There are cheap splitters, but cheap spliters will only split the wood that took little effort to split with an axe, and less than half the wood you cut is going to be that easy to split straight grain wood, so you are either going to need more for a splitter or to be physically fit and capable enough to split a lot of gnarly wood by hand. Some people enjoy it for the exercise, I do, but not everyone is up to it, and it is such a hard physical activity that you need to be in good health to maintain it.
Also splitting mauls are a gimmick, they take far more effort than a long handled axe and are only a good option if you are otherwise incapable of using an axe. Speed applies more kinetic energy than mass, kinetic energy is half of the mass times velocity squared, so doubling the mass you are throwing around is far less effective at applying force into splitting than trying to double your swing speed. And that is the biggest "trick" to a good axe split, swing speed, which is why you want a long handle. Mauls are far slower than an axe, take more energy than an axe to lift and swing, and are far less capable of splitting more gnarly wood as the more aggressive edge angle has a much harder time splitting into and separating the grain as much of the energy merely crushes wood fibers before it bites in and starts wedging. If an axe can't do it, a maul won't do it even more, and then you are getting into a sledge hammer and steel wedges anyways, and a wedge and sledge are easier to set and more maneuverable than a maul with a big ass handle on it.
Burning wood is a decent way to heat a house if someone is always at the house in regular 8 hour intervals or more, but it has a lot of caveats and is not what I would call free. More like subsidizing a portion of the cost of with hard physical labor.
I live in a country where for half of the population wood is the default fuel. There's a reason it's a lot of peoples job.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
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-...
Every electric and mechanical device we use produces waste heat. Humans and pets produce waste heat. The sun shining on a roof and through the windows heats a house.
Take the example of DC with average summer highs of 87 and winter lows of 28.
If it’s 87 outside a house with no AC full of people and pets, running appliances computers and lighting with the sun coming through the windows will easily get up to 100.
You AC needs to effectively move the temperature from 100 to 74.
The same thing applies in the winter. If it’s 28 outside a well insulated house full of people and residual solar heat would likely never drop below 48 or so.
Also the article picked 74 degrees which is fine for the summer but insane for the winter. Especially at night when the low temperatures hit.
If you pick something more reasonable like 68, you now have 20 degrees of heating and 26 of cooling.
Then when you consider that adding 20 degrees to the outside temperature means that in the summer you will need to run the AC pretty much all day. While in the winter day time temps + 20 degrees puts the indoor temperature right around 70 with no heat.
> It's not though.
It always has been, for humans. Energy cost != financial cost (or ease).
ie You can't settle on the bright side of mercury surface, but you can on the dark side of the moon.
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.
[0]: https://dqydj.com/etf-return-calculator/
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.
Some of the middling-old sections only have one sidewalk. The oldest have them on both sides of the street, and the newest developments have them also, usually.
I see from Google maps that here in Illinois the situation seems to be a bit better... (E.g. Morris, Rantoul and even Du Quoin). Du Quoin seems very inexpensive and seems like it would make a better argument than somewhere truly rural (it even has Amtrak service)
I can’t say for sure, but I think this is much more typical of American Walmarts than it is to be able to easily walk to them.
Streetview of your opponent as a pedestrian trying to access the Massena Walmart: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ufTWTHxHCReFP8VA9
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.
Most Americans would be able to do it if it became a regular occurrence for them. 2km of walking is not much even if you sit around 24 hours a day.
I think in US it just cultural. "You are walking?! With your feet?! How?!". Unless you more likely to get shot walking via some neighbourhood I can't understand that.
You’ll walk more than 500m through the aisles in Walmart buying your groceries.
... Wait, what? That's less than half an hour walking at a fairly relaxed pace.
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
Not at $0.04/kwh for a 600 square foot house it won’t.
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.
For the other 20 percent, it’s best to go to a private clinic, where the care is as good if not better than many US clinics but at 10-20 percent of the cost.
And the private clinics are not subsidized.
My wife just got an MRI at a private, fully for profit imaging clinic. The total cost was $217 USD for a study with and without contrast on a 2023 Siemens scanner. Labs for the contrast approval were $6.
What people pay in the USA is in no way justified by equipment or facility costs. Runaway liability and profiteering, perhaps. But not because of the “quality” of the healthcare or the equipment.
But I don't really buy the argument that healthcare quality is the same elsewhere. Like, do you really think you're going to get the same care for, say, long term multiple sclerosis in the United States versus Guatemala? I feel a lot of the "the care is the same" comes from younger people who have had relatively easy interactions with the healthcare system. When you're over 70 it's a totally different ball game.
You have two elements in healthcare , for the most part: expertise, starting with basic medical education, then gained by reading and being exposed to patients, going to conferences and other experiential factors. People are ill, injured, or old everywhere, so this opportunity is well distributed.
Apart from that, you have technology, and people with money pay to have access to it, and people with money are also everywhere, so that too tends to be distributed.
There are also a lot more doctors per person in many developing nations, because education of doctors tends to be highly subsidized in those countries. You get a lot more of a doctors time and focused attention with your consult.
It’s when things are rare that it can be harder, but even then, sometimes the leading specialists start out off the beaten path.
All I know is that it's gone up tremendously since then, and my family plan costs about $2100 a month.
US healthcare is extremely high quality and timely if you can pay for it unlike the crap "free" Canadian "healthcare" I used to have with 12 month wait times for procedures and 50%+ marginal tax rates.
no, its more like, what if you lived in a country where you were forced to buy a mercedes or die of starvation, regardless of your socioeconomic status.
I dont doubt that Canadian healthcare is deeply broken, considering its close proximity to the US system, leading to extreme pressure from perverse incentives.
I have spent the last two decades living in developing nations in Latin America, and I can say I have been very pleasantly surprised.
Where I am right now, The public systems cover 80 percent of what people need at no cost with government hospitals and clinics. Any community >200 people will have a clinic, and any reasonable town of a few thousand will have a hospital. There are government Pharmacies that distribute most common medications for roughly 25% of the standard (very low) pharmacy price.
Alongside this is a thriving system of private pharmacies and "clinics" Often, these are fully equipped hospitals, with trauma centers, cardiac units, the works.
One of the nearby ones, for example, consists of seven towers and many other buildings over several city blocks and includes hundreds of specialist practices, three separate hospitals, two imaging centers, etc. All fully for profit and privately held.
The cost at the clinics is typically about 10% - 20% of US cost, and includes the use of new, state of the art equipment from Siemens, GE Medical, etc.
Very good health insurance coverage for me, a 60 year old man, runs a little under $100usd a month, and covers 90-100 percent, including a reasonable allowance for vision and dental.
This is not a wealthy country, and the general tax rate paid by most people is a 20% sales tax on non-essential items, roughly 20% import tax on luxury goods and personal vehicles, a fairly high fuel tax for road use. There are other taxes for top 1% earners and corporate taxes, but they are not onerous.
The public and private system is thriving, and is becoming a hotspot for healthcare tourism for the USA and Canada.
Naked Greed is not the only way forward, and private / public hybrid systems can thrive side by side.
Its worth mentioning that the government provided insurance, typically extended mostly to mothers and children, is also pretty good, covering 100 percent, but each usage requires an approval process that may take several days. Anything else, you go to the hospital where they will provide primary care / stabilization if it is a complex situation requiring ongoing care.
On the government side, there is a clear priority towards care that can result in good outcomes. Pallitive care and diseases that inevitably result in near-term death are deprioritised under the public systems, and private insurance or families pick up the tab on those kinds of things.
> 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.
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.
So new houses have more than doubled the pace of inflation in my hometown.
But when we moved in there was no mall, no Best Buy, few jobs. It was much more rural. This happened all over. Things got more developed. Areas that are desirable now weren’t necessarily desirable 30 years ago.
Plus the houses now are so much more insulated and air tight that heating and and cooling costs a fraction of what it did 30 years ago. And the houses are much bigger.
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 judge you - I also live in a VHCOL area and my wife wouldn't even want to move 30km where the housing prices are half of where we are now. Such is live.
But saying you couldn't afford it is false - you can't afford it where you'd want to live, is more accurate.
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.
Well, I would have assumed that was well understood, but you know what? Here's some data that shows that rural communities do, in fact, have measurably higher prejudice against others (In this specific case, hispanic immigrants): https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1409896/FULLTEXT...
And here's a study demonstrating that outgroup identity, particularly in rural communities, can lead to worse outcomes including worse allocations of scarce resources: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-021-09680-3...
If you want more data, there's plenty of research out there.
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
Yeah, great
Back when I was living in Austin I was at the airport getting ready to visit my family for a flight. As I went to enter the male restroom, a woman from behind me yelled at me that I was entering the wrong restroom and sneered at me.
Do you know what my crime was? Being a cisgender male with long hair. That was all it took for someone to assume I was transgender and then proceed to be an asshole.If you're in a rural like that and you stand out in any way, people will notice. And if you're someone that is trans, it'll be far worse.
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.
"He/she is one of the good ones..." is a fairly common turn of phrase.
It is right, but - if you were one of them, would you risk your life to maybe bring in some change?