I think we should all just calibrate what kind of project we believe the author to be engaged in from the following quote from a linked post:
> After all, constant sunshine is the weather of the dullard. The lover of hot, lazy days and breezy, cloudless skies fancies himself a lordling — he insists that the earth be his womb-like chamber of easy, saccharine delights. He is the same man who enjoys sugary-sweet sodas, on-the-nose political commentary, prefers his novels to be cheap and gutless, and his women botoxed and spray-tanned.
No very close reading is required, I believe.
I've commented (probably too much) to argue with the harshest critics of this piece, but I am surprised to not have seen much this criticism which is my main one:
Supposing I've made peace with the main gist of this: Cut living expenses to a point where you can work ¼ or so of the time most of us spend working by living somewhere cheap and not being so materialistic.
The missing piece here is social connections. Family and friends. If I could take my in-laws and my 2 best friends and their families with me, I'd sign up to move to a rural place like this tomorrow. But it's impractical for nearly everyone in the whole country to make such a thing happen. This limits its appeal. This place is 90 minutes or so from the Montreal airport, which is actually not bad for rural places, but flights are not cheap, certainly not accessible on the budget described here, so for you to have contact with anyone outside this town, they're likely going to have to drop about $500 per person, per visit, and will be staying at the Super 8 since you probably don't have a guest room). So, implied but not acknowledged in this piece is the assumption that you are almost definitely going to only see your family and friends a few more times (maybe once a year each, if you're super lucky) for the rest of your life.
And unlike questions of money; food, entertainment, family and friends aren't fungible. You can start over and hope to make new friends out there, but you can't replace people. This is what would make this life untenable to me, and I'm not even all that extraverted.
It is quite cheap to build a small prefab guest house. Room for guests is not a concern I think.
Rather, the friction is making them endure the travel time is, I would say .
The problem is that its across an international border from the Montreal airport. So you'd need to cross a border twice to fly to a domestic US destination and twice more on your return. Crossing a border is always an unknown in terms of delays, so I question the practicality. I'd personally feel like I needed to leave way more than 90 minutes to ge to the airport.
FWIW, I've crossed the border at both Cornwall and Ogdensburg when driving to Ottawa, and they were quiet when I crossed. Going from the US side to Canada was fast and easy, but the reverse wasn't true, and that was several years ago when crossing the border was quite a bit less stressful.
Massena, the place in the article, has an airport. An international airport.
Just checked flights from sfo to there, 500 bucks. I don't get how this is different than moving to another state for work.
Massena's airport serves exactly one destination, Boston, and even that is possible only through federal subsidies. It's "international" because they can muster up somebody to stamp your passport if you fly in via general aviation.
also, if you have a social "thing" like tennis or climbing or drugs or whatever thing you like that tends to have an active and welcoming social community that you're willing to engage with, then the social issue can be dampened somewhat
Your social "things" adapt somewhat to the environment. Since moving to rural Vermont, my wife and I have taken up hunting, and she has gotten back into fishing. There's a group of (mostly older) people who get together Wednesday mornings and shoot muzzleloaders and have coffee. I join them when work allows.
As a happy side-effect, it let me get into muzzleloader season with some support from people with a lot of experience. In Vermont, muzzleloader season falls during the damnable month between Thanksgiving and New Year's when the days just keep getting shorter, and there isn't usually enough snow (where we live) for snowshoeing. Having a reason to get out in the woods and be really present and observing nature when I otherwise would have trouble is outstanding for my mental health during that month.
That's not to say there aren't opportunities to climb. A rock gym just opened near-enoughish-by and I have friends who climb outside weekly at a nearby crag.
> if you have a social "thing" like tennis or climbing
Then you wouldn't be able to cut down expenses to "nothing"/month.
Social thing assumes expenses. Hobbies assume expenses.
A tennis racket is $13 at Goodwill and tennis balls are $1.30/ea. In the case of living in Massena, NY like the author you can play at Alcoa Park for $0.00.
As for climbing, you don't need a $200 climbing harness you can tie your own Swiss seat out of rope ($2/ft.) and buy a couple of snap links ($4-10/ea.). I would buy a lower-end harness for $30 though.
Spread out over several seasons that is as close to "nothing" as you can get, and is well within reach of any person with a pulse.
35 years ago I played DnD with a single AD&D 2e player's handbook and DM's guide shared among us all, campaigns and items out of Dungeon Magazine and Dragon Magazine hand-copied from issues at the library, and a player miniature made out of a film roll canister that I used whiteout to paint a design on. Our greatest individual expense was dice and I think those were less than $10 for a set.
Hobbies are only expensive if you let them or want them to be.
Have you ever tried to do those sports with cheapest equipment? Because I did and it ended up the same as everyone else who tried it in a cheapest possible way - you stop because it is not fun nor pleasure and equipment limits you.
That being said, for tenista you need to pay entry. For climbing, you will be kicked out of gym on top of it being uncomfortable. Climbing gym don't want you injured due to badly made seat - it makes other guests feeling bad.
> Hobbies are only expensive if you let them or want them to be.
Climbing gyms aren't cheap. Climbing rocks outdoors is fairly cheap.
Now we’re back to the point where you’ve saved so much money by not carrying health insurance.
Social things are free! You just have to understand that being social is what you pay with.
Just find npc sims friends who like to walk on sidewalks and turn around when they experience interactions with animals.
> Social thing assumes expenses. Hobbies assume expenses.
Entertainment is a line item in the budget: Library + Fishing = “Free”
Libraries can be amazingly social, for eggheads. Lots of groups and events meet there in my town. It’s a full-fledged Third Space.
[Neither the library access nor fishing gear is without cost, but at least they already account for taxes.]
By the way, anyone who benefits from free stuff, for example installing ad blockers, and earns $17/hr, should seriously consider tithing 5–10% to tax-deductible donations. It’s a matter of economic justice.
Libraries are highly dependent on the town you're in. Ours is open six (6) hours a week. The one in. The town we were renting in before we bought was open reasonable hours and the librarians were great.
Fishing licenses aren't actually free but at least they're cheap
wait... drugs? I don't get it. the dark net is a thing. or do you mean doing them with other people?
A very social activity if done right
Indeed, though you could probably do pretty well by getting a NEXUS membership for this use case. At least for now, though obviously US-Canada relations are getting stupider by the week so who knows how many dumb roadblocks will end up being thrown up.
I just noticed that Syracuse has an airport with passenger service, only 2 ½ hours away, so that's another option, if the "international flight" hassle plus border crossing actually burns an hour.
Begrudgingly, neither the Ogdensburg nor Massena crossings support NEXUS. Closest ones with lanes are up in Plattsburgh or Alexandria Bay, and to get a NEXUS interview you have to travel the 2 or so hours to central NY.
OGS-IAD flights are great though.
Oddly enough, I always spend more time crossing into Canada than the US at Ogdensburg, even though I’m a Canadian citizen and travelling on a Canadian passport. Had my car searched last time. As always, your mileage may vary.
Same crossing, different experience: American citizen (with NY Enhanced Drivers License), Canadian First Nations (with Secure Certificate of Indian Status). They look at my native card and just wave me through.
The single time I got pulled in to go pay tax on a gift for someone ($150 USD) they looked at my card and went "I'm not dealing with the tax paperwork on that (due to some native exemptions)" and waved me back out.
As for local air travel: you'd have to go 30 minutes from Massena anyways for 'proper' air travel - Ogdensburg now has once-a-day service to DC via Breeze. Traveling to Shmoocon was hilarious for only $30 roundtrip.
As an introvert, I believe I could live in a remote location without problem. I often wish I could switch off my hearing to just enjoy silence, and dream of getting a chance to spend time in an isolation chamber.
That said, I don’t know if I’d want to live in a depressing small town, unless it had a good diner.
Rural NY isn't just for introverts. Most people are social and are somewhat active. Like most areas, an outsider will probably feel like an outsider, but if one allows themselves to be curious about the things people are into doing, I think it would be fine for typically social people.
One who sneers at rural people and habits will probably not get along. And if you take too much offense at rural people sneering about urban things, likewise.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of racism in upstate NY. I do know rural NY black people, and they do fine, but I'm not sure they appreciate the way insults are thrown about "present company excluded". It's those attitudes that kept me from wanting to stay.
> Unfortunately, there is a lot of racism in upstate NY. I do know rural NY black people, and they do fine, but I'm not sure they appreciate the way insults are thrown about "present company excluded". It's those attitudes that kept me from wanting to stay.
This is so heartbreaking.
I live in a suburban area, and have friends and neighbors from around the world -- Trinidad, Sri Lanka, Korea, Canada, and I _love_ that aspect of where I live. As I get older, I don't like the din of lawnmowers and leaf blowers. Many of my neighbors have lawn services, and the ZTRs and backpack leaf blowers are even louder than what your average joe would have to do the same job.
On top of that, since there is land by me, the local government's zoning board has approved of more and more warehouses. As such, semi truck traffic has increased significantly, and somehow they all seem to have unmuffled straight pipe exhausts. I've contacted my representatives, but none of them seem to care. The state rep passes it off to the district rep, who passes it off to the township, who passes it back off to the state. The only winning move is to leave.
The point of my tangent here, is that a place like rural NY seems idyllic to escape the noise. Anecdotes like yours, though, steer me away. I understand that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy in that regard.
Yeah, it will hopefully improve with more exposure. Even suburban NY was highly racist in the 80s, maybe by the 2040s with more diversity it will be better in rural NY. But one thing I noticed as a young man road tripping through the South in the 90s was that the racism was a different species from Northern racism. In Birmingham, AL, I found people relating to each other like normal people. Birmingham, where they used water cannon and dogs against marchers and blew up a church in the 60s. In rural Ohio, a black friend of mine walked into a breakfast restaurant with me and had dozens of pairs of eyes staring at him like he had just announced he's robbing the place. It wasn't until I learned the history of sundown towns that I understood the racism of the North and its place in Segregated America.
With the direction things seem to be going, I'm not as confident about your 2040 hopes.
On a return trip from Florida we booked a room in Florence, SC for the night. Everybody was staring at me, but I was exhausted and figured that it was just in my head. We ate breakfast there the next morning and that's when I realized that we were the only white people there. About 50% of the population of Florence is black.
It was an interesting experience, and it gave me the opportunity to understand a fraction of how it would feel if the roles were reversed. And this was with friendly people with no malicious intent or fear!
If you get a sense of relief from silence, I recommend Peltor ear defenders. The more expensive/better ones.
Seriously. I don't wear them a lot, but when I do the lack of stimulation is instantly relaxing.
Only downside is you can't sleep in them.
I sometimes sleep with them, especially while traveling. Paper thin walls? Hostels? Not a problem. It takes some getting used to.
the winters up there would be brutal if you're not used to them. It's not just the cold, its the prolonged absence of the sun due to short days and cloud cover.
Seems like that low bar you should be able to meet somewhere?
The network effects/moats of places! There needs to be a Kickstarter for coordinating groups of people to move to the same place all at the same time.
Then the value of the place would go up fast.
This is one way gentrification happens.
That seems to be pretty good for the group of newcomers! They all buy together at lowish prices, then prices go up enough that they ~make their money back on housing appreciation. And it's not bad for existing homeowners either, since they get the appreciation too.
> And it's not bad for existing homeowners either, since they get the appreciation too.
Assuming everyone is only out after appreciating house prices. While the locals who lived there before you might like that the house gains in value, depending on how large the group is and what the culture is, they might not like it at all. There is a reason some rural people continue living in rural areas, and bringing parts of the city to them might not be ideal for those people.
Or you could just invest the difference in your stock portfolio and institute a land value tax instead. Stock are more a lot more liquid than real estate and less risky as well. Whereas the value of a home is pretty much stuck in the property until you convert it to liquid cash by selling it, but then you need to move elsewhere.
Indeed you could either go through the arduous task of convincing your friends to move somewhere with you or just get enough political support for a land value tax instead. No brainer to go for the tax. Way easier to achieve.
Ah, path dependence.
Is someone Penny pinching $400/month really going to have the funds necessary to flip housing?
I'm sure there's a way to have more than 20 but less than 2000 people move to the same general area.
Also if your primary goal is a cheap lifestyle, you're much less likely to gentrify anything.
Organized gentrification. Nice
Seems like you could call it Cultstarter
The Free State Project[1] had 20k libertarians pledge to move to New Hampshire, talking 15 years to reach the total number.
This has turned out to be a really interesting failure. To point out just one aspect, back in the 1970s there were hints that New Hampshire was leaning toward legalization of cannabis. Libertarian party meetups often focused on legalization of cannabis. This trend seemed to be solid and strongly linked to Libertarian influence in the state.
Then the Free State Project happened and the intense liberty seeking of the Libertarian party kept everyone occupied with arguments about bears and taxation. Meanwhile the rest of New England legalized cannabis while New Hampshire remained in a strange state of suspension. The influence of Libertarians has been so chaotic and unpredictable that what was considered the most likely result of Libertarian influence now seems completely out of reach.
This powerfully demonstrates how seemingly minor or irrelevant factors like political networks, tone, and tempo can end up being as important as core political issues and their direct consequences. Metaphors like piloting the ship of state through stormy waters take on additional meaning in this context.
Forget cannabis. I always found it hilarious that NH is supposedly libertarian but bans privately run businesses from selling bottles of alcohol.
Only to fail to address the problem of bears because it requires the kind of public action that libertarians rejects for religious reasons.
A libertarian solving a problem is like me performing brain surgery.
They ain't got no clue, and will almost certainly make things worse.
It was pretty easy for me. We got enough friends to move to one neighborhood of SF. Once you get a few, the numbers start going up and the gravity of the network draws more.
that's what pieter levels did in portugal
Good luck getting people to agree not to compete for the best cheap houses.
doesn't seems to be a problem currently.
Professionals move from city to city all the time due to jobs. In the modern world it's easier to keep in touch with family and friends with Internet and cheap (by historical standards) flights.
I have 3 close friends - they live about an hour away, about 8 hours drive away (or about an hour of flying + 1-2 hours driving), and one on the other side of the country.
"Keeping in touch via Internet" for me is a pale imitation of what I want from a friendship. We text a few times a week. I visit each of them 1-2 times a year. I miss them a lot.
This isn't to claim it's impossible to do better. But I have a feeling that especially those on the "urban" side of the friendship just have a hard time making time for say, a Zoom call with you on the same frequency as they may have gone out with you for dinner or drinks. Especially group dynamics don't allow this: If you were part of a group of 5 friends that hung out together, they'll just start hanging out without you, and no time will be opening up in all of their schedules to devote to tele-friendship. Those friendships will suffer.
And remember, the "low cost of living, low earning" thesis we're discussing does mostly rule out even those "cheap" flights (which stop being cheap really quick once you have a family, so multiply all prices by 2, 3, 4...)
Americans have been moving less and less, and that trend hasn't reverted.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/03/united-states...
That's using a mighty broad brush to paint folks' circumstantial situations.
A small set of professionals do, yes. A lot more stay near family and friends instead.
This is an example of a place. There are likely many such places all over the USA within a few hours drive of where your friends and family live.
So now you have to have a car? So yes this post is still unrealistic
Having a reliable car can be cheap, it just requires skipping more modern convenience features and being willing to work on it yourself.
yea you either need to see people very rarely, see them often by spending a lot of time and money traveling, or see them often by spending multiple days away (which again, how are you paying for this? and what's the point of buying a house far away if you won't be there half the time?)
Rural living also looks cheaper because most people do not even remotely consider the costs of transportation.
The IRS estimates per-mile deduction at well over 60 cents per mile. If you have to drive 15 miles to the grocery store and back, your grocery bill goes up $18/trip. If you need to drive 15 miles to work and back, take $90/week out of your paycheck.
Then there's the fact that whoever is The Employer in that region - if you lose your job there, you're fucked. So The Employer gets to abuse every rule in th book because who's going to complain and risk losing their job? If The Employer decideds to drop everyone's pay by 25 cents/hour, what are you all going to do? Answer: nothing.
Meanwhile in the city you can go anywhere you want within a 500 square mile area (or more) for well under $100/month and commuter rail will take you even further for not a lot more. And you can do other things while using said transportation. No "self driving car" needed.
As a sidenote: the same author complains about the "loss of the $50 motel room" and laments they're 3x more expensive now. Days after complaining that housing isn't actually that expensive. The guy has to be a troll...
Oh, and also not factored in: almost every aspect of rural life is heavily subsidized, and I don't just mean direct assistance. I mean literally everything you stare at when you roll through a rural town was subsidized in some way by the federal government, and most of them either don't know or will never admit it.
For fucks sakes the government actually runs a program to subsidize rural Americans getting to fly around on barely-occupied turboprop planes. But heaven forbid a city get some federal funding for electric or hybrid transit busses that will serve several thousand people a day.
Exactly, as someone who moved to a rural area (in Chile) a year ago, I can say that you basically pay a shipping tax on everything you need, starting with construction materials themselves.
It's basically that ancap meme of building your own infrastructure: water, electricity, access roads, clearing the vegetation that constantly tries to reclaim your property. I've never owned so many things in my life until I moved here, many of them just to be able to tend the wilderness around me.
But shoveling and cutting things has been an eye-opening experience in terms of how many processes the high-energy urban civilization hides from us. Even with steel/power tools, it’s brutal out there.
I also noticed the author's budget did not include health insurance.
I also wonder how close it is to the nearest hospital or urgent care.
I live in a pretty rural area. We have a hospital and urgent care 12 minutes away, though for anything that isn't immediately life threatening I'd be driving an hour for much better hospital care in a larger city.
Hello stranger! No need for a throwaway account for such an insightful comment. I thought exactly the same when I read the article.
Yeah, it is a bullshit/clickbait article. No healthcare? Yeah, let's see how long his wife will put up with that. And, literally, there is zero cost for heat. Do you know how cold that place is in the winter? Here is what he wrote:
> 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.
Still: This person should setup a YouTube channel to document their life. It would be like the boring/suffering version of people who sail around the world on a yacht.
To be fair, at $0.04/kWh, even at very low outdoor temperature, a heat pump at COP only a little bit above 1 or even an electric resistance heater is not very expensive to operate. If you have anything resembling decent insulation and you heat only a small space, heat can be very inexpensive. Even in an old, uninsulated, drafty house, you can fudge it cheaply with window insulating film and by hanging fabric on the walls. (Those cheap cut-to-size cellular window shades sold at many home improvement stores also have excellent thermal performance.)
It gets tricky if you want a civilized humidity level, though. You need to control leakage to achieve decent humidity and you need to control condensation to avoid damaging the window trim or other parts of the structure and to avoid growing mold.
I don't know about America. But for me here in Switzerland additional transportation cost is actually cheaper in a rural area than parking costs in any city. A standard parking space about 100$ a month (not including going anywhere and park there, which is also es expensive closer to the city).
Every round trip ads maybe $5 right now. We don't have to drive to the city every second day.
> Oh, and also not factored in: almost every aspect of rural life is heavily subsidized, and I don't just mean direct assistance.
Couldn't you say the same for cities since they live on food produced outside of cities, energy from the Gulf and products imported from China?
It doesn't matter where the thing comes from, it matters who's paying for it.
You can drive for a lot less than $0.60c/mi. At $0.04/kWh, evergy to propel an EV costs 1-2 cents per mile. If you buy a $35k car and drive it 200k miles while spending very little on maintenance (tires might be the major expense), add maybe $0.20/mi, for a total of $0.21/mi or so. Insurance isn’t all that expensive and doesn’t vary that much with mileage. If you buy a BYD car (oh wait, not in the US), it’s even cheaper.
Wait wait, how much does fuel cost that a 50km trip is $18? Even my diesel car does that for 4 €.
The IRS is also presumably factoring in increased wear and tear on the vehicle and increased insurance costs.
The last time I did the maths on that fuel was half the cost of running our car.
The IRS reimbursement rate includes maintenance and depreciation along with fuel and insurance costs. I get back around $500 a month at $0.75 a mile for expensing my work-related mileage.
About the bit regarding funding:
It’s because rural voters are both active and reliable regardless of their party affiliation, they get out the vote. This in turn for the fact that many rural counties account for a great many house seats and can swing senate elections, they have more power than numbers suggest.
If urban voters were as persistent and consistent as rural ones they could easily flip the narrative, but in my experience (and by looking at a lot of election statistics) a huge chunk of apathetic eligible to vote voters live in urban areas, so you don’t have the same en masse consistency and persistence
>The IRS estimates per-mile deduction at well over 60 cents per mile.
I think you are manipulating and substituting concepts, and these calculations of the cost of the trip include expensive cars of highly paid city workers. And if you recalculate the cost of the trip taking into account cars that are used outside the city, then the amount will be several times lower. Probably 5 or more times lower if people are interested in the maximum reduction in the cost of travel.
>almost every aspect of rural life is heavily subsidized
I don't know, show me the data. Maybe the city guys are just saying that it's all subsidized, while they themselves are completely stealing all the allocated funds, taking advantage of the lack of control. I recently watched a program about how government-funded projects were costing 10 or 20 times more. So, without credible evidence to the contrary, let's assume that what we see around us in rural areas has roughly zero subsidies, and all allocated funds have been completely appropriated by contractors.
>But heaven forbid a city get some federal funding for electric or hybrid transit busses that will serve several thousand people a day.
This is blatant hypocrisy. We have already sorted out how rural areas are "subsidized". And under these conditions, we are asking rural residents to pay for the transport of pompous urban asses? If this transport really moves so many thousands people as you said, why don't these city people pay for it themselves from their huge city salaries? Why do you want to put your fat fingers in the pockets of the rural guys?
Nobody is using the public transport anymore as they've become moving toilets and drugs dens.
> drive 15 miles to the grocery store and back,
Okay, but you're inventing a strawman there, since there are millions of places to live that are far closer than 15 miles away from basic services. The outskirts of Massena for instance, are about 2 miles from Walmart.
> whoever is The Employer in that region - if you lose your job there, you're fucked
The article is specifically about how with a low cost of living you don't even need full time work. It's not about moving to a company town to work a 9-5 at a factory.
> a city get some federal funding for electric or hybrid transit busses that will serve several thousand people a day
I mean, they most definitely do get that federal funding -- this fiscal year there is $1.5 billion available. Here's[0] last fiscal year's winners. But I assume the meaning of your comment is that it bothers you that someone somewhere complained about that fact? I doubt it's the rural folks complaining, probably car drivers in the city complaining that the money didn't all go to fixing the potholes, the same cranks who complain about bike lanes, etc.
It is interesting how this proposal that people even just consider rural living as a thought experiment seems to have triggered a lot of people. If you love the city yet simultaneously think it's too expensive, other people opening their minds to living somewhere else is good for you. It doesn't have to be for you for it to be an okay idea.
[0] https://www.transit.dot.gov/funding/grants/fy24-fta-bus-and-...
To be fair, leaving everyone behind and not seeing them again was kind of what people did in the great grandfather era mentioned in the article. Even not that long ago. I was talking to someone only perhaps grandma age the other day who said their brother's family moved to BC and they didn't see them for 25 years.
Your comment does focus in on the interesting point in that connected places have perhaps not scaled as well. Or perhaps there is some pareto front of locations on cost vs connectedness we need to imagine in our heads. Very interesting.
> what people did in the great grandfather era
Unfortunately the appeal to ancestry fallacy is always a terrible idea.
You see this in the nutrition space where “influencers” go on and on about how our ancestors ate, forgetting that our ancestors died extremely early relative to modern humans.
Similarly, our grandparents lived pretty terrible lives in many ways.
The reason to complain about the high cost of living is that the U.S. has an incredibly high GDP and yet Americans live highly precarious lives, not that in certain very specific ways our ancestors had it slightly better, which as you point out leads to all sorts of issues.
> forgetting that our ancestors died extremely early relative to modern humans.
While it's true that average life expectancy has increased, it's not really accurate to say that "our ancestors died extremely early". See "Did Ancient People Die Young?" at https://www.sapiens.org/biology/human-lifespan-history/ :
> Mortality rates in traditional populations are high during infancy, before decreasing sharply to remain constant till about 40 years, then mortality rises to peak at about 70. Most individuals remain healthy and vigorous right through their 60s or beyond, until senescence sets in, which is the physical decline where if one cause fails to kill, another will soon strike the mortal blow.
> Similarly, our grandparents lived pretty terrible lives in many ways.
Our ancestors also had more children, less rates of depression and mental illness and the modern rates of socialization, marriage, etc are all in steep decline.
Therefore maybe the cardboard box apartment, transient friends, and access to all that nightlife isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. While we’re a lot richer and more well off it doesn’t seem like people are happier.
> our ancestors died extremely early relative to modern humans
As others pointed out these claims are often skewed by high childhood mortality rates.
Beyond that, though, I'm curious why you consider the number of years lived to be a primary concern?
I'd rather live 50 good years than 80 miserable ones. I'd also rather live to 65 than make it to 80 with the last 30-40 years spent increasingly propped up with medications, doctors appointments, and invasive treatments.
Cost of living is always a somewhat distorted metric because it ignores tradeoffs. If I was living on ~500$/month in that area I’d spend way more on technology and far less on food.
Starlink and a local grocery store means the vast majority of the US is able to support a lifestyle most of humanity could only dream of until fairly recently without actually being that expensive. Year round bananas for dollars per pound is a fucking miracle of logistics.
Not that long ago one of my coworkers was effectively living in minimum wage in a major US city and tossing everything else into savings. Excessive number of roommates, no car, cooking simple vegetarian meals at home etc. At the other end if he had a major medical condition, drug addiction, etc he’d have been “fucked,” except for the fact modern medicine simply wasn’t available at any price again until recently so should we assume it’s normal.
> Similarly, our grandparents lived pretty terrible lives in many ways.
That's entirely subjective. My grandparents are no longer alive but I'm confident they would find many aspects of the average life today to be terrible.
>our ancestors died extremely early
No they didn't, stop using averages.
https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortalit...
Childhood mortality is only one factor, and I think at this point we're all aware that the "life expectancy was 40 years" statistic has a huge asterisk next to it. But yes, our ancestors really did die much, much younger than us.
You're still focusing on averages, which is the error inherent in the myth.
While it's true that average life expectancy has increased, the point is that it was absolutely routine for people to live into their 60s, and not uncommon for them to live into their 70s or 80s.
See e.g. https://www.sapiens.org/biology/human-lifespan-history/
> Childhood mortality is only one factor, and I think at this point we're all aware that the "life expectancy was 40 years" statistic has a huge asterisk next to it.
No, people who say that they “died extremely early relative to modern humans” mean the bunk dying at 40 due to old age myth. Not dying at 65 rather than 80.
Your link seems to show graphs going up but not why.[1] The medical breakthroughs have been, like first of discovering hygiene, vaccines and antibiotics. Which does exactly nothing to debunk what the OP[2] called “appeal to ancestry fallacy”. That we know medicine now (like hygiene, antiobitics) do not discredit claims like, you should eat like a hunter-gatherer or something like that.
[1] This seems typical of “data” outlets.
When I look at some of my favourite writers, philosophers, and scientists from past eras quite a few of them died in their 60s and 70s. Medicine and nutrition was poorly understood for that time. What they had in common was wealth and professions that wasn’t backbreaking labor. Child mortality was high and that is what really drags the average age down.
Our marginal increase in understanding of nutrition has had no detectible benefit in terms of population health or lifespan. People in past eras pretty much knew what to eat. Mostly the problem was that poor people simply couldn't afford enough high quality food.
It was not just child mortality. It was adults dying from diseases and infectiona we don't die of anymore too.
And smoking. Everybody in my parents' generation smoked and most of them died young.
And drinking. And drinking while engaged in physical activities with potential for injury.
This is very true, that is definitely a sacrifice that they were much more willing to make than most of us today.
They would move 1,000 miles or more, or even across the sea and then send back and forth letters every few months. "Alice had a baby, she named him Robert Joseph. I have secured work at the textile mill, and am saving to buy a plot of land. The weather here is cold in winter, but the summers are somewhat more tolerable."
The interesting thing is, I feel like they moved back then mainly because there wasn't sufficient land or jobs where they came from. Today, the urban dwellers this article is talking about has an equal dearth of land and jobs available to them in the city, but they don't feel like the countryside has anything to offer them either.
Most people stayed with the family.
Any discussion of staying near family and friends on a forum predominated by startups out of the bay area is completely disingenuous.
But that aside, I suggest this is front page and meaningful not because it brings up a third option (to stay home, move to a city, or move to rural NY), but instead because it advocates accidentally for just staying home. Your family probably already lives in an area that is more affordable than SF/NYC/Paris, and they are there waiting. It's entertaining as an extreme data point but motivating for other reasons
This article is most interesting to me because I tried moving to the big city to be a big shot techie, and have been substantially happier living outside a major city in Minnesota.
Absolutely nobody that I knew in those cities lived near their family, absolutely all of them moved away to chase fortune and fame.
Not everyone has a home to go to. Broken families, dead families, there may no longer be room at a home, etc. Everyone's circumstances are different.
And honestly, based on some cultures, home isn't free either. The moment I got back home, I was given a few months to find work, but had to pay rent in 3 months no matter what. I was doing temp work for one month while interviews finished
Of course you are right, not everyone has the option to move back in either their parents, and of course that option (when available) is often not rent free (nor should it be.)
However I don't think that's what the parent poster meant. I think he meant "home" is the "home town" sense.
There's a perception that young people (for probably 60 years now) see "getting out of this town" as a major life goal. Small towns find it hard to hold on to folk in their 20s as they head off into the world seeking the excitement of a bigger city, industry location, or indeed just the option of choosing from a list of more than 2 places to eat.
The parent poster is suggesting that after experiencing that, and discovering the negatives (high housing cost being one), if you have a job which can be done remotely, then Starlink allows you to do that from your home town.
Of course this is a viable option for some, and likely not for most.
>There's a perception that young people (for probably 60 years now) see "getting out of this town" as a major life goal.
It sort of is. Opportunities in the small towns is limited compared to urban areas. As well as other social aspects like night life, entertainment, the culture of the residents, etc. The people argument of being irreplaceable works both ways; you're simply going to get more options when you're around more people.
> if you have a job which can be done remotely, then Starlink allows you to do that from your home town.
Perhaps. Both Starlink and jobs in general really don't want us to have such options, as seen in the last few years of layoffs and crashouts. Add in the cable monopolies and you see how WFH really isn't stable right now without a good connection.
Does anyone actually like nightlife though? Same for local entertainments, sure they're a nice extra sometimes but nothing worth sacrificing for.
It's all some variation of "crowded into a dark room with hundreds of strangers with deafening music, can't see anything, can't hear anything".
"nobody wants to go there anymore, it's too crowded"
There are many parents who allow their kids to live rent free. First job can then DCA the near entire salary and what you save early on compounds like crazy for life.
Parents telling kids in this world to "go work 24/7 on the treadmill without being able to save" should wonder if having kids wasn't something selfish they did like having a pet.
I was always welcome at my mother's home and she told me there would always be shelter and food for me, whenever I'd come.
The selfish people who kick their kids out of their home at 18 y/o are people best let out of my life.
If a kid is working, I see no reason why parents shouldn't let them
>Parents telling kids in this world to "go work 24/7 on the treadmill without being able to save" should wonder if having kids wasn't something selfish they did like having a pet.
Like I said, it's cultural. Some parents literally need extra income just to keep the roof over their heads, and having an adult dependent at home is still an expense. . Some parents simply don't want to facilitate a full on NEET lifestyle and want to encourage a proper work ethic.
I agree that a kid won't just figure everything out the moment they turn 18, but I can empathize with a child also needed to leave their nest one day. Uniersity was the perfect environment for that transition, but we decided to cut funding for decades and move the costs to the 18YO's with no financial sense. A "party school" just doesn't make sense anymmore so if we don't treat it as a vocational school, you may as well have saved money and let them be a NEET for 4 years.
I've no objection to my kids living at home, and there'll always be a place for them here.
I charge them rent though - 33% of their gross pay. Not cause I need the money but because it allows them to afford to move out one day. In other words their lifestyle has "rent" built into it.
In other words I'm happy to offer a backstop. I'm less happy for them to simply ignore "becoming self sufficient adults" just because it's cheaper to live at home.
How about the "rent" going into a savings pot which they can use for a downpayment or otherwise reclaim (maybe partially) when they move out?
Good point. IME it is quite common all over the world for grownups to chip in towards family expense if they are staying more than a few weeks back home. If not cash it could be some other way.
I am substantially happier that I moved into the big city because I built social connections and I don't want to live with my parents anymore. Driving down there is insane and I wish there was decent transportation option.
I can use electric scooter to move around most days. It's a lot more fun than driving my car.
Really, what these places really need is major policy reform to make them more livable. There's a reason why these places are where people want to live after all.
To help make this happen, I donate to two non-profit that works to improve transportation and housing accessibility respectively.
Try to use scooter to drive the kids to school at freezing temperatures.
> I donate to two non-profit that works to improve transportation and housing accessibility respectively.
Most of those are just leeches or just straight political agendas or tools for foreign power disruption. You can't improve city civil planning outside of city system. At best you can beg, bribe officials.
You seem young and naive.
Wow! Name-calling. Baseless accusations. Whataboutism. You're really going for it, huh?
> donate to two non-profit that works to improve transportation
Unless those nonprofits work with local government to improve transportation, you're donating to scammers
Yes, if you plan to have kids having parents or other family near is a big help. Big cities are fine when you are 18-25 and want to have fun. Near 30 and older you are just tired by the noise and other people being around ;)
Eh, perhaps a curious administrator can share the data but I really suspect just through sheer numbers most people on this forum do not live in the bay area.
The NYC metro area is 23 million [1] which is about 7% of the country (23/300). There's a good chance somebody who works in NYC grew up nearby.
That said, if you chase fortune and fame for a decade and then retire to Minnesota you still come out ahead... Even if rent is twice as expensive in SF, if your salary is twice that then your savings are also twice as much which will go a longer way anywhere but SF.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
A lot of people in this forum don't even live in the US (if not most).
People aren’t simply moving into the city locally the numbers just don’t work.
The demographics of NYC require and support the idea of a huge and constant flux of people from distant areas moving into and out of the city which matches people’s observations. Even the gender divide is abnormal, the largest age group is 25-29 for women and 30-34 for men despite more men being born vs women living longer.
The metro area, not the city. That extends into New Jersey and Connecticut.
I’m saying the “local metro area” just doesn’t have the population to support that kind of migration pattern on its own.
Sure plenty of locals move into the city just as with any city, what sets NYC apart is it draws in people from much longer distances before most of them leave. The elderly population in NYC being relatively tiny.
>> if you chase fortune and fame for a decade and then retire to Minnesota you still come out ahead
And the locals start to hate you for buying up land and generally raising prices enough that working folk are squeezed out of the market. Some areas are starting to enact laws to prevent productive farmland becoming condos and hobby farms for retiring city people.
Not in MN. Nobody is moving here to retire. And there’s plenty of rural land to go around.
The land is part of the equation, but more so the impact on government services. More retirees is more burden on local healthcare and emergency response. They may contribute to the local tax base, but the turnaround between increased population and new hospitals/firehalls is often measured in decades. Have a look at how long it takes to get a new firetruck these days, let alone the people to run it.
Yeah, Minnesota is awesome, particularly near the Twin Cities.
"Disingenuous" is a bridge too far (and worth mentioning because it impugns intent.) It's easy to get drawn to the cities with friends and high pay, then feel like path dependency precludes one from returning to the lower COL hometown. You tell your story in the third and fourth paragraphs because you find it worthy of mention.
You're right, bad word choice.
But yeah, this lifestyle is mostly madness. I watched others stay at home and they have decades of memories, families, and paid off houses. Grass is greener.
A real issue until recently, with remote work as an option, was the lack of opportunity to pursue more intellectual forms of work in a small rural area. I grew up raising cattle and a number of my extended family members were loggers. However, I had an aptitude for science and math and was bitten by the programming bug when I was a teenager. I didn't leave my rural community for fame and fortune but for work that was more interesting to me.
That said, now that I'm near the end of my career I've taken full advantage of remote work by moving to a rural area while maintaining similar pay. Honestly I don't know why more people haven't taken advantage of this significant arbitrage opportunity. To each his own.
I was born in the suburbs, of a moderately large city (think low millions) and have lived here all my life. We often spend weekends out in the countryside in the quiet rural towns.
These towns are somewhat popular with retirees, rural and quiet enough but within 2 to 3 hours of the city, international Airport, and so on.
Getting closer to my own retirement, discussions about "where" have occurred.
Thing is, I actively don't want to retire there. Frankly because there's nothing to do.
As I'm slowly gaining more free time, I want to learn new things (music, ceramics, etc) go out more, play more golf etc. Small towns with their small shops are lovely to unwind in, but personally, not for me full-time.
So yeah, to each his own. Which is great, we are all different, with different circumstances, different opportunities, different goals.
And yes, high speed internet removes a huge part of "have to leave" (or at least adds a big part of "can come back") to the equation. Plus remote work can pump significant revenue into a small-town economy.
This!
Ans it's also why there are homeless people un big cities when from a material point of view they could be living a half-decent life in a rural place instead.
Humans are social animals, and most of our behavior are shaped by this characteristic, even if some people don't seem to realize that.
That's the other unspoken side of the boomer-emulation argument, too. People's access to the world when boomers were buying houses and raising families was much less. Their families and friends were already close because few, if any, of them left where they were from (except to get drafted into wars). In some of those who left, they did so to enable the rest to follow.
These things just don't happen anymore. To find better work (especially outside of tech), people move, some constantly. Siblings wind up across the country or further from each other and where they grew up. Elders are either left behind or move into retirement homes.
There are exceptions, and those who keep some of that support network find the real boomer superpowers of sharing costs (financial, time, and labor alike) and inheriting wealth. But the ease with which people could leave home for good is one of many factors that make emulating boomers difficult, if not impossible: that rural cheap house isn't 10 minutes from the rest of your family, your childhood friends, and your co-workers anymore.
> Their families and friends were already close because few, if any, of them left where they were from (except to get drafted into wars)
Your original text, edited for sequence and clarity while preserving your voice:
This doesn’t apply to the U.S. or Canada, nor has it ever since their foundings, possibly excepting some natives. The American frontier was declared closed by 1890, long before the post-WW2 population surge to California. Before that, New Englanders left farmland to settle the Midwest. Later came the Great Migration of mostly Black Southerners to northern cities. Anglophone North America has never been a peasant society where families remained rooted for generations.
>> peasant society where families remained rooted for generations.
I'd hazard that a few parts of Appalachia remained relative stable, and poor, across more than a couple generations.
>> The missing piece here is social connections. Family and friends
Silicon Valley is not populated by people who are there for family and friends. Silicon Valley is populated by people who left their family and friends to go participate in a gold rush.
Silicon Valley is populated by people from other continents who came to participate in the gold rush, family and friends be damned.
I really don't understand the antipathy towards the fact that you can live on $432 a month in America. I just really don't. With some tradeoffs, you can live on $432 a month in America, and this fact makes some Hacker News commentators very very angry.
So I think some of us have done it out of having no other choice and found it lacking.
From the time I had to live a year going to paycheck advance every month because of an unexpected auto repair bill (leaving that cheap typically requires a used beat up car).
Or the time I woke up with an excruciating pain in my side and went to ER which resulted in bills that lead to years of payments.
People do this experiment every day in the USA and the experience is pretty bad.
EDIT I’ll grant this is all a fine trade off for some people. But having lived it, I can definitely say no thank you.
I am not angry. I am barely cementator here even. But I find this article radicoulous. For example author mentioned raising family at the beginning. And then mentions no car. How are you suppose to transport kids to school/preschool? 'You can take the bus' - yeah, drive with the bus to one place (kindergarten), then the second (school), then the third (job). In the winter, rain, storm or heat. Yes that is doable but would be very annoying and time consuming. No mention to hearing kids complaining that they want to eat/drink/poop at the bus or bus stop.
And if you and you spouse have jobs and kids you probably need two cars, and school is another cost so I would say 400$ is pure fantasy unless you want to live insolitude, fishing in forest.
Normal people need near school/preschool/highschool/job/store etc. And this is why you have cities. It is cheaper for society to concentrate population around those buildings.
What you described is what my parents have done with me. They took me to the kindergarden, on foot. But then again, I live in Europe and it is dense enough here, the kindergarden was about 3-5 km away. You can definitely take the bus, which many people do around here.
The article is about the US and in most places they can't do that.
On one hand I agree with the general premise of the article, which is that you can live a lot cheaper than you choose to. Homes in the passably-cute downtown of Massena are under $100k; you could live on $40k/yr comfortably and if you're here on HN you can probably earn at least than that with a remote job. Cutting it to $5k/yr is just trying to prove something.
The missing thing is health care. If you're young and immortal and willing to take risks, sure. This attitude won't last into middle age. My wife had cancer, and without health insurance I'd be a single parent right now. Maybe you can lean on public assistance like Medicaid (if it continues to exist), but this isn't really a scalable solution for "we can all live cheaper". It only works if enough people stay in the rat race to pay for it.
"Cheap" health insurance for a youngish small family is >$1000/mo. That really isn't optional in the US.
That's insane, my dad had cancer 3 years ago, and here in Spain we didn't even think about it (beyond of course the terrible situation). If you also want private insurance it will cost a youngish small family (like mine) 150EUR/month.
If your income is $5k/yr you are on medicaid in NY.
I looked through those numbers, and immediately thought to myself - hope you don't need to see a doctor for anything serious, or go to a dentist for that mater.
FWIW, I grew up in rural nowhere (population 150, nearest town 45 miles away) - and I honestly don't know how anyone can live out in the boonies without a car. Taking the bus that goes 3 times a day is one thing, needing to move stuff is another thing. I mean, obviously there are plenty of people that do manage - but sooner or later you'll become completely dependent on others for certain types of transportation.
Also, there's clothes, house maintenance, and lots of other things.
> hope you don't need to see a doctor for anything serious, or go to a dentist for that mater.
That's the first thing I thought about.
His budget of $432/mo doesn't include health insurance. But $5K/y probably gets him Medicaid eligibility. Let's assume he's on Medicaid, then. In NY state, that covers quite a lot of dental care, if you believe this: https://www.health.ny.gov/health_care/medicaid/program/denta... Not saying it's a good option, but it's there.
> Taking the bus that goes 3 times a day is one thing, needing to move stuff is another thing.
What kind of things do you think he might be moving? He probably has just about no possessions with that budget (and a 600 sq ft house). In a pinch, perhaps he can rent a truck from Home Depot. Apparently, there is a Home Depot in Massena, NY, so maybe it's not quite so far out in the boonies as it seems.
Personally, I wouldn't do it - the lack of choice would get very unpleasant very fast. But it could work for some.
Yep, it could work for some. And I think that's his point. Depending on how much meatspace socializing / culture one wants/needs. Library internet, meh ... but working 3 more hours at Stewart's would take care of that ... and access to a hyuge amount of entertainment, news, online spaces. Readers, writers, painters, DIYers. At $0.04 per kWh, keeping a small room warm in the winter is trivial ... could be worse!
> but working 3 more hours at Stewart's
And working 5 more hours would get him a some better garden tools, and 20 more he could support a family of 3 And if he just got a higher paying job, he could even get a car!
(This was obviously a image of the slippery-slope most of us fall into)
>> But $5K/y probably gets him Medicaid eligibility. Let's assume he's on Medicaid, then.
If he is on medicaid then he isn't "living" on 432/month. That would be living on 432/month PLUS whatever medicaid is worth, likely well north of another 500/month.
Then the kids need schooling, either in-person or remote. that is another 10k/year/kid. And you need some sort of local police/justice system to ensure nobody boots you off your homestead. But even once you account for all those local costs, there are things like national security. Living a peaceful life on a remote farm is only possible because the country is ringed by police and armed forces. Those things may be a thousand miles away, but someone still has to pay for them.
> That would be living on 432/month PLUS whatever medicaid is worth, likely well north of another 500/month.
Well, not for long at this rate.
The lack of a budget for heating in an article that uses the term "American Siberia" is so hilariously out of touch that it makes the rest of the article farcical.
I live just over an hour north of this place. Until recently I heated my log cabin exclusively with wood.
It takes somewhere between 7 and 9 cubic metres of wood a year to heat about 800 square feet of house. It costs about CAD 1500 for a tandem load of sawlogs plus the cost of fuel and maintenance of the chainsaw and hydraulic splitter plus about 100 hours of labour bucking, splitting, hauling, and stacking. And still there are mornings when I had to break the ice on the dog's water bowl in the kitchen when it's been below -30 C for several days in a row.
You're not going to survive a winter in that part of North America with just "a few scraps of wood" for heat. "A few carloads" is maybe going to take you to Christmas and they'll simply find your thawed corpse during a warm spell in March.
Apparently it's "free Amish wood" or "a little extra in electricity"... which, as someone who lives in a temperate area, is a stunningly low price to imagine for electric heat in somewhere cold.
It’s a 600 ft home with electricity at 0.04kWh. As someone who owns a 400 sq ft uninsulated cabin in MN, with rates closer to 4x that, I can tell you it’s about $100/month to heat it with electricity.
I guess, if the math holds, you would be paying around $50/month to heat it in the winter months.
E: changed kW/h to kWh per the nice commenter who suggested as much below.
Fyi it's kWh not kW/h
Literally mentioned in the article. Their electricity is literally less than 0.1x what I pay in California.
Heat is mentioned in passing with literally no attempt at quantifying the cost:
> 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.
That's it. The line in the budget for heat is there and was left intentionally blank:
> Heat:
You can't just hand-wave away the cost of electric heating at the temperatures they get in upstate NY, even if the 0.04 number is accurate year-round (which it almost certainly isn't), and wood-burning stoves use way more wood than the author appears to be imagining with their "scrap wood" comment.
[0] https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/massena/new-york/unite...
Should be budgeted though right.
It's mentioned as the article as free from using waste wood.
so people are just delivering free wood to anyone who chooses to move out to the boonies? Seems like a bad assumption to be making
you could get a wood burning stove heater. as long as you have enough trees to be sustainable, burning firewood is a great way to go. and with the clean burning filters they have now a days, you'll much much better off than from the days when they used to burn fires inside a house with no container/stove/filters or even a chiminey at all! (just a hole in the roof if you were lucky.)
You can get by with a woodburner without buying wood in a fairly large city if you collected the odd car load during the year.
That said, it might be a better use of time to work, then get the wood delivered.
What small town even has a bus? The closest bus line to me is in the closest large town (40k) about an hour away.
Are there bus lines in the middle of nowhere?
St. Lawrence County does offer several shuttles that run only 1-4 times per day in each direction. It is probably better to add a bike or e-bike to the list.
I think when people write these articles, they should have lived the life instead of just totaling a few expenses. It is very hard to live without at least a few unforeseen expenses above the base budget. The life proposed here is like a 19th century life, waiting for the stagecoach to take you to where you can pay your property taxes, and then spending the day in town because the next stagecoach out doesn't come for hours.
Granted, this was 20 years ago, but I remember taking the Greyhound and people were getting on or off the bus in the middle of nowhere. By nowhere, I mean the nowhere in the literal sense: at the intersection of two highways in the northern Ontario with no other development in sight. Of course, they also serviced the other types of nowhere: the lone gas station or the tiny village.
The author is being somewhat misleading in the sense that this is not the type of bus service that one would use for your weekly commute to that 10 hour shift at the gas station, never mind the three or four times per week that you would need to cover the bills. It may be fine doing errands in town, where the arrival time and departure time don't much matter. It may also be fine for spending a day or two in the city, assuming you have the budget to stay over night.
I'm not saying that the type of lifestyle alluded to is impossible, but it is not going to be the type of lifestyle accessible to young people. Then there is the question about whether they are equipped to live that type of lifestyle.
I agree that the bus in the scenario is implausible for most. But in real life, most rural people would simply own a car. The author describes car ownership's costs hyperbolically, but unless you're doing long-distance commuting, driving a $5000 car wouldn't add more than $200 to his monthly budget, which wouldn't change the math dramatically, while I'd argue it would improve quality of life tremendously, especially because rural America of 2025 most definitely assumes car ownership in a way that it didn't 100 years ago.
What about cycling? If amishes are fine leaving there with horse carts as vehicles, there is no reason you can't manage using a bicycle.
Even Ottawa is not out of reach at only 80miles.
That would depend upon the roads and, given that winter was mentioned as a feature, maintenance during the winter months.
I've done some riding on rural roads with no shoulders, and it can be as scary as heck. At least on winding roads in wooded areas. That's from the perspective of someone who is fine riding on fast and busy urban roads during all seasons. Winter maintenance is also a huge issue if you are riding to work. If you're doing seasonal work, that's fine. You just wait until everything is plowed for winter forays. If you're working all seasons, you cannot maintain a job when you cannot reliably reach the job site.
I lived like this when I was younger and single. Most here, even the self-identified cyclists would scoff at it. It isn't for everyone. There are definite advantages in terms of health and overall robustness. If you are acclimatized to pedaling around in freezing weather and hauling in all of your supplies, you probably won't have a problem with wood heating.
That said, I don't think it would be fair to expect my wife to enjoy that lifestyle. I cannot imagine taking a child to a dental appointment under those circumstances.
A $200 cost is a nearly 50% increase to the budget.
A lot of smaller counties have a publicly operated demand response service that includes small buses, or at least some vehicle that is able to transport someone in a wheelchair.
So not a regular service schedule, but you can call and schedule a ride and it won't cost a lot.
Some times, Boulder Creek is in the mountains between Santa Cruz and San Jose (it’s more remote than it sounds I think)and it gets regular bus service on winding two lane roads and there’s a stop at Big Basin State Park where there’s no cell service in wide swaths of valleys and mountain sides.
Rural transit exists in some places but certainly is not common in the US like it is in e.g. eastern Europe
If you’re around or on the way to a popular hike I’ve seen buses run out to some more remote spots. But probably really depends on the county.
You read articles like this every so often, sure. Maybe ~13 years back I read about an indie game dev who lived in a carbon neutral home in the middle of nowhere Arizona or something. Beautiful house, hand built. Talked about how you really don't need all that much money to live - they were living on less than 20k a year from his game sales.
Him and his wife were also in their 20's, and their kids I think were already a few years old when they moved to the boonies. All healthy.
It's an extreme example, but this is a good read:
For anyone curious, the game dev is Jason Rohrer:
https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/simpleLife.h...
Things have changed since:
"In October of 2011, we moved from Las Cruces, NM to Davis, CA. Along with all the good things listed below about Las Cruces came bad things. Vicious dogs loose on the streets (one bit my wife while biking) and in parks (I came close to getting myself shot during a confrontation with a dog owner). Crime (the little old lady next door got burgled twice in one year, once at 3 in the afternoon through her front door). After living in extremely cheap places for 8 years, I came to realize that these places are extremely cheap for a reason (because people don't want to live there if they can avoid it)."
Haha this is so US. Almost got killed in the park because you said few words to someone you should not...
Greatest country on earth...
Zillow says the average house in Davis costs $890k. Looks like they've pretty much given up on the "life cheaply" thing.
The main page of his website now says New Hampshire
In the comments on the article, the author says “we treat what we can at home, otherwise we go to Mexico and pay cash”
Oy vey
> I honestly don't know how anyone can live out in the boonies without a car.
Why would you want to live out in the boonies without owning a car?
Just get a car.
They’re not that expensive, you can get a used beater for not much more than an iPhone. If you don’t want a beater, you can probably afford to spend a little more with the money you save from living out in the boonies.
Most people who live in the boonies owns a car.
These are "young people" things. The older you get, the more dependent you are on the society and it's benefits.
Not close from my parents home is a small farm collective of mostly ex hippies who have been living there communally for decades with people well into their 80s now. It was so successful that the city, taking that as inspiration, ran trials of creating more autonomous senior communities that are largely self supervised, including even people with dementia.
From what I heard it works extremely well, not the least because it's more dignified and keeps people engaged, active, and self reliant. The modern notion of the drooling, dependent nursing home patient is a product of our (artificially!) atomized system.
I will say, at this income level you're on Medicaid. It would be more than nothing but very basic, and if you're using government assistance than you aren't really "escaping" modernity, you're actually living off of the economic surplus of all the people working hard in the rat race. (Don't misinterpret me as saying that social safety nets are bad, I am all for them, but I'm just saying - if the author of this article gets cancer I bet they'll want to visit a hospital where doctors are working 12 hour shifts grinding out the era of "overabundance.")
But it is extremely important to point out that the American "rat race" cities subsidize areas like this. There would be no road in front of this house without those subsidies. These areas are net negative economic contributors that depend on federal and state funding to exist, including that bus transit that this person is relying on (not to mention the American factory workers who grind out their shifts in urban centers to make those buses).
The author claims to be living the life of great-grandparents, but it’s not like he’s a subsistence farmer or something. As a metaphor it’s kind of like claiming you’re a wild animal living out in the wilderness living a simple life of virtue when in reality this existence is more similar to a raccoon living out of the dumpster of modern society’s surplus.
Why bother building a self-sufficient community like the Amish where they build their own homes and grow their own food and build their own buggies, clothes, furniture, and breed their own horses when you can survive in a cheap depreciated house someone else built, use the library and transportation that other working people pay for, and the roads that were built by the workers who actually work some significant hours?
I am sure it works on some level but it doesn’t seem to me to be a very positive alternative to a lot of other lifestyles.
Apart from all that, there are so many flaws with this article.
The budget didn't include mortgage/housing cost, I guess it's just assuming you're paying cash? How does a person with this kind of lack of gainful employment come up with $29k?
Water is $0? Even well water requires some level of upkeep and potentially replacement and re-drilling.
Most rural towns in the US absolutely do not have this transit available. You'll need a working maintained car plus insurance almost everywhere that looks like this.
Internet, use library - again, with what car? Aren’t a lot of the methods available to make income dependent on internet access?
The heat budget is just blank which makes no sense, heat in upstate new york is not cheap as you need a lot of it.
Education for your kids? How is that going to look out there? Are they going to be trapped here? Will they even have the option to opt out of this lifestyle? How easy will it be to do homework at home with no internet? You’ll rely on a rural bus schedule and use the library during open hours only?
I might also point out that a lot of modern society lifestyles that aren’t so far on this side of extreme of frugality are really easy and comfortable lives. Not all of them, a lot of people live difficult modern lives, but at the same time the “most people” who left the farm to get a job in the city did so for a reason.
I guess you could say that the extremes of society can make for some interesting reading.
I think most of your points are fair ones. I also feel that it's rather cynical to drop out of the "rat race" by relying on the participation of lots of other people to pay for your Medicaid expense and so on. However, on average, there are just so few people doing this type of thing that I don't think we have to worry about free riders damaging the system. Most people who complain about the rat race aren't willing to take the extreme steps that this guy is suggesting in order to get out of it.
> The budget didn't include mortgage/housing cost
True, but I don't think you can get a mortgage for a $29K house. I'm guessing the guy is saving up for his house by sticking in the rat race until he's got his $29K saved up (presumably made easier with his wife?). Then, he shops around for a house on a bus route. I suspect it is possible, especially in a state like NY.
> if the author of this article gets cancer I bet they'll want to visit a hospital where doctors are working 12 hour shifts grinding out the era of "overabundance."
This is one point where I disagree. I'd really rather that doctors were working shorter hours. I don't want someone taking care of me if they're at the end of a 12 hour shift. Forget about the fact that it's so bad for her, it's also bad for me and the level of care that I get.
> Water is $0? Even well water requires some level of upkeep
Oh yeah, we just paid $800 to replace our pressure tank. His roof will need to be replaced one day, the gutters will leak, etc.
I actually think I detect a bit of tongue-in-cheek in the article. I think this guy will do this for a while, enjoy his adventure, and then go do something else.
Slight digression but shorter clinical shifts mean more handovers, and those carry their own risk of error.
The author mentions putting 20% down and getting a mortgage. Even with insurance, for a 10 year mortgage 29k is 430 per month. Or you live with your parents and save on $1500 rent for 2 years, bam you can buy it with cash.
> I think most of your points are fair ones. I also feel that it's rather cynical to drop out of the "rat race" by relying on the participation of lots of other people to pay for your Medicaid expense and so on. However, on average, there are just so few people doing this type of thing that I don't think we have to worry about free riders damaging the system.
It's one of those cases where the "freeloading" is more miserable than just working, which is why abuse isn't rampant.
I was on Medicaid for three or four years and had much better healthcare than when I was on an employer plan. Employer Plan w/ a shoulder injury: no MRI until three months of PT (physical therapy without knowing what the issue is????). Medicaid w/ a foot injury: MRI, physical therapy, option for surgery.
I see a couple of specialist that explicitly state they aren’t taking any more Medicaid patients. I’m not on Medicaid. But I assume if you have any type of need for more than just a GP, you’re going to find your choices more limited.
I’m not sure if the “rat race” actually produces real wealth to subsidize this.
If anything you could say we’re able to subsidize this despite the “rat race”.
The "rat race" refers to the economic engine that is American society.
> But it is extremely important to point out that the American "rat race" cities 100% subsidize areas like this.
It's even more important to point out that places like this grow the food and do the manufacturing that those "cities" you like would collapse without.
Yeah, but the farmers and factory workers are working more than one ten-hour shift per week.
Which implies the public roads have a positive economic value - the earlier post did refer to the area not to the people like the author of the blog post
I think the author is arguing against their own point with the illustration they chose. The very last picture can be found in the Wikipedia page for the Homestead Act and, two jumps later, one can find themselves in the Dutch version of "Sod house" [1] which has this to say:
> The living conditions there were miserable. Due to the construction method, the room was difficult to heat, it was damp and teeming with vermin. (...) The Housing Act of 1901 prohibited living in sod huts.
If the author says "you can live like your grandparents" to mean "in conditions that were already considered miserable for the standards of 1901", that's not a great selling point. And while I sympathize with the underlying message to a point, I would argue against romanticizing the past. Sure, my grandfather lived in a cheap house he built himself, but he also came back home every day with bleeding fingers that my grandmother would treat.
I lived in a place purely heated by a wood stove in the Yukon. It was glorious, easily best heat and nicest feel ever. When it was past -40 I’d get up at 1am to put in more wood, otherwise I’d have to spend 30 minutes in the morning lighting it again.
Places heated with wood stoves are NOT damp or miserable. I loved it. Working on doing it again.
Wow tending a fire 24/7 so I don’t die. Living the life, yo.
The point could be taken in the other way, as in "hey at least you don't have to live in a house made of dirt, right?" Comparably you are much better off, so there is no point in complaining. They made it work. Sure it wasn't great, but we're all passed that now, standards are much better.
Adobe (dried mud) homes in Santa Fe go for well north of a million dollars US. I’ll take a couple of those myself.
adobe and sod are very different materials, and the climates they are built in are very different, too. Technically, a brick manor is made of dirt, too.
I don’t know why they chose that picture, but it’s also not really related to the argument of the essay.
It's sure ironic that they chose those photos, to be sure, but I don't think it detracts from the words, which describe conditions much better than that.
Like other people here, I have my quibbles with the exact math. But the general premise is true: yes, you can live in rural poverty for cheap. The problem is the vibes. A hundred years ago, you would have a community, a place in society, and all of your family and friends nearby. In 2025, the only actual local job the author of the piece can come up with is at a gas station.
Top ten occupations, 1920: Farmers, farm laborers, clerks, salespeople, servants (bellboys, butlers, cooks), textile workers, machinists, carpenters, and teachers. All of those jobs, even the less respected ones, had infinitely more societal respect than the common jobs hiring in rural America today - such as stocking shelves at Walmart or working at a gas station. You could be a simple farm laborer and have a wife and kids and a place in society. Today, though, a young man working at a Walmart or a gas station will struggle to attract a stable partner or the respect of the world around him.
> a young man working at a Walmart or a gas station will struggle to attract a stable partner or the respect of the world around him.
From personal experience I can tell you confidently you are wrong.
The part you are missing is you only need to work 10-20 hours a week MAX. That means you have an enormous Amount of leisure time to do what you want with your life. Trust me when I say plenty of young women love the idea of not working a lot and instead having wilderness adventures.
Want to see it for yourself? Go spend a summer in the Yukon. If you love it, stay the winter. It’s nothing short of epic.
Not saying I agree with the premise of the article at all but making life decisions based on how much others will respect it is a terrible way to live
We're wired to yield to social pressures, it is what allowed us to create civilization. You're right, the energy spent to overcome it is well spent, but its not as trivial as you make it sound to be low-status and feel fulfilled.
Yes, it seems the only thing the world around me respects is conspicuous consumption. It's better for your own wellbeing if you can avoid indulging that.
Humans are a social species. Your happiness absolutely depends on what other people think about you.
"You could be a simple farm laborer and have a wife and kids and a place in society."
You could not afford a good life as a farm laborer.
I don't think the OP was suggesting it would be a good life if by "good" you mean a life of relative comfort. I think his claim was much more modest. The point is that at that time a farm laborer was valued by the local community.
Farm laborers were probably at the bottom of the social ladder for working rural people. They were usually fully dependent on the owner of the farm that they worked on. Think of the cowboys in the bunkhouse in "Yellowstone" except way worse.
I think you’ll meet most of the community and could gain some standing working at the town gas station actually, especially if you try to be even a little bit friendly with the locals.
"Today, though, a young man working at a Walmart or a gas station will struggle to attract a stable partner or the respect of the world around him."
>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.
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.
While such towns may have walkable cores, often places like Walmart are a huge pain to walk to.
If you need only $400 a month, you have a looot of time to spend walking to Walmart.
It's not the distance, but hostile roads with no safe crossings.
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 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.
Streetview of your opponent as a pedestrian trying to access the Massena Walmart: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ufTWTHxHCReFP8VA9
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)
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.
Why not? You can walk plenty in the cold with the right equipment. I walked 2+ km a day at the south pole ...
It's really dangerous if you don't know what your doing. I'm about .5 km from the closest supermarket.
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.
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?
> 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.
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 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.
0.5km is like, 6 minutes of walking?
How? It just doesn’t compute to me that someone would ever see that as onerous.
Surely you walk that much inside any reasonably sized grocery store.
In IKEA you probably walk around about 1km for just one visit considering how they design their space.
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.
I am 50 years old and don't think I'd pass fit for service either, but I can still easily walk a few Kms.
This is just utterly astonishing to me. I've just checked a map and it's ~0.5 km between where I park at work and my office!
Your going to have to walk both ways, in the rain/snow, etc ?
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
Is there a lot of traffic in places with 10k residents?
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...
You need to be in good shape to fucking walk 2km? WTF is wrong with people in murica? Well is guess they are just ordering fast food all day
What are you buying this equipment with in this scenario?
There are no sidewalks, so you are walking in a street in the snow asking to become a statistic.
47 people died in a blizzard in Buffalo, New York in 2022.
..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.
Let’s not pretend that the cold regions of the world were uninhabitable before the invention of the car.
They weren’t, but they were zoned and organized a lot differently compared to our post-war world of today.
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 $45 for a prepaid cellphone plan with ample tethering doesn't change the overall equation significantly.
It's less click bait-ish. The max SSI payment is 967$.
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
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.
Might be a slight of hand? Maybe he has a moped like the DUI people do.
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.
https://www.slcnypublictransit.com/transit-schedules
It seems like they have a good number of routes and do route deviation within 3/4 of a mile of the bus stop.
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.
Rural bus routes used to be very common - they commute in in the morning and out in the afternoon.
You change your schedule to handle that, and they usually will drive the van (barely a bus) up to your door.
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.
> 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.
Yeah, I haven't eaten fast food in — I don't know how long. Maybe it's an age thing? I ate at chains when I was younger....
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....
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I’ve never really been super confident with remote jobs - a recession hits and you can’t find another job.
> remote jobs
> 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'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.
A big part of it is how you want to find friends.
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.
> 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.
>> 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.
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.
Edit: the tap water was superior to my towns.
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!
When I lived in NYC, it was a given it would take at least an hour to get to an airport, and then I’d budget an extra hour for something to go wrong.
Driving to smaller airports - just arrive 50 minutes before departure.
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.
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.
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.
Name that town!! --
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 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?
Time Square is a tourist trap, an area I always avoided at any cost.
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.
Cities wreck your finances and your health.
People raise families and live generations in cities. There's plenty of rural poverty and poor health outside of cities.
> Everyone claims it's about living in a city with available services
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?
This is addressed directly in the article:
>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.
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."
It doesn't seem to be caused by his lifestyle as the posters above also cant divide by $7 per hour. Its 62 hours or 11 shifts.
I think hé means one should do all kinds of small projects.
$17/hr is the rate
That makes it even more funny. No wonder we cant find a cheap place to live.
$17 x 26 h = €442
One 10 h shift per week is to much apparently.
432/17 is 25 hours, or otherwise stated one 8 hour shift every week or two.
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.
One 10 hour shift is ~30% of what you need per month
40 hours per month is much less than 40 hours per week
And when those gas station jobs fill up but there's still empty houses around?
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.
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.
>1. Buy, repair, and flip MacBooks on eBay
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.
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?
"Just break the law, it'll be fine"
Great financial advice happening on the orangesite.
Really good stuff.
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.
> 3. Mow lawns 4. Clean gutters 5. Set up a little stand and sell baked goods or tamales
Those might pay well in the city, but nobody making $17/hr is going to pay more than $10/hr for lawn mowing.
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.
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?"
"impoverished lifestyle"
"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.
I think you've arguably left out some interesting options in the middle.
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.
YES! this is the question.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What?
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.
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.
I agree with the possibility but many people just end up staying home due to traffic, money, or being an introvert
That's true! And many don't!
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
> few opportunities to build a life
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.
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.
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!).
I agree. With no jobs in the area $432 may as well require to work a lot more for lower pay, whatever is available in the area.
>> 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.
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.
> I would in a heartbeat if my partner shared the same mentality as me.
And what are the chances you would find an acceptable partner for you in the small town if you didn’t already have one?
> 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.
Small towns can be great if you fit the mold.
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.
Also small towns attract less serial killers.
Murder rates are higher in rural Canada than they are in urban Canada, and Massena is basically Canada.
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.
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.
the complaints aren't less valid, but having a constant axe to grind that you blame for all UN-success isn't a good strategy.
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
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.
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.
It's frankly ridiculous as is this piece.
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].
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per...
1. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/globalization-did-not-hollow-o...
What’s your point? All of the things I listed have far outpaced income and disposable income.
"disposable" income means "subtracting necessities like housing" so if disposable income is going up, by definition your claim cannot be correct
Officially, disposable income means income minus taxes. Lots of people assume it means minus necessities like housing and food, but that is discretionary income.
That's not correct.
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.
> utter failure of local, state and federal government to provide housing, public transit, education and healthcare
I don’t think it’s similar to the billionaire thing, this guy is apparently living the way he describes full-time.
And he does sort of have a point. You could probably afford an apartment _somewhere_, just not in any of the places you consider desirable.
I think the problem that most millenials have is that their parents could afford a house, for a pittance, in those desireable areas.
I think living in rural areas sucks because you'll end up feeling very lonely. And I'm speaking as a hardcore introvert who didn't feel lonely at all during the lock-down. But after extended periods of isolation, human connection becomes important, especially if you're young.
I'm currently living below my means in a small village in Mauritius, but I'm planning on moving to a big city in a big country ASAP because while living like this is good for my bank account, my mental health is taking a heavy toll. Not to mention how challenging it is to find a date.
As a young person, IMO the best thing to do is move to a place where you can make some good lifelong friends, and build a solid network for employment opportunities. Saving money while living frugally only served to dampen my social muscles.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
> 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 would argue is that what we need for healing and understanding is more brave trans and gay people in these spaces.
It is right, but - if you were one of them, would you risk your life to maybe bring in some change?
> It's a lot harder to hate a group when your kind neighbor is one of them.
"He/she is one of the good ones..." is a fairly common turn of phrase.
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.
This is one of those articles where the comments are really interesting to read through. I see a bunch of comments who don't agree with the exact math, which might be warranted, but it seems at least directionally correct to me. However there's also a bunch of people commenting that this lifestyle isn't viable for some reason or another, that mainly just boils down to a personal preference those commenters don't want to live without.
But having read through most of the objections I still find myself enticed by this. If I mentally place myself in this position I think I could quite happily live a few decades without talking to anyone for weeks or even months at a time. I'd still have my pets to give me companionship. Load my kindle up with a thousand books I want to read and just work my way through it. Pick up writing as a hobby and spend the rest of the time working at a gas station and fixing up the house and/or grow some food to offset the reduced income.
Healthcare is an issue. Doesn't seem like a viable place to grow old. Once you become too frail for physical work it's probably just time to die, which isn't great.
You might also like a documentary called Alone in the Wilderness, which tells the story of Dick Proenneke, a man who moved to the remote Twin Lakes region of Alaska in 1968 and lived alone in the wilderness for 30 years.
Proenneke built his own log cabin entirely by hand, using only simple tools (many of which he made himself), and filmed his daily life, including hunting, fishing, foraging, and crafting everything from scratch
Man, I don't wanna see someone going to live as a hermit in the woods and shit in the bushes for $400. I've got plenty of examples of people living in mud huts in Africa for much less.
I wanna see how it's possible to live a decent life in civilized conditions (roof over your head, running water and sewage system, electricity, heating) on $400.
I think a lot of the complaint I see is people want to have 100% of everything they want, within a 10 minute walk, with zero compromise. I.e. they have unreasonable expectations.
I see people come to London from other parts of the world and ask where they can live that is nice and a 5-10 minute walk from the office and I usually laugh in their faces. If you can afford to live that close in central London (even before you think about "nice"), then you don't need to work. Even single car parking spaces in central London cost more than family houses elsewhere in the UK.
When I got my first place it was on the outskirts of London, cost 20x the average UK salary (and for which I obviously took out a huge mortgage for that basically took 75-80% of my salary at the time to pay), and took over an hour on public transport (which was also not cheap - walking is free but probably about 4 hours each way) to get to central London. And this was just in the 2008-era - it's never been cheap (or even reasonable) to own nice property in the center of a large global metropolis like London where you are 10 minutes walk from your office AND transport AND entertainment AND everything else unless you are ultra wealthy.
People need to lower expectations about locality/proximity and affordability before things become viable. This isn't a new problem.
> However there's also a bunch of people commenting that this lifestyle isn't viable for some reason or another, that mainly just boils down to a personal preference those commenters don't want to live without.
Given humans are also just animals that had lifestyles before money and modern society was invented, this doesn't seem like a useful distinction. Either you're talking about your personal preferences you don't want to lice without or money isn't even part of the picture in the first place. Where that line is personally drawn is just as arbitrary to this point at $1 as $1,000,000.
Overall though I agree the article sheds light where we don't normally tend to think. At the same time it crosses points too often to make that those focus of conversation. That is to say it makes a good point with just a little too much PoV twist inserted so people who don't agree will think about that statement instead. E.g. don't complain about not having the home prospects of a boomer because you can live like your great grandparent - which would be something ~40 years prior to the boomer comparison, even for a zoomer (-> driving pushback against the idea owning a house at all is the same as the lifestyle the article laments hearing about -> driving conversation like the above paragraph).
You can go to not quite as extreme levels. There are thousands of small towns all through Appalachia, the Midwest, and the Northeast with a bit of interesting local culture and a low cost of living. Not this low but they also have hospitals and often colleges and other things.
If you are a minority concerned about the culture of red America, the 2016 and 2024 elections both provide excellent county by county color coded maps for you.
Telework is what really unlocks this if you’re a developer.
The Midwest also has many medium sized cities. Not as cheap as small towns but not as expensive as the coastal real estate cost traps. I live in Cincinnati, which has three universities, four Fortune 500 companies, a small startup scene, and over a dozen small neighborhoods with walkable streets (overall you’d want a car but you could get away with not using it every day).
At some point the only economically rational decision is to leave very high cost of living cities. I tell people for cities like SF that it might be good to go there to launch your career but look at it like a college. If by 30 you are not making — for SF I’d say over $300k — then leave. You will never get above real estate in those places unless you are approaching mid six figures.
It also negatively impacts what you can do. Even if you can earn that, it might be with golden handcuffs to a FAANG. Think about that. If you want to start a startup, one that is not lavishly funded enough to pay that, then leave. If you just don’t want to be golden handcuffed to a monster mortgage, leave.
This is bizarre to me - my extended family live in the towns surrounding Massena, NY, and have for about four generations now. The area certainly has its perks, it can be very pretty and there is plenty of room for hunting, fishing and other such pursuits if one is so inclined. Houses are extremely inexpensive, as is a surprising amount of land if that’s what you want. Though the set who are actually farming has declined precipitously over the generations.
The article however rather oversells the economic opportunities of the area - the two best employers are a nearby Indian casino and the prison system, both of which have their drawbacks. Otherwise there is a reason why all the local farmland is slowly being occupied by the Amish, they’re a group that doesn’t care much about the lack of opportunity.
As you can guess, this has led to a big divergence in outcomes. My relatives who have found remote work are living like kings, and the ones who haven’t are really struggling.
I dunno why I’m writing this. I guess it’s just funny to see Massena written about. And Massena is the big city compared to the surrounding towns.
In the 4th paragraph the author suggests that the economic backbone of the country - young people - simply desert economic centres of growth and prosperity and to instead assume a life of poverty in a rural teardown. A life substantially worse than their parents live, simply because their parents don’t want more homes near their own home.
I didn’t bother to check if the article gets any more serious from there.
> 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
Am I missing something or is this implying that you need to work 34 hours a week at the gas station to live there. That's.... basically a normal, full-time job, right? It's a strange way of putting it.
No, it’s saying one 10 hour shift a week gets you 30% of what you need to live for a month. So doing 3 or 4 of those a month is sufficient to live on, assuming the posted costs are remotely accurate and aren’t missing anything important (big assumption).
The expenses are monthly so if you did that shift every week, you’ll have an income surplus.
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. I find the midwest is plenty dry and plenty warm, even with multi-month snowy winters.
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.
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.
> 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.
https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/why-does-it-take-more-...
> Moreover, the vision that I am going to postulate here would not even require very much in the way of work. I say this because by all I have seen, many young people today find the idea of indefinite wage labor to be a dismal one. They seem to prefer a “low-work lifestyle,” but very often, the manner of living that such a lifestyle would require is completely foreign to them. Because of this, right alongside the many social media posts on the topic of the awful expense of buying a home — there are just as many posts, it seems, complaining about “life in the 4HL,” or pining for remote work, or (rightfully) bemoaning the scam-infested, difficult-to-navigate, often cynical and fake job market that they’ve encountered.
It's cheeky because it frames itself as rejecting the status quo, when actually what it is doing is saying "accept the status quo wholesale and just move to somewhere the status quo hasn't reached yet." And of course, if enough people do that, no one will be around to fight against the status quo anymore. The main difference between this and Thoreau's cabin in the woods is that Thoreau could have chosen to do differently.
It seems a fairly pragmatic solution to me. Yes, at a societal level things are pretty messed up for lower earners but there is next to nothing they can do about that. However from an individual perspective there are options and they aren't all as extreme as this.
Confused by his portrayal of Massena, NY. I don't live there and have never driven through, but looking on Google Maps it doesn't seem that bad or depressing as the author (and I guess commentators) make it out to be.
It has a Walmart, Home Depot, BJs (similar to Costco), a main street with several businesses. A walkable grid with sidewalks in that main town area....
Feels like reaching that this place is so desolate and depressing.
Agreed! I'm randomly Google Street View-ing through town, and it looks... modest but actually quite nice?
Check out these pleasant-looking houses in the summer: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Massena,+NY+13662/@44.9264...
Edit: I've spent a few more minutes on Street View. This is not at all the podunk backwater that the author makes it out to be. They've got plenty of commercial streets, and big blocks of houses with nicely trimmed lawns.
I suppose this actually makes the author's point more strongly -- even if you have very little money, you can live pretty nicely in Massena!
Alcoa (Aluminum Smelter, *cheap electricity*) was the major industry in the area. Massena plant now produces 85% less aluminum compared to ~15 years ago (AFAICT), leading to something of a ghost town (and cheap housing).
Also what I was thinking! I saw the Home Depot on the map, and an International Airport (with daily flights to Boston no less), and thought, "Wait a sec, is this guy pulling our collective legs?". https://flymassena.com/
It’s got three elementary schools, one junior high and one high school. My hometown had two public elementary schools, few pre K options, two religious options for K-8, one middle school and one high school at 25k residents. And we don’t have an international airport (we do one hour away and in the same county though)
Massena is small but not that desolate/small
Could not get past the multiple paragraphs of strawman nonsense. Here, let me summarize:
The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise. …
Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs. They tyrannised over the paidagogoi and schoolmasters.
This guy lives in Amish country, yet is not Amish, but drives a hard bargain.
I'm nearly sold, but I haven't sat on the furniture yet to see if it will be hard enough.
The author mentions they’re just about to have a baby, and it’s notable that they don’t talk about the quality of the schools. Even if they homeschooled, I imagine they want their kids to have some friends, and they didn’t talk about how that would work without a car. Once they get a car, they might get a little bit unlucky and live an hour away from their kid’s closest peer. I hope they get along!
I checked and the quality of schools there are fine! 75% of students in high school at grade level in math and reading. Pretty normal.
> Even if they homeschooled, I imagine they want their kids to have some friends, and they didn’t talk about how that would work without a car.
Why do you assume that they are no kids in the neighborhood?
I suppose another option is that they don't actually care if their kids have friends. Perhaps parents are enough, in their view.
Where are they going to go if the birth is complicated? Just bleed out on the floor of their hut?
«My wife took down and died upon the cabin floor / And I ain't got no home in this world anymore»
Even more recently: https://genius.com/Phil-collins-the-roof-is-leaking-lyrics
"My wife's expecting, but I hope she can wait. 'Cause this winter looks like it's gonna be another bad one"
"The roof is leaking and the wind is howling, Kids are crying 'cause the sheets are so cold. Woke this morning, found my hands were frozen, I've tried to fix the fire, but you know, the damn thing's too old."
> In fact, were it to be that any of those who seek a simpler, more straightforward, more affordable way of life matched themselves up with the various regions in which that kind of a life is on offer in spades — it just might make our country better.
I think this all the time too. Would be interesting to try to start a colony like this.
People have tried it plenty of times. There might be a few still sort of running, but most of them fail.
> 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.
Yeah, leaving the "heat" part of the list just blank is pretty telling as far as how much thought went into this.
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.
That's not what the article says.
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).
Sure, I think a certain rare type of guy can really thrive like this. But most people don't want to live like this, for understandable reasons.
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.
> Also, while I agree that $40 is cheap to me, it's also an additional 10% on their budget.
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.
It's not about heating your house, it's about being able to leave it comfortably.
Sincerely, someone who moved from Buffalo NY to Northern California and has never once regretted it.
So > 10% of your budget goes to heat in cold months.
Yes, that’s seems rather low even? Plus that is basically almost included in their budget - 30 USD for electricity is already there.
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.
I enjoy the part about "Heat? Well...I'm sure something will happen allowing me to have heat. No need for concrete plans there."
You mean this part?
> 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.
Those are both vague and completely different ways to handle heating.
Also, conveniently, neither appear to have an associated cost so we don't have to worry about whether the financial math works out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good catch on the hourly rates there.
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.
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.
And yeah, a truck costs money, whether for maintenance and gas, or bare bones insurance.
.. a cargo bike might be a better choice
The author makes a big deal out of not having a car, and the math gets a heck of a lot worse if you add a truck.
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.
Seems like a tongue in cheek way of implying that climate change will solve that eventually, no?
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.
> that means you don’t get the latest iPhone
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.
$60 is ~14% of the monthly budget, so yeah, I think that would make an impact.
> 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.
Do you forgo modern medicine?
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.
> 1960 living standards were universal in 1960
Universal for whom?
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.
And don't miss the point that I'm making, which is that the standards of living in 1960 for some people was built on the back of exploiting others.
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.
I flagged this article and later saw it dead, so I’m quite surprised it came back. I found the content extremely shallow and lacking nuance. Others have mentioned, but it leaves out huge caveats because it would destroy the the conclusion - the cost of moving to the place in the first place, social connections, health (even worse for those with disabilities), emergency services, retirement, etc etc. The list of obvious hurdles that immediately disqualify most people is a glaring omission and I really don’t understand why this article garnered upvotes aside from affirming confirmation bias. This is the first time I’ve been greatly soured by the response from the HN community. What substance are people finding in this article?
> the cost of moving to the place in the first place, social connections, health (even worse for those with disabilities), emergency services, retirement, etc etc
Anyone moving to bay area for a higher income job would have most of these issues.
A forum full of people willing to migrate for better income and lifestyle should not be criticizing "cost of moving", "social connections", "health disabilities" and "retirement".
I might be misreading your reply, but what you’re keying in on and singling out is a tiny fraction of the audience the article is arguing for. My problem is with how shallow this article is and how it throws a wide net that doesn’t cover a ton of situations that prevent people from doing what he claims is possible for just about anyone if they change their mindset. If the argument were just for the subset of users you’re using as an example, then sure? But that’s isn’t as clickbaity and certainly doesn’t support the claim that any young person can just up and do what the writer claims.
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.
Actually, the town basically existed because of the TVA. It was a major employer and profits went to fund the schools and library.
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
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...
Starting now you can also get the diseases your great-grandparents enjoyed.
> 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?
this dude _literally_ wrote about a neighboring town that's dying and the government isn't helping them out. https://shagbark.substack.com/p/obituaryland
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.
I've spent time in upstate New York, and the communities I visited were not welcoming to newcomers. I had a few beers in a bar in Tupper Lake and I may as well have been a green alien. Unless you're religious and can lean on a church community, this life seems absolutely lonely.
An incredible strategy for getting the article to break containment. I won't share it unless you pay me $7100, which is how much it costs me to live in America with dependents
It's actually possible to live pretty cheaply in America if you can save up enough to buy a house or condo in cash. This article harps on ultra rural America, but there are plenty of closer knit communities that are quite affordable as well.
Lots of HOA communities exist with condos or townhouses. Example prices would be $175k for 3 bed, 2 bath condos. These can be found all over the country. Add a little more on top of it, say $250k-$300k and you've bumped up to a 3 bed 2 bath townhouse with a garage. For the price of a downpayment for a dump in a major metropolitan area, you can own a 20-30 year old construction fully paid off. And that's a mid-case scenario.
In a low tax area a place that's paid off like that might cost you $400-500/mo between taxes, homeowners insurance, and HOA fees. The big "GOTCHA" everybody comes up with is health insurance. Well between medicaid and Obamacare you can get sizeable tax credits up to fairly high incomes. If you're making around $50k/yr in my state PA, you can get around $1500/mo in credits with a family of 3, and end up paying ~$1200 in premiums per year.
There's literally nothing blackpill about this lifestyle. It's as walkable as any suburb, with the same CHATGPT-style standard of care healthcare that exists across the country, and it's actually more convenient to get from point A to point B in a car than in most major cities or in high density suburban areas. Fiber internet is likely more accessible and reliable too, unlike how it would be in decrepit city buildings.
A lot of pros, and not many cons - sure it isn't $432/month, but you can make situations like this work for $2-3k, which opens up an endless number of careers, projects, and opportunities to live off of.
Just make sure you don't get sick.
At that income level and in a blue state, there might actually be pretty good health coverage.
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.
"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.
Do like your great grandfather did, eat some hot chicken soup and go to bed.
Just a couple generations back my family members were dying of preventable illness. Like I'm not joking, we have the records.
Also, you just need to continually scavenge for "free" water and heat.
Don't forget the free fishing rod/equipment.
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.)
And I'd use a heated vest.
Just dress up well, cozily.
In the article he mentions there is a well at the house. Also blankets and wood fires are free heat.
In the article he mentions there is a well at the house.
Wells are not "free water" unless you never have to worry about any sort of repair or maintenance.
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.
Who said anything about sustainability?
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
https://www.reddit.com/r/homestead/comments/1jnpbug/how_much...
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.
There's also the small matter that the guy to whom you replied was suggesting that "free wood" means burning trees worth thousands of dollars each.
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.
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.
So many folks bashing the author. The message is clear, most people are not willing to alter their lives to live more comfortably.
Whether that is giving up living in comfort or making small changes to their habits.
I think the relevant commentary here is to look at what happiness looks like for you. For a lot of folks they are just going to mentally masturbate to alternative ways in life. For the select few that make those changes content like this is critical.
Thanks for spreading the seeds.
Jobs and crime: What value can you add, and what value can be taken from you?
Stressed communities like Massena are defensive: outsiders (particularly relatively wealthy ones) are typically a target, and are unlikely to get a plum job that goes by word of mouth. That effect is amplified when people don't have the assets or kind of life they want to protect for themselves, so they have little to lose and a big chip on the shoulder.
To me the sweet spot for young people would be the in-law unit in a great neighborhood where you could do professional work. Learn from the best, and deal with people more interested in a clean, secure transaction than extracting every advantage they need (e.g., buy good engineering used from someone who loved their car). Even wealthy people aspire to pare down to what they really need, because the simplicity restores irreplaceable time.
If there are thousands of ways to do wrong and few to do right, give yourself your best opportunities. Make yourself not only useful but reliable and graceful. Anyone under 30 (or anyone at all?) should be budgeting 30% on making the future selves they really want to be.
So, it's a stationary alternative to the "van life" trend that floats around sometimes.
Massena's about the size of the town we moved my parents from after my father had a stroke, though it's a lot poorer (in 2013 nearly a third of the population was below the poverty line, and that's before Alcoa closed a chunk of operations there). It does have a hospital (25 beds, not-for-profit) and given the demographics I'm 100% positive that it's one of those hospitals that *needs* Medicaid to survive.
I'm pretty sure that doing this really would feel a lot like going back and living like your grandparents or great-grandparents did - all the joys of the 1950s.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was data center work available though - with cheap power there's probably someone there doing cryptomining or maybe even hosting AI processing.
Yep, they already thought of the cryptoming angle: https://www.nccs.one/
> 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.
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.
>Taxes: $41
>Electric: ~$30
>Water: $0
>Transit: $53 for a 30-ride pass for each person living there
>Food: ~$300/mo.
>Telephone: $8/mo
>Entertainment: Fishing and library, free
>Internet: Use library
>Medical costs in case a moose kicks you in the nuts while fishing: ~$500000
Someone help me manage my budget, my family is dying.
Also your offspring need to go to schools paid for by local taxes. Ruhroh.
Hold up. You don’t need a car due to a robust transportation system. You don’t work too much because of a high minimum wage. Health care is free. Retirement is handled by someone else. Education expenses are free. Child raising expenses free! You are provided free entertainment, news, etc at the library. The author forgot about how they were going to pay for clothing, etc, but there’s food stamps on the other side of the balance. Your taxes are zero, paid by richer people. The 29k payment for your house is taken from a homesteading fund.
Somehow I think grandpa would be suspicious of this tale of bootstrapping just being socialism. But why not? I think people in the left have been insisting that if we gave people a robust baseline for free (by taxing the rich), we could revive this sort of lifestyle.
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?
> 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.
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?
> so we can stretch to afford a million-dollar starter home, two luxury cars, designer clothes, and IG-worthy vacations
Only one of those we have control over. If starter homes cost a million what can you do?
Move to a place where starter homes are cheaper?
> 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]
[1] https://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/resource-library/rese...
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.
Why would you assume people are talking about themselves just because it's on HN? I'm reading these comments much more broadly.
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.
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.
I think think is doable, but how would you find a partner that is willing to do it? how many men or women are interested in this that are also the kind of people that read substack regularly?
Plenty of retvrn types that are terminally online. You’re not likely finding them in person though in a major city. They’re probably barely scrapping by in a MCOL and don’t go out - thus, find them online.
If you're ready to move to frozen salty belt to live bare minimum, why not move to a cheap country, work as English tutor for 10x quality of life?
Don't live in this area, it sucks. You'll have 8 months of miserable, not enjoyable winter with winds and freezing rains, 2 months if suffocating humid summer with mosquitos and ticks, and maybe relatively enjoyable September. Ask me how I know.
Surprised that there isn’t a kibbutz trend in the US with this sentiment.
A lot of kibbutzim are run collectively. As a joke in the TV show The Americans went, from an Israeli to a Soviet spy: "if you like socialism so much, defect to Israel, we do it better".
That kind of thing isn't in the American DNA. You'd have people demand a lawn and a fence after a month.
I like this proposition, but the article didn't mention health services in the area. I'm European and I don't fully understand the US health sector but I want to know what would happen in case of severe illness, living this way.
> health services in the area
Massena Hospital is a 25-bed hospital. Might have to go to Canton or Ogdensburg for a family doctor (45 minutes by car). Most things serious get referred to Syracuse or Burlington (3 hours away by car).
AFAIK, Cost[1] is "theoretically" nothing if annual income is less than the federal poverty line ($15,650 for an individuality). And might as well be free for an income up to $39,125.
There are some little emergency clinics around in rural places, but its generally like the bare minimum where if you make it there they can give you a bag of blood and an oxygen tank, but I would expect atleast a 45 minute travel time to an actual hospital that can treat you for anything, and it would cost $2,000 for the ambulance trip alone, not to mention the actual hospital bills..
The hospital will have to take you in if you need emergency treatment, provided you make it that far, however they only guarantee the minimum treatment to "stabilize" you, and at that point they are going to expect either an insurance policy be given to them, or your agreement to take on additional medical debt beyond what you already incurred to receive additional treatment. Like if you have a heart attack, they will take you in, give you some nitroglycerin, and try to get it so that they aren't worried about you keeling over within the next 2 hours, but if your heart is still in a lower level of afib and you can't afford treatment? They will give you the boot and tell you to go see a doctor but it ain't an absolute emergency any more.
Or say you crash your car and your leg is crushed. They will stabilize you, but then you or someone else will have to make a financial decision for you or give your insurance. Will you be able to afford the costs of multiple surgeries to pin your shattered leg bones back together and all the rehabilitation? Sure they can do that. Can you already not afford the costs you incurred and certainly can't afford all the additional surgeries and rehabilitation later? Well they will "save" you from all those costs you can't afford by chopping off your leg, knowing that without those other surgeries they will end up cutting it off 6 months later anyway.
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.
I think a lot of people are taking it as a precise prescription. Rather, I think it's the main idea that counts: you can downsize and reduce your expenses by quite a bit. I think this will become ever more important going into the future as the standard of living continues to erode, as it has done for the last 27 years.
I've seen better publicity for a simpler life. Jacob Lund Fisker[0]'s ERE comes to mind.
> They’d need to disabuse themselves of the idea that they ought to abscond to some kind of a tropical Shangri-La; and moreover, 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.
New Mexico, Arizona, even Florida if you're into tropics - have pretty amazing weather, no? And there must be low COL locations there. Now, imagine living in Canada. The warmest place in all of the country is south-western BC and it rains most of the time (the nature is amazing though).
The other version of this is the whole FIRE movement. Instead of living cheap, which also affords the ability to not work much, work as normal (or more than normal) for a shorter time while living cheap, so eventually you can live cheaply forever without working.
Especially tenable for the tech crowd, where salaries are high and potentially scales well with more effort put in, even if for a short duration.
Nobody wants a Breaking Bad ending like Walter White hiding out in a New Hampshire cabin or Ted Kaczynski scribbling his manifesto on cold winter nights.
It sounds nice, atleast until non-daily tasks and costs start to pile up. Goods are not cheaper in a rural area, you don't get an Amazon or Walmart discount for living in the middle of nowhere, medical and dental are not cheaper, general services are far more expensive so I hope you can fix or install most all of your own appliances and plumbing systems and roof, it will cost you a lot more to have wood delivered than cut it yourself for heating and using sawmill cutoffs is not a great material for maintaining a fire overnight. Friends and family are farther and fewer. Law enforcement in these places basically only exist to extort people because that's how they fund themselves and real crime is so uncommon, but of course they still need to pay for maintenance on their MRAPs and Humvees and such and think they are better than the local "yokels". Fire service may or may not cost you money to pay into, or may simply not exist for anything other than making sure it doesn't spread after your house is gone. And of course you are living outside of modern society and being left behind technologically, which isn't a problem for a few years, but after 10+ years you start to become out of touch.
This kind of thing might sound nice from the outside, but if poor rural community living was as nice and cheap as claimed, these kind of areas wouldn't be so cheap or abandoned. These kind of articles always seem like a "grass is greener" type escapist fantasies. Yeah sure there are a handful of unusually better spots, maybe this place is one of them, but 95% of poor rural areas are just... poor rural areas with little to offer. Hope you don't have kids because the schools will be garbage. Hope you don't like going to bars or being super social because 90% of the clientele are the same handful of drunks you see every time.
Just because you can eek out a few cheap years in a place like this in your 20s or 30s doesn't mean it is a great place to actually live. Say you work a decent amount to "save" money for 10 or 15 years, what will you walk away from there financially? You weren't saving city wages that will afford you to move wherever you want, you saved poor rural wages which will afford you.... another slightly less poor rural area or maybe living like a 20 year old in a more prosperous place for a year, your house might be worth less later than what you paid for it, your job might just disappear one day without warning and no viable replacement except for a desperation job at just a bit above minimum wage.
Ive lived in rural areas, mostly poorer areas, my whole life. And yeah sure there are some hippies around surviving, some Amish dudes surviving, a few people are doing a bit better with long-distance traveling jobs like truckers or seasonal work farther away. But 90% of people are just barely surviving, watching their health slowly fail away faster and faster because they can't afford the care to maintain it. Hopefully you can live until you are 60+ without any health problems, but that is a big gamble. If you get sick a single hospital visit can wipe out a decade or more of careful savings. Break an arm or an ankle? There is an entire year's savings or more. You get to watch those few still around you struggling day after day living in shacks or 30 year old decaying mobile homes. Poor rural areas are not some hidden grove of wonder and peace, if it was these places wouldn't have been abandoned to start with.
I don't think living in the boonies is for everyone.
I was in South-Eastern California just visiting desolate areas. One place I stayed at had absolutely nothing: the nearest place to get food or gas was Bishop, CA, a 50-minute drive. Coming from a big city the desolation is appealing at first, but gets tiring pretty soon.
> 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.
I remember reading about a family with 4 kids who lived in a one bedroom house.
The kids slept in two sets of bunk beds in the bedroom. The parents slept on a pull out couch in the living room.
I’m not saying I want to live that way. Just pointing out that people have lived that way before.
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.
Because fox news has convinced people they deserve it is about 90% of it.
I don't know what a healthy young person pays these days. 20 years ago I paid 80/mo for basic catastrophe coverage.
All I know is that it's gone up tremendously since then, and my family plan costs about $2100 a month.
No mention of health expenses. This is often underestimated in all these "Retire Early" scenarios.
At this income level health is covered 100% by Medicaid. Depending on where you live, that can be perfectly fine or pretty bad.
I think a lot of people are missing the larger point. Yes its very possible to live quite inexpensively in the American Siberia... thats not what the author is really getting at. The Author is pointing out that there is a HUGE opportunity for young americans to live in places that aren't a handful of large Metros with outrageous housing costs lots of these places are the heartland, where it is socially unacceptable now for costal middle class adults go.
The authors point resinates for me, and I've seen a different but related model by friends - A couple (Dentist and small business owner) living in semi-rural Kansas (city pop ~40K). Their contention was that normal people in a normal week eat some food, go to work, do kid stuff (school, practices, etc), workout, watch some TV, and sleep a bunch... And theres really nothing about that that is needs to be in a major metro, so they moved to a place where college educated adults from the coasts dare not go- Kansas. The recognize the useful stuff from the metros are the food, culture, etc... and what they did was take a trip one a month to live like kings...
Can you imagine how much more fun you can have with ~400K of disposable income (after living expenses)? Seeing the trips they've taken and the adventures they were able to afford because their 7 bedroom 5 bath house cost ~400K (movie theater and all)... was mind boggling to me. It was all for the small cost of not being able to get access to the metros during the week. Seems worth it to me...
> The recognize the useful stuff from the metros are the food, culture, etc...
Probably most importantly, a thriving job market
What happens when you get sick?
Only way you could live on $500 a month is in a paid off vehicle on public lands in western states where you only drove to buy food. I know because I do it.
How do you find a property like that? Is there a Zillow for cheap rural land?
My cheap rural place is on Zillow, so you can probably just use that. Pull up a map, identify a couple of large cities (St. Louis and Kansas City, for instance), find a point between them, and zoom in. Repeat until you find a spot you like. It's a really, really big country and most of it isn't urban, so there are lots of places to choose from, with a wide variety of weather conditions, population densities, and other aspects.
Such cheap homes all across America: https://tinyurl.com/hnlink
> At the end of it, most people don’t want to live this way. That’s OK — I’m not here to judge them.
What would you judge them for even if you were here for that?
I sold a small import export business I stood up during Covid and after living in NYC for 13 years, decided to get a “fancy instagram bus” after a voice in my head told me to do so.
The next day a friend called, who I hadn’t seen since we got shipwrecked in the gulf of Panama, and told me he had been building out a “fancy instagram School bus” for the last year and between his wife and his pot farm in CA he realized he’d have no time for it.
“I figure you were the guy to buy it from me.”
I said yes and bought a 1 way ticket to Santa Cruz.
I sublet my place in park slope for $3,600 a month furnished which was $1k more a month than the base rent.
I thought I’d spend a few months driving around, go on Phish Tour, and flip the bus for $50k.
That was about 4 years ago.
The bus cost me $36k and within 10 months paid for itself.
I let the place in nyc go entirely after that and for one months rent could drive back and forth across the US.
A $89 parks pass gets me into all the national parks and I can stay on BLM land in the most beautiful places for free.
I soon realized many people have at least 1 home and love having a self contained guest for a week or two. I visited friends, family and clients (I still maintain a high end high performance coaching business working with founders of companies like Asana, Bombas and other interesting folks).
I also run a remote AI research lab for the last 4 years.
I shop at farmers markets or wholefoods.
I love ultimate frisbee and am pretty good, having been a former world games invitee, and any city usually has a game and within an afternoon I can make a dozen or so new friends and be invited to all sorts of things. (pickupultimate.com).
Last year on the eclipse I met a woman in hot springs, Arkansas and fell in love - and she lives in Kansas City so I’ve spent a lot of time here with her the last year.
The creative freedom of having a bus and living in beautiful spaces is unmatched. And knowing if I lose all money, I can buy a 50lb bag of rice and beans, fill up on water, and use my cell phone and solar for a month to figure out the next move, is very comforting.
Of course there have been problems like breakdowns, a friend filling my diesel tank with reg gas, a break in in nyc, and getting hassled for parking legally by house dwellers in Santa Monica, but it’s been a great investment.
So much of “middle class lifestyle” is a trap marketed to you people by the upper classes to get you to opt in to being a modern day share cropper. Taking a couple vacations a year, retiring out of shape and unable to really enjoy life and nature, and coping with pills and drugs and tv and consumption that are primarily part of the problem.
Ps we host an ai / philosophy / founder meetup every Wednesday, come as my vip! Http://earthpilot.ai/play
An expert told me there are places to earn and places to spend in the world. In the cheap places to spend you might want a fun job with very little pay and few hours. You for example earn 400 and spend 600 per month. In the places to earn you should try not to live at all. Ideal is to work 84 hour weeks for 15-20 bucks, rent a bunk bed with a shared kitchen and bathroom and eat whatever cheap crap you can stomach. 50 for the bed 100 for food, save something like 1400. Every week not living like that buys 6-7 MONTHS in the afordable location. Two weeks is a year. Clearly you dont actually need to live. You do 2 to 12 weeks of pure work, enough to slightly burn out. This will make the 1 to 6 year vacation all the more enjoyable.
You also have money in the bank so if you feel the need to burn a few thousand on something you can. It will shorten the vacation but who needs 6 years seriously?
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.
Is this the place? https://redf.in/UXIUBi
I like this article. I think it's a little unrealistic in many ways, but it's good to consider that a life does not require extravagance. However:
>often enough, the “boomers” are the scapegoat; the ones who lived their American Dreams and, as the allegations go, pulled up the ladder behind them as they tasted their successes.
>They’d merely need to content themselves with a manner of living that would be more in line with that of their own great-grandfathers
The problem isn't that we can affordably live like our great-grandparents. It's that we can't affordably live like our parents and grandparents did.
Two words: "Health Insurance"
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?
My main takeaway from the article is that I agree it benefits the younger generation of Americans to consider moving abroad if they are comfortable with a different lifestyle where consumerism is secondary to adaptation. Personally I’m looking forward to traveling to places where being a Blues Guitarist from Texas might be a curiosity rather than a liability (such as in Texas). The biggest export, decade after decade, the US can cite is “culture” and “what is cool” and though other countries do have significantly different political / authority structures, I’m interested in exploring them. Nepal, Panama, Albania, and Vietnam are all on my list.
Going into the armpit forgotten realms of the US is, however, not appealing in the least despite its financial practicality on limited means.
The book "Hinterland" by Phil Neel comes to mind.
Interesting how the author says that people tend to react bitterly when he says stuff like this. And sure enough, the HackerNews comments are mostly people reacting bitterly.
Even beyond the comments, this article was immediately flagged dead despite many upvotes. Then enough people vouched for it to bring it back. I don't find it controversial or inappropriate, but many people apparently do.
If you (generic you, not parent) happen to be one of those who flagged it, maybe you could explain why?
I think the author's main argument is interesting, and despite the good counter arguments already made in this thread (health care, car dependency, social isolation), it does make me think a bit about where I could possibly retire. I live in a smallish, highly-desirable city just north of Seattle that - while being pleasant to live in - is becoming extremely expensive.
For me, one of the biggest issues with living out in a small rural town like this is the culture. From my experience, the majority of rural areas in the United States are now extremely politically conservative. Going anywhere outside of the Puget Sound metroplex always reminds me of this reality... lots of MAGA and confederate flags, billboards promoting the latest ultra right wing candidate, etc.
I sometimes wonder how much Amish have to spend a month.
> Taxes: $41
> 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.
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.
I'd expect 5G home internet to be cheaper than satellite, though probably still more expensive than an ultra-low-cost cellular plan.
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.
living outside of society is not viable. but its true that the economic system that we all live inside of is not serving us well because of corruption. everything is much more expensive than it should be. i think the best solution is for people to make their own little societies, bring back towns, and instead of a walmart and box stores put people to work growing food and making things. its the only way to live affordably without moving to another country.
“Internet: Use library” says all you need to hear about this wonderful bargain of a location.
Worse than a Boomer who got his and pulled up the ladder is a Boomer who got his, pulled up the ladder, and lectures a youngster to go live in a miserable cold place in the middle of nowhere with no heat.
I am sure people are managing it in New Orleans.
There were several years (late 2015 to mid 2017) where I did a much less extreme version of this. I stopped because, as many commenters have noted, I was (to quote this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44077097) "living off the economic surplus of [others]", and perhaps even taking opportunities away from those who needed them much more than I did.
Some anecdotes from that time:
I had a $30/mo phone plan that got me 100 minutes, and 5GB of data at HSPA+ speeds. I basically never worked from home, even if that had been an option, because one too many `npm install`s or video conferences would've set me over the edge. I brought my personal laptop to the office to install OS updates, and took downloads back home on a flash drive. And if I had an unexpected call to a 1-800 support hotline - one that I knew would take an hour - I'd literally go find a payphone, where you could call it for free (although it's a much higher charge to the recipient).
I developed a strong love of free-to-me media and entertainment. I was a voracious reader of library books, got my news off broadcast TV, listened to FM radio for music (to be fair, I'd always - and still - done that), and so on. I was attending one or two tech meetups a week.
I didn't have a car. Being a 15-minute walk from a train station helped drastically, but I wasn't as close to the city as most of my colleagues were (maybe 20min over others' average). Visiting my parents took 115 minutes (30 minutes by car) and I did it every other week. Twice a week, I'd take a commuter rail train south of the city, then walk 20 minutes to get where I was going. Most of the time I'd bum a ride back to the station with someone else there. All said, it was probably two extra hours of commuting whenever I did this. There were even times where I'd carry odd things home from Home Depot on the train.
And then, as we got older, many of my friends started to move far out of the city, to places unserved by our transit system. I was totally dependent on my friends still in the city to carpool, even though I was almost certainly making more than they were. I wish - truly I wish - that I could say that this was the straw that broke the camel's back, what made me snap out of it.
Sadly, that honor went mostly to both my work changing (much more teleconferencing / Zoom), and my family situation changing (needing to commute out to the burbs regularly, sometimes with little notice).
I still remember some of the jibes I'd get while doing this - "why do you make life so hard on yourself?" and "you don't know how to have money".
I look back on that time and do think it was an interesting experiment, and to an extent, I'm glad I did it for the perspective. But really, I was naive. I wasn't doing something that somehow made me more independent, or less wasteful. I was dependent on much of other's output, and really only wasting my own ability to be productive.
In many countries around the world, $432 is more than enough.
BeWelcome.org is free accomodation for travellers, so if you need somewhere for just a couple of nights, you can stay. It’s safe; there’s an entire safety team dedicated to handling complaints.
If you settle down for too long though, it is recommended to share in paying the rent or utilities, out of politeness.
i'd have to do a lot of research to find a cheap rural area that I would be able to exist in after sundown.
Missing healthcare costs.
at that income level Medicaid is an option in many states.
Same with education and such. "How to live on $432 a month", "... with society subsidizing a bunch of the important parts."
>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.
You lost me here. Weather is probably the most important thing to me. Cold weather gets into my bones and leaves me low and uncomfortable. My body physiology is such that even if I wear appropriate clothing, I end up sweating under them and paradoxically get even colder. Winters for me just mean being cold, wet and uncomfortable and is not worth it for me.
Disregard systemic problems, place the blame entirely on younger generation using too much tiktok/uber/doordash/netflix/whatever. You should live like it's 1899 out in the fields and basically enjoy none of the good sides of modern life. This is part of the reason why "OK boomer" is so popular.
(Also, living that far from urban centers when you're not a farmer is a burden on society. You require much more road, water pipes and power line maintenance than someone that lives in the city.)
The US is packed with vacant infrastructure over hundreds of dying cities where you can get a nice home that has electricity, water and sewer and trash removal and schools etc...for dirt cheap.
You could make the payment trading options with an almost meager portfolio. Evil stock market and corporations could buy you a free house.
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.
Is there no culture, or no "culture"?
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.
How would you describe the local cultural opportunities in your area?
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.
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.
If someone were buying a place in Michigan today (as a second home) what would be some towns (villages?) to consider?
No idea honestly. I had some family connections near the place I acquired.
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.
yes, Massena and Ogensburg. Plagues of flies and mosquitos. Frozen car batteries. Snow plows. Rust.
I've been thinking a lot about this in my personal context. I'm not super wealthy and thinking about the inevitable moment when I will work less and need to live on what I've scraped together by then. I currently live in Berlin in a gentrified area which is nice to be in but also getting more expensive rapidly. It's convenient for me to be here. But I wouldn't mind being in a much cheaper place otherwise.
I see a few technical trends that would enable me to live quite far away from Berlin mid term that could be a lot more affordable.
- Starlink provides good enough internet pretty much anywhere. Rural Germany is famous for its lack of connectivity. I could live anywhere in Germany and have a decent connectivity and be able to work remotely. Complete science fiction until recently. But now feasible. I expect there will be competitors in a few years.
- Improved modes of transport to remote locations via autonomous driving electrical cars, mini buses, drones etc. could unlock rural destinations. Electrical means cost per mile/km is expressed in kwh. About 2-4 km/kwh. Autonomous means there is no driver to pay or tiring driving to do. Even at Germany's high-ish grid prices, a 50 km commute becomes quite affordable (a cup of coffee worth of energy). And you can take a nap, relax, or work while you move and be quite comfortable while being moved. There are a lot of affordable housing options starting from about 10km away from where I currently live. 50km, we are talking rural Brandenburg which has depopulated significantly since the fall of the wall. Ghost villages, lack of employment, etc. I know several people that moved to the edge of Berlin or beyond and have a great standard of living there.
- Tiny/prefab housing means the current cost of constructing houses is increasingly complete bullshit. I don't need a artisanally crafted house at great expense. I just need a small amount of space that is comfortable. That shouldn't cost me north of half a million and put me in debt for decades. And modern materials means such a place could be well insulated and relatively cheap to heat.
- Low cost, renewable energy is starting to dominate. Germany has really high energy prices. But it's investing to fix that. Those investments might pay off in a few decades and lower the cost of energy. That's good news if I'm heating with a heatpump, and am being moved around electrically.
So, I need some land reasonably close to where the action is (Berlin in my case) but not in the middle of it. An affordable & comfortable way to get to Berlin when I need to. And some housing that won't break the bank. I think all of those are well in reach for well below 100K and next to nothing in monthly cost. All I need is some kwh of power and water. And the usual insurances, taxes, and what not. And food, which I might even grow some myself if I had enough room for a garden. And being far away from all the hipster areas in Berlin, probably means local shops are going to be relatively cheap.
Of course this being Germany, the obstacle to this is going to be immense bureaucratic inertia. You can't just plonk down a tiny house anywhere you want. There are rules! Designed to frustrate anything entirely reasonable like that.
But I imagine similar things are going to be true everywhere and there is going to be fierce competition between depopulated regions to attract people and their money. And when push comes to shove, I'm not German and could be persuaded to move elsewhere. Also, if you extrapolate to autonomous RVs, you could just live in those and let them drive you to some remote parking space at night and to charging and water points for access to the essentials. Be in nature when you want to be, drive up to a city when you need to. Move south in the winter, north in the summer, etc.
Great article, yes, its the classic "I want to not work AND keep my current lifestyle" I dont know if it was social media, bitterness at boomers, or whatever, that made most zoomers behold this pipe dream.
Loved the Massena example, but I went to school near there (Clarkson) and the winters are pretty rough. Summer / fall is beautiful though!
There's so many issues with this article. Ignoring the real costs of living in declining rural areas (poor health services, vanishing community), they also fail to account that you also cannot raise a family there properly. Schooling is often poor and the infrastructure poorer and you're fucking over your kids future so you can play pretend boomer while ignoring the biggest things they benefited from.
> A long and mostly endless stream of “blackpills” about the cost of housing can be readily found on any social media platform — and often enough, the “boomers” are the scapegoat; the ones who lived their American Dreams and, as the allegations go, pulled up the ladder behind them as they tasted their successes.
I've often heard the criticism that Boomers lived unsustainably and then pulled the ladder up behind them, making life harder for future generations. But what I don't often hear is a breakdown of the specific policy decisions that led to this. What were they?