“Stadtliche luft macht man frei” is an old German saying. City air makes you free. Life in a small town can be stifling. That close-knit family wants you to be just like them. God forbid you want to do or see anything new. The moving-to-a-big-city trope is as old as cinema, and has strong roots in reality.
In the middle-ages in at least in what is now Estonia, if you ecaped to the city and lived there for a year and a day you would be set free from your serfdom. “Linna õhk teeb vabaks” same frase was used for that.
Because those “loving family members” IRL are usually nosy dickheads, and there is no dating scene in small towns. So it’s either marry your cousin, or move to the city.
Not to mention job opportunities…
Mr green text has no idea what he’s talking about.
I grew up on a farm you’re telling me that was an idyllic life?
Farmwork is stupidly long days in awful weather, it’s either hot, or freezing cold, or raining, or snowing. The pay is effectively abysmal and makes you wish you worked in Starbucks on minimum wage because that would be an improvement. You have all this necessary equipment you’ve had to “buy”, which despite costing more than most houses is about as reliable as a Soviet era tank.
And that’s just growing props if you’re mad enough to also raise cattle then it’s even worse because you’ve got all them to deal with and sheep in particular are more suicidal than a depressed lemming.
But hey, you get a nice view.
Well, at least a soviet tank can be repaired with a hammer, unlike a deere
Soviet equipment is much more repairable than any of the modern crap we have nowadays which is designed to be used and tossed in a relatively short timeframe.
There’s a reason the kids aren’t taking over the farm. Not to mention that a 50 acre returned soldier lot can’t provide for a family of six anymore.
Well it isn’t subsistence farming by any stretch of the imagination it’s full on industrial farming.
Most farms these days, at least crop farms, grow only two or three different crops. Mostly dictated by what will fetch the best price and what is currently being subsidised by the government. Often times you will find that farms are not growing any food stuffs at all.
I grew up next to a farm. They stopped growing produce because the government regulations got to be crazy. They just grow soy beans and hay now.
Can they not poison the water supply anymore or were there too many strings attached to get their subsidies?
You know nothing about them.
Wait, you got paid? I just got grabbed by the neighbor whenever he needed another hand
I currently work at a farm and it is fucking hard work for $15 an hour. The only reason I stay is because family friends own it and I need money for college. At least I don’t have to deal with sheep lmao.
You are currently depressed lemming
I’ve lived in high urban, low urban, suburban, and rural. They all have pros and cons.
If you’re dating tho, the city is way better, but good luck finding practice space - if you’re into that sort of thing.
There are dating practise spaces?
Haha, yeah, it’s called the bar.
She had 275 siblings. Getting away from that farm was the smartest thing she’s ever done. She has no hope of any kind of meaningful inheritance. I’m honestly surprised a farm could support that many rabbits and still turn any kind of profit. It must have been subsidized out the wazoo. The last thing it needs is her hanging around, getting hitched to some redneck just out of high school, popping out a couple hundred hungry mouths of her own right before the inevitable foreclosure and declaration of martial law as the farmpocalypse occurs when her parents finally kick it and the tens-of-thousands of children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren raze the countryside in search of fodder. Just ask an Australian what rabbits are capable of.
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Eh, my friend actually did that. I assumed that she had some sort of awful family she was running from, but actually they’re nice and she visits them on holidays. She just wanted to be in the big city so much that she was willing to rent a single room in a bad neighborhood and constantly look for odd jobs rather than live out in the countryside with her parents.
I understand the draw. It’s boring in the country for most young people. At least there’s always something to do or something to see in the city.
I was a city kid that ended up in the country, and it’s like a different world. It took me years to slow down to country pace. Now that I’m older I enjoy it, but it took a lot of getting used to. There’s things I miss about the city but I prefer being out here where I never have to lock things up for fear of it getting stolen, cleaner air, and all the other issues city life brings.
The biggest issue I have out here is keeping the deer out of my garden.
I mean I can imagine the dating prospects are really terrible in the countryside, noone talked about that yet.
Another issue is that LBGT people often have to flee hostile rural towns for a city where they can be free to live. We’re currently in the middle of a refuge crisis as trans people flee red States for mostly cities (small towns in blue states can be scary too) in places like Minnesota.
We already have that, it’s called the Hallmark channel and exists entirely to aggressively propagandize to rural stay at home moms to remind them that they made the good choice staying behind while everyone else went out looking for careers and how those city slickers are stupid because they can’t ride a horse, nevermind how Karen hasn’t even touched a horse, nevermind learned to ride, evaluation based on real facts is for those liberals and their critical gender theory!
Because these characters are usually young and cities are exciting. Wanting to get away from people tends to happen later in life. That said, I know plenty of people in their 40s/50s who love city living.
Yeah people want excitement from movies and TV and country life is usually quiet and might be considered boring for movies or TV programs or just wouldn’t be considered interesting by most younger people.
It’s not even that complicated… the vast majority of people that make up the consumer market live in urban environments.
Anon has never heard of the term “target audience”.
Why do we accept that urban life is worse than rural life?
In some cases it is.
I live on an acre about 100 miles from the nearest sizable city. I’ve got a workshop, pecan trees, a pool, a smoker trailer, a bonfire pit fifteen feet across, and lots of peace and quiet. No HOA, no city ordinances, no traffic, and the only loud neighbor is a donkey that brays a few times a day.
That would cost me at least half a million in the city. The little apartment I used to rent Pre-COVID cost me nearly as much as the house payment I pay now.
Is it for everyone? No. There’s no excitement, limited shopping and dining options, and anywhere I want to go is at least a twenty minute drive. But it’s great for me. My job sends me all over the world so I get my fill of the city while living in hotels. Going home is a breath of fresh air.
The key is to live in the countryside but not actually work in the countryside.
Yep.
Having a decent income and wealth makes living on a rural location idyllic. Someone with a low income farming job and an acre in a rural location won’t see the exact same house the same way because they will be struggling financially.
Oh, for sure. I lived not too far from where I do now when I was younger and flipped burgers for a living. I had holes in the floor of my trailer where possums would come up at night and raid the cat food.
Still, being able to wake up, walk outside, and take my morning piss off the front porch while watching the sunrise was some compensation. Being out away from everyone is appealing to some people.
Ignorance plain and simple. Most people nowadays live their whole lives in big urban centers, they have an idealistic view of country life and take the conveniences of city life for granted. City life can suck, I won’t deny it, but living in bumfuck nowhere also has it’s major drawbacks.
Eh, I’ve lived both, now in the city, it’s got its advantages but I’d be lying if I said I don’t dream of going back from time to time.
Cars ruin cities. There’s more we can do to make cities better but that’s the big one
I mean, do you think cars aren’t a thing in rural areas or something? You think us country bumpkins are riding our horses around?
There’s enough space out there it’s not an issue. Cars are a rural technology we bulldozed half the city to makebroom for and then complained about not enough parking and too much traffic
No, but it’s much, much easier to get rid of them in cities where they can be replaced by subways, tramways, buses, bikes, and the like.
All of which make for a way better quality of life than car hell. If people wern’t sitting in unbearable traffic all day complaints about urban living would be far less common
What if you want to leave the city?
When you want to travel to the third world countries that connect the cities of the US you could rent a car, which is necessary because rural areas have apparently forgotten about public transit of any kind. In civilized countries, there’s a solid network of mass transit basically everywhere. It doesn’t matter that you’re in a podunk town, a bus comes by every half hour because it’s a necessity to have a regular bus more than a full one.
Bullshit. There are vast areas of the western US and Alaska where this simply is not economically possible or even desirable. The same is true for huge parts of Canada and Australia and other countries that have very remote and thinly settled regions. Even when I lived in Ireland, which is tiny and relatively densely populated, there were rural communities that only had bus service once or twice a day.
this simply is not economically possible or even desirable.
Life is not economically possible or desirable by capitalism.
Then you take the train. If this is not an available option, you take the car, one of which you either own but barely use when staying within the city, or that you buy (which is the option I chose, it’s a lot cheaper than to own one).
There also should absolutely be trains that connect cities together too, it’s already mostly the case in Europe which is around as big as the US, including high speed trains between major cities, but there is also a lot of regular trains that connect moderately sized towns with their nearby city. This can be both a cheaper and faster alternative to driving a car if you go somewhere you won’t need a car (say, a city with very good public transit). China may be more comparable to the US as it is a single country with a similar size, but the size of their train network grew tremendously over the last twenty years, especially their high speed network. I guess a good start for the US would be to connect the major cities on the East Coast with high speed trains, such as DC, New York, Chicago, and other cities nearby, I can guarantee you there will be demand for that.
In fact, I’m about to take a high speed train from Paris to Lyon. Including the time I’ll have spent in public transit to go to and come back from the train station, it’ll take me three hours total vs four and a half hours by car without stops on traffic jams to travel some 400km (around 250 miles). The tickets cost me 90€ both ways, including the subway and tramway, while the same travel by car would cost me at least that much in not double.
rural life can not be austainable.
move out of city for cheap house etc - than complain about no wifi, no doctors etc - force government to have fiber internet - yadda yadda
people who advocate rural areas are just big egoists and ignorant
You literally cannot grow sufficient food to feed the population of the city within the city. Every city requires massive rural areas for sustenance.
Rural areas have sufficient abundance to both sustain themselves and the cities.
But there’s no jobs in rural areas. That’s why they’re emptying out
Why is “a job” considered so essential to life?
Everything costs money for some reason
When you understand that reason, you’ll understand why it doesn’t need to be so.
can you give me any source for that?
i heard paris is considered a beautiful city. if all humans lived in a city as dense as paris we could all live in an area the size of germany.
growing population says it is impossible to feed the world with conventional farming as this will further reduce nature.
rural areas are whats destroying the planet.
also, were i lived the farmer has an ipad and the machines do all the work. nobody really needs to live there anymore as you can easily check from the number of employees in farming. constant decline. it is bs to think people need to be in thos rural areas but you can wait till it is 100% machine made.
Rural areas provide food and raw materials for the cities. That’s their entire purpose.
If all people lived in a city as dense as Paris, they would all starve: Paris does not have a single farm producing food.
If all people lived in a city as dense as Paris, every manufacturer would be out of business due to lack of raw materials: Paris does not have a single mine.
If rural areas are destroying the planet, it is because the cities are demanding from those areas more than the planet can provide.
the cities
It’s not cities doing that, it’s capitalism.
Socialist cities make the same demands on rural areas that capitalist cities do. It’s primarily a function of population density, not economic model.
At best, a square mile of farmland can feed about 6000 people. That’s under ideal conditions and assuming vegetarians. Want a little meat in your diet, and 2500 is a more realistic number.
A square mile of Chicago contains about 12,000 people. That’s 2 to 4.8 square miles of farmland for every square mile of city. Chicago is about 230 square miles.
A square mile of New York contains about 30,000 people. That’s 5 to 12 sq miles of farmland for every square mile of city. New York is about 300 square miles.
A square mile of Paris contains about 53,000 people. 8.8 to 21.2 sq miles of farmland for every square mile of city. Paris is about 40 square miles.
Lives my ideal life
Ftfy
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