I find that city living enables me to live introvertedly. If I want to be around people without being intimate with people, there’s nothing better than walking down a busy street or eating lunch at a crowded restaurant. I can absorb “people energy” without getting burned by it.
Indeed, I can’t imagine living as a hermit out in the country as much as I do in the city. Living in close proximity to others means that I enjoy the safety that comes in numbers, but I still enjoy my privacy and personal space. I don’t have to carry a cell phone with me when I’m hiking about the city. But I would if I did the same stroll out in the woods.
Including air & noise pollution. I’ve lived in the country and while I prefer living in the city, the two things I miss about the country are the clean air and the quiet.
I feel connected to both, though raised in suburbs, and always lived in the urban core. But my Mom’s family was from a subsistence farm,and we spent all our summers running wild there as children. I still adore going to the country, the woods, the wilds. And am envious of those who get to make a life there.
For myself I prefer a smallish city, a couple of hours from a major metropolis, surrounded by farmers fields.
I think living in the country would make me a slightly different person than I am now. Better or worse I couldn’t say!
I grew up in a rural area of Louisiana but I have lived in everything from major cities (New Orleans, Boston proper) to other rural areas in New Hampshire and Vermont to a very suburban area of Massachusetts now. I understand where the OP is coming from. There does seem to be a disconnect between rural and city people especially in terms of politics and overall policy. Rural people as a general rule, understand perfectly why some people like to live in cities, even the largest ones even if they don’t want to do it themselves.
Almost all of them visit cities, take in what they have to offer and then leave to go back home to their preferred lifestyle. The reverse isn’t commonly true however. Many true urban types think that all people would want to live their lifestyle if only they could see the one true way and be ‘saved’. I can see both sides of the issue and I also believe that the urban types are being the more narrow minded and judgmental of the two sides.
Even though I live in suburbia now and work in a place that is more rural, I want even more of a rural lifestyle deep down and I will get it back some day. I am a semi-conservative that reads the Mother Earth News the same way some people look at porn. Give me a self-sustaining farm in the middle of nowhere (with internet access) and I will being happier than my pigs playing in shit.
I grew up in the city, and I loved it. It was the perfect place to live through the first 3 decades of my life. There was a lot to do, plenty of people to meet, and it was easy to get around even if you didn’t drive.
Now, I am in my 50s and I live in the country, about a half hour from the nearest small city and an hour from a large city. I live here mainly for the quiet, the space, and the freedom. Maybe because I got more cantankerous as I got older, I started to resent being subject to arbitrary rules put in place by the city I was paying taxes to. Who decided 3 dogs were acceptable but 4 were excessive? Why can’t I park my own truck on my own property?
Out here I get to decide these things for myself, and I can build a chicken coop if I feel like it, or a cob goat shed, or a geodesic dome garage.
That freedom and the stars are enough to keep me here at this age, but my 25-year-old self would have been incredibly unhappy.
I know this won’t make you feel any better, but they’re like that to white (that is, European descent milk white white) people, too. My husband lived in a small rural town for 25 years - he was a firefighter and paramedic, asked every year to be the announcer for the town’s annual patriotic parade, loaned tools and cars, literally saved half the town’s life at one point or another…and he was still “that new guy from Milwaukee that _____ married.”
Yes, this. I like the, perhaps ironic, isolation of living in a city. Physical privacy is so limited that social custom has raised polite fiction privacy to an art form. I’m comfortable with that. I like that none of my neighbors know about the loser I dated in high school, or who my father is, and they don’t judge me because of my brother’s behavior. I like that the only things they know about me are what I chose to share. Y’all here on SDMB know about 10000x more about me than the people who live in my building.
There’s also that whole ecology thing to consider. Cities, while dirtier in a certain visible sense, have a smaller per person carbon footprint and use less energy (again, per person) by most researcher’s calculations, thanks to the shape of our buildings, the “heat sink” effect of asphalt and concrete, public transportation and geographic proximity of most of the things we need. While one could theoretically live fairly green in the country, most people don’t, any more than most urbanites go out of their way to be green in the city. But in the city, we’re “greener” without trying much.
I’ve done 'em all: suburban, rural and urban. All of them have their benefits, and I wouldn’t be heartbroken to live in any of them, but I do see more benefits to urban living than the other two. So while I understand that some people prefer rural living, no, I don’t really understand why. Except for that being able to go out into your own yard naked thing. That I grok.
I wouldn’t want to live in the country, but I have my solid reasons. Wells are a pain in the ass, septic systems are a pain in the ass, propane tanks are a pain in the ass, being too far from grocery and drug stores is a pain in the ass. Also, the isolation scares me.
I wouldn’t ever want to live in a city either though. Crowded, dirty, and noisy. I feel safe in them though because someone is always watching what’s happening to you.
for Mom, a supermarket in the same block, four more within less than 200 yards but she, oh no, has to cross one or two streets
for Littlebro, a supermarket within 200 yards, he needs to cross one street
for Middlebro, the nearest thing resembling a grocery is about 1km away and better go by car.
All live in the same small town.
For me, in a town 1/10th the size, it’s four small supermarkets, a fishmonger, two bakeries and half a dozen butchers within a 10 minute walk. And I have much better views than either bro.
I was a street kid and really hadn’t seen more greenery than the trees at the parks around my family’s tenement until I was old enough to hop trains and hitch rides into the countryside. At the time Brooklyn was, in my opinion, an overcrowded dump and I didn’t find anything romantic about it. Living on top of others, all cramped together like animals at a Chinese zoo.
Funny enough, I dreaded family vacations out to the “country” to camp. It was sickening to me, even as a child, to hand over money to get into a campsite, as if the great outdoors were a fucking amusement park.
I live in a somewhat rural area now, and I wouldn’t trade if for anything.
Perhaps surprisingly, none of those things is a pain in the ass at all. We have a spring-fed well with the best water I’ve ever tasted, and we haven’t had to do any maintenance on the well system in the 10 years we’ve been here. All we’ve had to pay for water is what we pay for power to run the pump. We have a septic system that we get pumped out every other year but which otherwise functions about the same as a city sewer system, once again costing only the power to run the pump. Our propane tank gets filled automatically by the guy from the co-op when it runs low.
In contrast, when we lived in the suburbs, we had to have our sewer line snaked every other year to combat roots from the numerous silver maple trees they planted. The city inspector was on our block to inspect a rental one day and decided the rest of the residents had to paint their garages. We were forced to license our dogs despite having no history of loose dogs or neighbor complaints. All of that stuff was a far bigger PITA than anything we’ve had to deal with out here in the boonies.
We are isolated out here, but we think that’s a good thing ;).
If visitors ask where the bathroom is we say," What, you’re too high and mighty to go out behind the shed like the rest of us?"
I vote for the city. I enjoy museums, sporting events, and the diversity of cultures I see in a big city. I do enjoy driving through the country and stopping for a meal, but I would be bored if I lived there. As far as suburban life - no thanks. Like Jimmy Buffett sang, “She died and went to the suburbs.”
I love city life because I hate driving. I love being able to walk to places and take public transportation.
Conversely, I really enjoy the time I spend visiting relatives in rural Alberta (Canada). Summers are beautiful (I only visit in the summer), walks in the forest and around the ranch are lovely, and the view extends to the Rocky Mountains 50 miles away or so. But I think I would really get sick of having to drive everywhere, and really miss being able to walk to restaurants, the supermarket, and bars.
For me it’s because whenever I spend time in the country, everything becomes a huge hassle. I get that you can enjoy the quiet, the open spaces, and the privacy, so if you live in the city you’ll be missing things that you enjoy.
But if you live in the country, you miss things that you need, like food, services, and employment. Sure you can access those things, but it involves spending hours in the car and burning gallons upon gallons of a non-renewable resource. On top of that, your choices are limited (generally one or two grocery stores with a much smaller selection) and reduced hours (everything’s closed on Sunday, few things are open past 5 or 6 pm). It’s a frustrating existence once you realize how bloody convenient everything is in the city.
At the end of the day I understand that it’s all just personal preference, but the difference between “wants” and “needs” is what makes it easy to declare one as better than the other.
Nothing wrong with the country, the problem is mostly the people. I’m sure the country would be a great place to live if it wasn’t so full of the kind of people who live in the country.
No argument here, love the country, I could never tolerate the city, too many people too close together
Besides when the Inevitable Zombie Uprising occurs, where would you rather be, stuck in a concrete jungle trapped with the rest of the Purina Zombie Chow, or out away from the Hordes…
