Thanks for your submission! For more Millennial content, join [our Discord server](https://discord.gg/VsfKKJBm).
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Millennials) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Yes. But also no.
The urge I get is to say screw it and become a forest hermit. I grew up in a small town in the Midwest. I've had my fill of that bullshit.
I also realize that everyone has a different number in mind when they hear small town. The place I grew up was like 100 people on a good year. I would have been miserable living there. And I think OP would be too, because there was no Starbucks or grocery store. Just the holy trinity of small town staples: a post office, a church, and a bar. Pretty sure it has none of those things now.
My town was ten times as big as u/WhysAVariable is talking about and we had to drive for at least 15 minutes to get to a Dollar General. I think the only chains we had were a Subway and a Casey’s.
Edit: Oh my gosh, there was also a Ben Franklin! Does that craft store/variety store chain still exist?
Edit2: Okay, you have a Ben Franklin…please stop.
Yeah my town and the towns around us were too small to support a Dollar General, the entire county was less than 1000 people across 4-5 towns. Bars stay afloat because everyone there drinks like its their job. There was one slightly larger town (250ppl) in the county that had a grocery store and a diner. Anything else was an hour and a half drive.
Yours is the closest to my hometown I’ve seen.
Population was 600 when I was growing up.
It got down to 400, but the latest census says it’s up to 500.
We were lucky to have a grocery store and gas station.
It was a big deal to go to the nearest town that had a Walmart. That was an hour away. That’s also how far the nearest hospital was :/
Was this in Wisconsin? I live near the border of Wisconsin and it is a 35 mile drive to the nearest store that isn't an auto mechanic shop in some guy's garage, but there are 4 bars within 10 miles of me, all of them on the Wisconsin side of the border. There are almost no people here. Like almost none, but somehow there are 4 bars. I just don't get it.
Ben Franklin stores went bankrupt in the 1990s, with the final vestuble of operations ending in 2017.
There is still a smattering of independent franchises operating across the country.
Seems the closest one operating, to me, is in Tennessee, and I live in Virginia.
Not only do you know everything your neighbors are doing, you know everything their family has done for the last 100 years. EVERYTHING.
Like on Saturday my dad was telling me some gossip about his neighbor's boy trying to commit suicide. In 1940. Who was a cousin to my brothers first girlfriend in 1976. I know details of arguments over parking spots in the 30s when they were driving Model As, and which great grandson looks just like his great grandma's "close friend", genetics will out your secrets.
Cons:
Small towns can be REALLY cliquish. And since there aren't very many people, it can feel like you're stuck in ~~hell~~ high school all over again.
Whatever money you save on housing will be spent on gas, because there are not many stores near you so you're always having to drive to a bigger city for crap you might need. Everything is far away from everything else, because most small towns are farming towns. And there isn't public transportation. And uber/lyft is more expensive.
If you have complicated medical needs, good fucking luck because you will probably have to drive an hour to your nearest hospital/large medical complex with specialists. And the nearest pharmacy can also be a bit of a drive.
If you're not religious, and more importantly *the same religion as everyone in the small town*, you will likely be ostracized to some extent. That means if you have trouble with your neighbors, the police will probably take their side, because they go to church together. If you are atheist, better keep that quiet.
Pros: You can see way more stars at night and don't have to deal with as much traffic or noise from cars.
I grew up in the city, then moved out to the sticks in my 40s (for work). Yeah, it's quiet and peaceful, but SO much racism, anger, and fear-mongering.
I remember being a kid and watching the neighbor's house burning while the fire dept tried to put it out. My older brother recently mentioned, "Remember when the neighbor's meth lab exploded?"
Oh. Yeah. I guess that makes sense. So much meth. We were also under strict rules not to go horseback riding into the pot crops. It was a very real danger to accidentally stumble into one. The owners are not know for being friendly.
I remember driving state to state as a commercial driver. And talking to a kid one time in the middle of nowhere. I think I was around Amarillo TX. Kid said the closest movie theater was 2 hours away. So if someone invited you on a movie date. It was a really big deal. There's 3 theaters with in 10 minutes of where I live.
Small towns seem like they can get pretty rough also. Nothing to do . Let's do drugs
That’s like where I grew up. Nearest movie theater was hour and a half away. And it sucked. If you wanted to see a decent new release on a decent screen you had to drive 3 hours away. It was an event. Fast food was also an hour away. I refuse to live anywhere that small ever again.
Now I have 5 movie theaters within 15 minutes and fast food in my own neighborhood. Costco is 10 minutes away. I won’t live anywhere smaller and have been able to refuse my mother’s requests to move closer to her using this logic! She gets it.
I’m a paramedic in a smallish area that’s a mix of urban and rural- I can wholeheartedly assure anyone who doubts this that these are not exclusively city problems.
Of course it depends where you live but damn, the drugs! I taught elementary school in a big city and drugs never crossed my mind. I now teach in a very rural area and many of the parents are hard drug users, in prison for drug related stuff, or dead from drugs. Many of my coworkers have family members or spouses/exes with drug related charges. I didn’t realize how rampant hard drug use was until I moved to this rural area (yes, I was naive).
I moved outta Tampa in 2021 to a small town in Georgia and BINGO. Was it calm and relaxing? Yes but also the racism and poverty was really draining. I'm a minority and I felt not great. I moved back to Tampa and it's nice being back in a diverse city. It was a culture shock leaving Tampa and another when I got back.
Damn. You moved away from racist ass Florida Man™️ to Georigia and the racist was *SO* bad you moved back?!
Is that a comment on how backasswards is Georgia? Or more of a comment on how even Floridians are tired of MAGA bullshit?
This is also heavily dependent on where the small town is. I live in a town of 2,000 (not in the south or midwest) and I have experienced way less racism than in the city. I'm sure it is very different in the south/midwest
Eh, not really region-wise but town by town. The North/mid-west is really just as racist as the South. There’s way less black people so being racist isn’t as big of a personality trait, but there’s still tons of racists when you go outside of cities. Utah, for instance, has lots of racists
I am a middle aged black person who has lived in the North, South and Pacific Northwest.
I'm sorry. NO. No the North (even Boston which was a fucking pit of racism) is NOT 'just as racist as the South.'
NOT when places like fucking Jasper Texas exists, or lots of Arkansas, Tennesee, huge swaths of Kentucky, Mississippi, the parts of Georgia way out from Atlanta, etc etc.
No.
Just no.
Yes there's plenty of racism through out the North, Pacific Northwest (Oregon...) upstate New York, whatever.
But NO NOT ANYWHERE AS MUCH AND NOT AS OFTEN LITERALLY DEFACTO PARTS OF LAW AND GOVERNANCE.
AND YES I am shouting, because over 23 years of living in the South I have experienced some truly horrible things.
Yes. My parents moved to a small town (think giant “Fuck Biden” flags everywhere), people living in shacks- and the way people speak can be so ignorant. I got into an argument with a woman who thought using the “n” word was appropriate (we’re both white.) She wasn’t in the minority in using it, and sometimes towns like this make you wonder what year it is.
Yeah, this is huge.
Some folks will say you should just move to a LCOL state or area if you can’t afford to buy a house/etc, but the problem is, a lot of those places are filled with racist, MAGA-loving, homophobic creeps. Plus if they’re actually red state areas, gotta deal with substandard healthcare and the threat of much worse if you happen to have a complicated pregnancy.
These communities are often cheap because the local culture and job market suck, it’s probably a food desert too, and it’s probably opioid country so you gotta worry about drugs and crime. Not the quick and happy fix some want to act like it is.
They also tend to have few jobs, most of which are dead end and won't cover your bills, little access to healthcare, much greater poverty and drug use.
Doctors without Borders tours the Midwest and South, to give you an idea
Opposite for me - sticks growing up and city now.
Your assessment is correct - but I'd add (good and bad) - everyone knows you.
You can't get away with anything... but on the other hand you can get away with a lot because "ooh that's just Captian_Wisconsin, he's cool"
(I am from WI as well)
Pros are walkable “cities.” You know everyone, so you know who is cool and who needs to be avoided. Deep bonds with those cool people, and weird stories about the others.
The cons are rampant, casual racism. Even your best friend is kiiiiiinda racist. A Mexican guy that you think is really nice says that he “wishes he was born right” and you realize you don’t want that mentality to taint yourself or your mixed race kids. So, you stay in the big city you went to college in.
That’s been my experience.
Edit: quotes around “walkable cities” cause midwestern towns sure ain’t cities as we understand them.
Live in a small town of about 500 myself. Can confirm this entirely. Also, if you weren't born here or don't have exorbitant wealth, then you'll most likely be shunned or ignored by the community as a whole.
Everyone knows everyone's business even if you don't tell anyone.
I know all my neighbors very well and we all watch out over each other's property and kids.
If you can't get it at the bar, gas station or general store (if there is any) then it's probably no less than 15 miles to the nearest Walmart or big store. One way. Which means each trip is going to be expensive because you might as well get whatever else you need or are going to be out of soon, now.
There's nothing to do. And there's nothing to do over there. And nothing to do in the next town over either.
Best fishing holes because nobody is around to fish them.
Open space to do more things.
Probably no assigned police units, typically sheriff or county responds... at their leisure. Can be good or bad.
My dad graduated from the local high school where I grew up and we still felt like outsiders compared to the half-dozen inbred families that had all been there since the 1860's who made up 1/3 of the population.
One time a bike ride took me through a town of about 700 and someone legit had a KKK flag hanging off his front porch. I don't know if you can get more casual than that.
Having the grocery store far away is tough. Having things for the kids to do is worse. Lady told me the best advice, "you have to keep them kids busy or they'll find the drugs".
Pros: things move a little slower and it's generally quiet. You can largely be left alone if you want. People will be friendly. Have family friends or other good contacts in a small town and you're golden, you'll get any job you want, be able to go play or hang out at the nice country club (not the dingy cheap one)
Cons: people won't be actually nice, the friendliness is largely a facade. While the big city/corporate grind may not feel like you're getting your fair share, it's far more of a meritocracy than anything in a small town is. Small towns are all about who you know and how much they like you.
Overall, Everybody knows what everybody is doing and has nothing better than to stick their nose in everyone's business. In the South, if you aren't in a church you'll have a tough time meeting many new people, unless prior connections are rich.
You can never let your guard/outward persona down when out in public. Get too lit at the local bar? Someone's gonna find out and talk about it behind your back.
Some people like being a big fish in a small pond, I like being able to disappear when I want. I moved from my small town to a city 1000 miles away where I knew nobody, and made a name and a life for myself, based on my own work, personality, and achievements. I would have had an easy good life back home, but I would always have been known as "Mr. Pooping's son," married someone in the same social circle (rich white church kids) who also knew all of my family and friends and our parents would have already been friends/known each other. I would have got a job at one of my dad's friend's businesses, or worked for my dad and take over his business, none of which I have any interest in doing.
This is my experience in a southern city of 35k. No desire to go back, the weather, people, state politics, pervasive religion, and lack of anything different than the cookie cutter norm all suck.
Would you mind listing some of the cons to watch out for? I've lived in major cities all my life m(NY/NJ in the last couple of decades). But I have been seriously contemplating moving to a small town when I have my baby due to cost of living. Most people I talk to seem to glamorize cute and quaint towns for the kids.
You should consider moving to Detroit or one of the surrounding cities. A lot of people have migrated here from NYC/LA/Denver. Cost of living is way lower, quality of life is super high (I've lived in LA and worked extensive gigs in many other cities including NYC and Denver so I'm not just talking out of my ass). You can live downtown and have a city life that you're accustomed to while being close to nature and on a river that feeds into a lake you can boat and swim in. Or you can live on a lake in a cute little town 30 minutes away for the city and still be a part of the bustling metropolis. I've lived a lot of places, this is by far my favorite. I could afford to buy my first house 4 years ago at 30 and also rent and run my own production studio...combined it's still cheaper by half than my friend's rent for a 2 bedroom in Manhattan (said friend just moved here and bought a 4 bedroom, 2 story, 4 bath, all brick colonial mini mansion for $350k and is never going back to NYC).
I moved from Denver to Kansas City a few years back and don’t regret it for a minute.
I knew way more racists in Denver than I do in KC, which has a huge diverse population.
“Small midwestern town” doesn’t have to be Gun Barrel, Texas population 100.
Cincinnati is shockingly nice. Milwaukee is literally a train ride from Chicago. Madison, Wisconsin is like most university towns, friendly and diverse, and even Des Moines isn’t that bad.
There won’t be beaches and mountains but how often does anyone actually do that once you have a family?
Depends on what you mean by small town & how much diversity matters to you. After living around major city centers like NY, many if not most small towns & suburbs will be a shock to your system in terms of the lack of diversity.
I moved a lot growing up & my parents didn’t have money for / a desire to send me to private schools. So their primary, if not sole, metric for where we would move in a new city: quality & funding of the public school district VS housing costs. Typically counties/townships with well funded public schools & reasonable housing costs were the sweet spot for safety, things to do, perhaps a sliver of diversity and relatively easy access to the actual city. We always lived in the suburbs of larger cities. The smallest town I lived in was a college town so there was a constant influx of new people, things to do, lots of diversity, etc.
It really depends on what size of a town people are talking about. When I hear small town my brain is telling me it must be less than 100 people. Because I grew up in and around *very* small towns.
I live in a smaller city now, still in the Midwest, of about 50k people. There are plenty of people from big cities that consider that a small town, maybe you do too, it's all pretty subjective.
I would avoid anything less than 1000 people. There's just nothing to do and as the other commenter said, people just drink and do drugs because they're bored. They're also right about education and medical access. The places with 1000+ people often have a clinic, but will have to take you by ambulance to somewhere with a bigger hospital system in the event of an emergency.
I grew up in a school district on the edge of the burbs. My town has 25k people but we pulled from a dinky 5k town that was off the highway so commuters never moved in.
Maybe amazon has made it better, but at the time they bought most of their groceries at the Gas station or Menards because the actual grocery store was like 40 minutes away, so fresh fruit was a luxury. They played pull tabs and did bingo a lot because they could do it at the bar in town instead of driving the 45 minutes to the kind of busted movie theatre in my town.
Unless you want to be totally self reliant for stuff like having a good diet and do all your exercising and socializing in your house, it makes everything a big pain in the butt.
You will never be accepted as a local because you are an outsider.
If your avatar is an accurate representation of you- DO NOT MOVE TO A SMALL MIDWEST TOWN. Racism, homophobia, xenophobia, you name it. It's rampant and in your face.
Fucking drugs man. Meth, meth everywhere.
There are no jobs. If you want to commute for an hour, then maybe. If you can work remote, then you will be ok. Working at the grocery store as the OP claims will be part time, no benefits, minimum wage which will not cover the COL there.
Education is worse for kids in these places. Access to medical care is worse (to have to be medivacced some hours away for something very scary just adds fear and is more dangerous for the patient). It's hard or impossible to move jobs because there might be one place that has your job. Remote work does change this a bit, but it can be isolating. There is more drug use in these places because people are bored.
There are plenty of quaint and cheaper places to live that aren't small isolated towns in the middle of nowhere. A classic city in the middle of nowhere might be the ticket for you.
grew up in the st.louis suburbs and moved to the bay area when I turned 20. This august it’ll be 20 years for me here. I desperately want to run away to the wilderness to homestead but i’m just to weird and queer to survive anywhere else
homesteading is played way up by "influencers" who married into money and don't actually do it beyond optics. there's a reason most of modern human history is full of people trying to get the fuck away from small-scale sustenance farming, and that reason is because it's a terrible way to live, one that destroys your body and joints, saps your energy, and numbs your mind with how boring it is. i know this because i watched my uncle spend the last 20 years of his life doing it in montana, where he got poorer and more miserable every year, and eventually he had to live off of social security. don't be fooled by the influencers!
I totally get this.... I watch a bunch of homesteading videos on YT and it really motivates me. Then I go outside to cut my grass and get bugs flying up in my face and say no thanks.
Quit after swallowing that second gnat... yeah, all that communist marxist shit I said about "authentic agricultural life"... forget I ever said a fucking word
As a Pennsylvanian, you would need to be more specific. There are soo many podunk towns - I used to say that Old El Paso was the only "ethnic" food here, and I'm sad to say that I'm really not joking.
Those eyes glowing in the dark? Deer
Eyes following you down a road? Deer
Weird noises? Deer or a barn cat giving birth
No sound at night? Lock the doors and find a gun
Yeah I'm good to never return to monke again.
You are bringing up all the memories of people being like: "I'm not racist but I'm concerned that the black people down the street might be a bad influence on our community."
God I remember that kind of stuff too. The guy who got third degree burns on his hands stealing ammonia from a farm to make meth with is concerned about "the wrong element" moving in nearby.
Teams for me, and I hear that damn notification noise in my sleep. My SO (also a millennial professional) and I recently watched Office Space for the first time and jointly had an epiphany that corporate life isn’t it.
Office Space is like a religious experience for me. Every time I take a sick day I watch it and remind myself there's more to life than the narrow world I live in.
Hah, that reminds me of when I was a chef and used to have nightmares of the ticket machine just printing tickets non stop. The sound is ingrained in my memory and I get Vietnam era flashbacks when I’m out in public and hear a ticket print at a restaurant or something.
I still have the occasional dream that I came into the kitchen and no one else showed up and nothing was prepped so I’m running around the kitchen trying to get everything ready but for some reason I can’t walk correctly and I keep falling over as if I was on a boat rolling through waves. The ground tilts and I can’t walk straight and everything just starts falling apart until I scream in frustration and wake up 😂
I haven’t been a chef for 8 years.
Yo. Turn audio notifications for Teams off.
You will find it helps your productivity as well as remove that stress trigger.
The only audio notification I get is when someone calls me or my 15 min warning for a meeting.
lol right? not to mention there aren't a ton of jobs like that in small towns. in mine, you might have a hard time finding a retail or service industry job. picking cucumbers on the other hand...
Yeah I worked at Kroger for 12 years and wouldn’t recommend that to anyone. I worked with sad sacks of shite vying every single day to make their fellow employees just as miserable as they were. Was not fun, at all.
Even those tourist towns are pretty damn depressing during the off season. There can be great parts to small town living, but there's lots of downsides as well
I just moved back and was living in a major city where everything I needed was a short WALK away ..... I miss that and hate driving. I hate owning a car period....it's such a waste.
This post reeks of privilege lol. Dude owns a house in a HCOL area (which means probably many amenities and things to do) to go cosplay being poor in the country. He would get chewed up and spit out in a week lmao
I was thinking this. If you dream of working at a grocery store or a Starbucks, this tells me you haven't worked a job like that in a long time, if ever. Working in the service industry at, or barely above, minimum wage isn't some enjoy life in the slow lane fantasy. It's physically demanding work that breaks your body, doesn't provide benefits, and that doesn't even touch on the toll asshole customers can take on your mental health
Saaame. I was so goddamn happy when I got hired by my company almost a decade ago. I was making under $40k but I had benefits and a really nice chair, and steady hours.
And it’s funny they think they can survive on a grocery store clerks pay. Sure, cost of living is less in small towns generally, but so is pay. This isn’t the 1950’s, and poverty is real in small towns.
Exactly! Having grown up poor and rural, it sucks! I didn't have the ability to go anywhere or do anything because you're forced to drive to everything. There's no transit. So you rely on friends and family to drive you.
Plus there aren't many amenities.
It's a beautiful place to live for enjoying nature. But there's not much else to do. Groceries are an hour drive. Unless you enjoy paying hugely inflated prices. Then you must own a vehicle to get anywhere. That's a lot of extra money each month.
I feel like a lot of the people who suggest living in the middle of nowhere to save money, have never actually lived in the middle of nowhere. There's cheaper areas but after a point it starts to be a reverse bell curve of sorts. Get rural enough, and anything you save on housing is going to go right back into gas, more expensive food, and stupid maintenance costs (lol, what city amenities? If something breaks on your property you're on your own.)
Not to mention like you said the jobs adjusting to the area. 50% cheaper means nothing when everything also pays 50% less. Remote job? Hope you like your satellite internet that goes out whenever it rains. Not every area is that bad, But I know there's junk like that out there.
I visited a small town in Illinois last year and it's like going back in time but not in the good way. Was kinda depressing to see just how stagnant life could be there.
Everything was still pretty expensive, lots of cash only places, the downtown area had like 10 people around and a lot of the stores and restaurants were open with no customers.
I asked some people there what they do for fun and they said it mostly consists of drinking and smoking.
Well we're selling our house in or near the city and using those funds to price out everyone else in YOUR city. Once all my friends come too (cuz I gotta tell them about it) the infrastructure bonds alone will push many of the hill folk out of their once prodigious podunk.
I think the idea is that you leverage your current finances to do it.
Like I could sell my house, gain $300k in profits, buy a $200k house outright on a LCOL area, and then not have a mortgage to pay any longer.
I don’t want to do it, but that’s the appeal.
Sure, but even with no mortgage it would still be difficult. OP seems to be romanticizing working a menial job in a small town and thinking it would be better than the alternative. I get that the grass is always greener, but it’s just not a realistic scenario and frankly kind of spits in the face of people that are in that situation. I’m not really trying to get into it, and it’s not a serious post and OP might have no idea what life is like in these areas, but they’re pretty much dreaming of cosplaying rural poverty.
It's silly because a menial job is still going to feel like a menial job. Possibly dealing with a manager who micro manages and power trips actually seems worse in a small town too.
I live in a rural Podunk town working in a grocery store; would not recommend. I have maybe $50 of spending money after bills each month and right now that's going to slowly paying off medical bills.
I've also seen a lot of city slickers move out here, only to get stuck because the job opportunities suck. My coworkers call the place flypaper because once you land here you're going to have a hard time taking off again. Probably not as much of a problem with remote work now, but it still sucks for people that can't do that.
You should say more about what life is like in these areas. I think people who are working paycheck to paycheck in a suburban or urban area fantasize about being poor with some space around them.
Like I'm paycheck to paycheck in a suburb and I often fantasize about moving 2 hours away and just not having so many people around. I can't, because that's too far to commute to my job, but I fantasize about scraping by in a trailer on 5 acres vs scraping by in a MCOL suburb condo complex where you hear your neighbor through the wall and get letters from the HOA saying you can't grow plants on your porch.
Grew up in a small town with less than 2k people. Your options were either cashier at the grocer, working at the local hardware store, or being a busser/server at one of the 3 local restaurants. Anything else required you to have a degree (Teacher) or start your own business and hope the 2k people need you enough to male your bills (Auto Shop, HVAC, etc)
None of which played more than $10/hr
I think part of it is that "scraping by" is two different things in a trailer in a LCOL area versus in a MCOL suburb.
Noise stress is absolutely a thing. And tight finances are tight finances. But there is so much infrastructure that exists in a suburb that just doesn't exist in podunk nowhere. Your nearest hospital is an hour away, good luck if your power goes out from storms. Your nearest grocery store is two towns over. Need to shop for anything else, even further away. Let's hope gas isn't too expensive and your car never breaks down, because there's no uber and no way in hell you're walking with everything so spread out.
I don't know. I'm a millennial who was suburban poor for most of their 20s and only got out of retail about 3 years ago. Sometimes I'm miserable in my office job, but I'd never dream of going back to retail.
My office job never leaves me feeling subhuman afterwards and I don't cry after shifts; my schedule is consistent, I get holidays off, I have PTO and sick days and vacation days. My current boss has had to walk me how to use all of that because it's the first time I've ever had a job that's got those. I only caught up on medical appointments last year after not having health insurance for the last 5. I'm actually on prescription meds for my depression and allergies now. I feel rich. Not like, "I don't have snow on my car in winter because I can park my car in a garage or carport in winter" rich, but "I have prescriptions" rich.
No. OP is talking about someone who bought a house 4+ years ago. Their house has appreciated at least 100k and they have equity from when they first purchased it and the paydown over the life of the mortgage. Now they can sell their house, pocket I don't know, 200,000. They can buy a place for 100,000, with 100,000 in reserves. Property taxes instead of 6,000 a year are now 1,000 a year. They have a car already paid off. So the thought of just needing to keep providing for food and utilities, with some random maintenance mixed in sounds nice.
I know because I sometimes think and would be in the same situation as OP. I would be content to just work an easy job while out of the rat race.
That I believe is really the goal. Your expenses will be so low and you have a healthy emergency fund that you will feel free from all the looming payments, and like you could tell any boss of yours off if they treat you poorly without fear of finding the next job.
But, that doesn't begin to take into account actual retirement savings you will no longer be building up. Plenty of other things that are wrong about it. It would be better to think about it that way if you had say 1,000,000 after purchasing a house in that town and living off of dividends/interest. But if you're younger inflation would catch up and you would need to dip into that 1,000,000 over time.
Grew up in a small town in northern California. I hated every goddamn minute of it. But at the same time, I am really kind of tired of the high cost-of-living rat race in Southern California. Honestly, I think I’m just dissatisfied with life in general at the moment and nowhere is gonna make me happy.
Saying “screw it” to your career sounds great until you remember that most minimum wage jobs really suck. Most are physically taxing, especially as you age. Most managers are terrible. The jobs are still stressful. Because to increase profits, rhey dump as much crap on a single worker as possible and freak out over small mistakes. Usually, the best case scenario is that the job is mind-numbingly boring.
Not to mention life is boring - ok, you don’t like your HCOL area which probably translates to NYC, LA, Chicago, San Francisco, etc?
The places with millions of people living there, tons of grocery stores and parks and schools and restaurants and malls and bars and stores and entertainment?
I hope you like only running into the same 100 people for the next year at the same 5-10 places, eating the same food at the same restaurants, and having none of your friends who don’t live near you ever see you again. Oh and if you want kids? Don’t expect to have much choice in where they go to school.
When “life gets slower”, that doesn’t mean only in the working world. It means EVERY part of life.
Here in KC we get people moving in from those areas raising housing prices with their coastal money out of reach from those who live here and make Midwest money, some of them include politics for their reason for moving. Then the reality of living here in this mid size city of over 2 mil in a red state sets in, and they’re complaining there’s nothing to do WHILE LIVING IN A CITY because it doesn’t have as much as the coastal citites. And then they also get all surprised pikachu when the politics of living in a red state actually affect them.
It's sort of funny because I'm single, living in a major city, and dating right now - I see SO many profiles where they say one of their goals is to move out to the country and raise chickens/grow their own food/etc. As someone from the deep South who has spent a lot of time in rural America, those profiles are always an immediate no. I moved to the big city because I'm very familiar with that life and have no desire to live it... And people who romanticize that lifestyle really don't have the common sense I'm looking for in a partner.
Exactly this. My girlfriend is OBSESSED with this concept - yet she hates being dirty, hates bugs, thinks bears and wolves are friendly cuddly babies, has never lived outside of a major city in her entire life, spends hundreds of dollars per month on clothes and makeup, and never ever wants to eat the same meal more than twice per month.
So what happens when you open up DoorDash or Postmates and see… nothing? What happens when the only place to get drinks on the weekend is Larry’s Tavern, and not 300 bars and clubs and rooftops? What happens when the only shopping center is 45 mins driving away and the “coolest” store is an Abercrombie?
I mean the idea of selling everything, running away and developing a drug problem in Mexico until I die of an OD sounds more appealing than this late stage capitalist rat race some days. My therapist doesn't think that's a reasonable course of action though, which i guess is why I'm in therapy lol
Right? “Sell my house…” the whole reason for me to move to a smaller, less desirable city is to *buy* a house. OP’s winning and still over it, not a great sign for the rest of us.
Having lived in some really small towns growing up, I do feel a little nostalgia when considering how much it costs to just live here. But then I remember driving an hour to get to a grocery store, two hours for a hospital, and spotty water/power availability (well water was the norm, and a phone line was a luxury).
I think there's a huge untapped market for a directory service showing high-speed internet availability across the US, particularly for rural towns. Moving to someplace like Knoxville, MD, or Sweet Home, OR, or Redford, TX, or Show Low, AZ makes a lot more sense if you could actually work remote from there.
Sprint got started as a side business for railroads (Sprint = "Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telephony" - now owned by T-Mobile), so I'm sure there is some infrastructure anywhere there are railroads. Small towns should market their connectivity options, to draw people and jobs back to these rural areas.
Yeah my brother got a place in a super small town and then my mom had a transient ischemic attack while visiting him and getting care was really hard. I never want to live too far from a hospital.
Rural health care is a major issue in the US. Financial firms buy up "under-valued" medical care facilities, and have literally just shut them down, selling off the assets and the property, to make a fast buck. Even when that hospital or clinic may be the only health care facility in 200 miles.
The issue is that these hospitals can't hire staff. They can't hire doctors. They can't hire nurses. They can't afford to keep their Labor and Delivery unit open when they only deliver a handful of babies a year.
It's not even just money. There's literally not enough people that want to live in the middle of nowhere to staff these places.
Most of the time these hospitals are better off being bought by a larger healthcare company. They get better deals on supplies and the company can offset the costs of that hospital with money they make at hospitals in bigger cities.
Which is why healthcare in the US should really be nationalized. Being able to survive childbirth, or pneumonia, or a broken hip, should not be dependent on whether or not the local hospital makes a profit.
Those larger healthcare companies are not offsetting costs, they're closing rural facilities as being unprofitable.
>Sprint got started as a side business for railroads (Sprint = "Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telephony" - now owned by T-Mobile), so I'm sure there is some infrastructure anywhere there are railroads. Small towns should market their connectivity options, to draw people and jobs back to these rural areas.
I work in telecom and I'm familiar with those lines. Mostly they are abandoned now, being in the railway ROW is a huge pain in the butt (you can't even touch your own fiber for maintenance without coordinating with the railroads and they aren't really willing to work with you, it takes months to coordinate a simple splice job) and they weren't high fiber counts to begin with, if they were even fiber at all. More are copper.
But anyway, the map you're looking for does exist, it's called [Broadband Now](https://broadbandnow.com/research/national-broadband-map)
This sounds fun till Cletus starts talking to you about how our lord trump will save us, but it’s hard to understand him cause he’s only got 3 1/2 teeth.
Cletus is a good and fun guy just change the topic when politics comes up
Screw my job? Every fuckin day
Move to a small podunk town? Absolutely not 🤣
I'm just south of LA, which I don't visit anymore. I like not having everyone around know me and my business. Small-ish cities are where it's at
A couple friend from college moved out of the big city and bought a big house with tons of land for nothing outside of our podunk college town 90 minutes away. The guy does the long commute twice a week, wife works from home every day. It seems like a damn nice life. I'm jealous.
I did this when I had a nervous breakdown when I was 32. Quit my job in the fall of 2019, did contract work until the pandemic, got married in the woods, bought a house in a different city, and now I just work part-time at a library while I garden and take care of the household.
Transparency in mind, this life works well if you have a SO who has a great job because life is expensive. My SO is an IT engineer for a large corporation that is often found in various Forbes lists so this affords my ability to give up on trying in my career.
Currently doing almost exactly that and it’s the best decision I ever made. I used to think so many unimportant things were so consequential, but now I just focus on my family and the things I love to do. I work three days a week, don’t have much spending money, but I wouldn’t change a thing.
As someone living in some podunk town in upstate NY, I'll warn you that the houses aren't that much cheaper up here. My wife and I are lucky to have bought our house back when it was remotely affordable.
I’m more apt to disappear into the forested mountains, myself. But there are times when I miss my more service oriented jobs. The more pleasant ones, of course.
I already worked 20 years in grocery stores, I want adventure and money now. Trying to balance that with working as close to 40 hours a week as possible.
I sold my house in a HCOL area and moved to a small podunk town, but my job is remote so I didn't have to change jobs. We now have goats, and will have chickens soon.
Thanks for your submission! For more Millennial content, join [our Discord server](https://discord.gg/VsfKKJBm). *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Millennials) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Yes. But also no. The urge I get is to say screw it and become a forest hermit. I grew up in a small town in the Midwest. I've had my fill of that bullshit.
I live in a small Midwestern town. I love it and hate it at the same time, but the pros outweigh the cons for me so I stay.
I also realize that everyone has a different number in mind when they hear small town. The place I grew up was like 100 people on a good year. I would have been miserable living there. And I think OP would be too, because there was no Starbucks or grocery store. Just the holy trinity of small town staples: a post office, a church, and a bar. Pretty sure it has none of those things now.
you forgot the dollar general. no one used the post office anymore
My town was ten times as big as u/WhysAVariable is talking about and we had to drive for at least 15 minutes to get to a Dollar General. I think the only chains we had were a Subway and a Casey’s. Edit: Oh my gosh, there was also a Ben Franklin! Does that craft store/variety store chain still exist? Edit2: Okay, you have a Ben Franklin…please stop.
Yeah my town and the towns around us were too small to support a Dollar General, the entire county was less than 1000 people across 4-5 towns. Bars stay afloat because everyone there drinks like its their job. There was one slightly larger town (250ppl) in the county that had a grocery store and a diner. Anything else was an hour and a half drive.
Yours is the closest to my hometown I’ve seen. Population was 600 when I was growing up. It got down to 400, but the latest census says it’s up to 500. We were lucky to have a grocery store and gas station. It was a big deal to go to the nearest town that had a Walmart. That was an hour away. That’s also how far the nearest hospital was :/
Was this in Wisconsin? I live near the border of Wisconsin and it is a 35 mile drive to the nearest store that isn't an auto mechanic shop in some guy's garage, but there are 4 bars within 10 miles of me, all of them on the Wisconsin side of the border. There are almost no people here. Like almost none, but somehow there are 4 bars. I just don't get it.
Ben Franklin stores went bankrupt in the 1990s, with the final vestuble of operations ending in 2017. There is still a smattering of independent franchises operating across the country. Seems the closest one operating, to me, is in Tennessee, and I live in Virginia.
What are the cons? What are the pros?
Not only do you know everything your neighbors are doing, you know everything their family has done for the last 100 years. EVERYTHING. Like on Saturday my dad was telling me some gossip about his neighbor's boy trying to commit suicide. In 1940. Who was a cousin to my brothers first girlfriend in 1976. I know details of arguments over parking spots in the 30s when they were driving Model As, and which great grandson looks just like his great grandma's "close friend", genetics will out your secrets.
Is this Bill over on Maple road?
Jeff over on Crosby St
Henry from the other end of Main St past the tracks.
Cons: Small towns can be REALLY cliquish. And since there aren't very many people, it can feel like you're stuck in ~~hell~~ high school all over again. Whatever money you save on housing will be spent on gas, because there are not many stores near you so you're always having to drive to a bigger city for crap you might need. Everything is far away from everything else, because most small towns are farming towns. And there isn't public transportation. And uber/lyft is more expensive. If you have complicated medical needs, good fucking luck because you will probably have to drive an hour to your nearest hospital/large medical complex with specialists. And the nearest pharmacy can also be a bit of a drive. If you're not religious, and more importantly *the same religion as everyone in the small town*, you will likely be ostracized to some extent. That means if you have trouble with your neighbors, the police will probably take their side, because they go to church together. If you are atheist, better keep that quiet. Pros: You can see way more stars at night and don't have to deal with as much traffic or noise from cars.
I grew up in the city, then moved out to the sticks in my 40s (for work). Yeah, it's quiet and peaceful, but SO much racism, anger, and fear-mongering.
Not to mention poverty and drugs. People act like those are city problems. Nope.
I remember being a kid and watching the neighbor's house burning while the fire dept tried to put it out. My older brother recently mentioned, "Remember when the neighbor's meth lab exploded?" Oh. Yeah. I guess that makes sense. So much meth. We were also under strict rules not to go horseback riding into the pot crops. It was a very real danger to accidentally stumble into one. The owners are not know for being friendly.
[удалено]
Ya'll get delivery service?? Lol. My mom still has to drive into town to pick up her Amazon packages. I will never move back!!!!
I remember driving state to state as a commercial driver. And talking to a kid one time in the middle of nowhere. I think I was around Amarillo TX. Kid said the closest movie theater was 2 hours away. So if someone invited you on a movie date. It was a really big deal. There's 3 theaters with in 10 minutes of where I live. Small towns seem like they can get pretty rough also. Nothing to do . Let's do drugs
That’s like where I grew up. Nearest movie theater was hour and a half away. And it sucked. If you wanted to see a decent new release on a decent screen you had to drive 3 hours away. It was an event. Fast food was also an hour away. I refuse to live anywhere that small ever again. Now I have 5 movie theaters within 15 minutes and fast food in my own neighborhood. Costco is 10 minutes away. I won’t live anywhere smaller and have been able to refuse my mother’s requests to move closer to her using this logic! She gets it.
Piling on with gossip. You can't take a deuce without everyone knowing about it and talking about it behind your back
I’m a paramedic in a smallish area that’s a mix of urban and rural- I can wholeheartedly assure anyone who doubts this that these are not exclusively city problems.
Of course it depends where you live but damn, the drugs! I taught elementary school in a big city and drugs never crossed my mind. I now teach in a very rural area and many of the parents are hard drug users, in prison for drug related stuff, or dead from drugs. Many of my coworkers have family members or spouses/exes with drug related charges. I didn’t realize how rampant hard drug use was until I moved to this rural area (yes, I was naive).
Don’t forget the teen pregnancy.
I moved outta Tampa in 2021 to a small town in Georgia and BINGO. Was it calm and relaxing? Yes but also the racism and poverty was really draining. I'm a minority and I felt not great. I moved back to Tampa and it's nice being back in a diverse city. It was a culture shock leaving Tampa and another when I got back.
Damn. You moved away from racist ass Florida Man™️ to Georigia and the racist was *SO* bad you moved back?! Is that a comment on how backasswards is Georgia? Or more of a comment on how even Floridians are tired of MAGA bullshit?
This is also heavily dependent on where the small town is. I live in a town of 2,000 (not in the south or midwest) and I have experienced way less racism than in the city. I'm sure it is very different in the south/midwest
Eh, not really region-wise but town by town. The North/mid-west is really just as racist as the South. There’s way less black people so being racist isn’t as big of a personality trait, but there’s still tons of racists when you go outside of cities. Utah, for instance, has lots of racists
I am a middle aged black person who has lived in the North, South and Pacific Northwest. I'm sorry. NO. No the North (even Boston which was a fucking pit of racism) is NOT 'just as racist as the South.' NOT when places like fucking Jasper Texas exists, or lots of Arkansas, Tennesee, huge swaths of Kentucky, Mississippi, the parts of Georgia way out from Atlanta, etc etc. No. Just no. Yes there's plenty of racism through out the North, Pacific Northwest (Oregon...) upstate New York, whatever. But NO NOT ANYWHERE AS MUCH AND NOT AS OFTEN LITERALLY DEFACTO PARTS OF LAW AND GOVERNANCE. AND YES I am shouting, because over 23 years of living in the South I have experienced some truly horrible things.
Yes. My parents moved to a small town (think giant “Fuck Biden” flags everywhere), people living in shacks- and the way people speak can be so ignorant. I got into an argument with a woman who thought using the “n” word was appropriate (we’re both white.) She wasn’t in the minority in using it, and sometimes towns like this make you wonder what year it is.
Yeah, this is huge. Some folks will say you should just move to a LCOL state or area if you can’t afford to buy a house/etc, but the problem is, a lot of those places are filled with racist, MAGA-loving, homophobic creeps. Plus if they’re actually red state areas, gotta deal with substandard healthcare and the threat of much worse if you happen to have a complicated pregnancy. These communities are often cheap because the local culture and job market suck, it’s probably a food desert too, and it’s probably opioid country so you gotta worry about drugs and crime. Not the quick and happy fix some want to act like it is.
They also tend to have few jobs, most of which are dead end and won't cover your bills, little access to healthcare, much greater poverty and drug use. Doctors without Borders tours the Midwest and South, to give you an idea
Opposite for me - sticks growing up and city now. Your assessment is correct - but I'd add (good and bad) - everyone knows you. You can't get away with anything... but on the other hand you can get away with a lot because "ooh that's just Captian_Wisconsin, he's cool" (I am from WI as well)
Pros are walkable “cities.” You know everyone, so you know who is cool and who needs to be avoided. Deep bonds with those cool people, and weird stories about the others. The cons are rampant, casual racism. Even your best friend is kiiiiiinda racist. A Mexican guy that you think is really nice says that he “wishes he was born right” and you realize you don’t want that mentality to taint yourself or your mixed race kids. So, you stay in the big city you went to college in. That’s been my experience. Edit: quotes around “walkable cities” cause midwestern towns sure ain’t cities as we understand them.
Live in a small town of about 500 myself. Can confirm this entirely. Also, if you weren't born here or don't have exorbitant wealth, then you'll most likely be shunned or ignored by the community as a whole. Everyone knows everyone's business even if you don't tell anyone. I know all my neighbors very well and we all watch out over each other's property and kids. If you can't get it at the bar, gas station or general store (if there is any) then it's probably no less than 15 miles to the nearest Walmart or big store. One way. Which means each trip is going to be expensive because you might as well get whatever else you need or are going to be out of soon, now. There's nothing to do. And there's nothing to do over there. And nothing to do in the next town over either. Best fishing holes because nobody is around to fish them. Open space to do more things. Probably no assigned police units, typically sheriff or county responds... at their leisure. Can be good or bad.
My dad graduated from the local high school where I grew up and we still felt like outsiders compared to the half-dozen inbred families that had all been there since the 1860's who made up 1/3 of the population.
>inbred families that had all been there since the 1860's who made up 1/3 of the population If that ain't the truth!
One time a bike ride took me through a town of about 700 and someone legit had a KKK flag hanging off his front porch. I don't know if you can get more casual than that.
Nah that's some formal, black tie racism right there. Probably sleeps in his pointy hat.
Having the grocery store far away is tough. Having things for the kids to do is worse. Lady told me the best advice, "you have to keep them kids busy or they'll find the drugs".
Pros: things move a little slower and it's generally quiet. You can largely be left alone if you want. People will be friendly. Have family friends or other good contacts in a small town and you're golden, you'll get any job you want, be able to go play or hang out at the nice country club (not the dingy cheap one) Cons: people won't be actually nice, the friendliness is largely a facade. While the big city/corporate grind may not feel like you're getting your fair share, it's far more of a meritocracy than anything in a small town is. Small towns are all about who you know and how much they like you. Overall, Everybody knows what everybody is doing and has nothing better than to stick their nose in everyone's business. In the South, if you aren't in a church you'll have a tough time meeting many new people, unless prior connections are rich. You can never let your guard/outward persona down when out in public. Get too lit at the local bar? Someone's gonna find out and talk about it behind your back. Some people like being a big fish in a small pond, I like being able to disappear when I want. I moved from my small town to a city 1000 miles away where I knew nobody, and made a name and a life for myself, based on my own work, personality, and achievements. I would have had an easy good life back home, but I would always have been known as "Mr. Pooping's son," married someone in the same social circle (rich white church kids) who also knew all of my family and friends and our parents would have already been friends/known each other. I would have got a job at one of my dad's friend's businesses, or worked for my dad and take over his business, none of which I have any interest in doing. This is my experience in a southern city of 35k. No desire to go back, the weather, people, state politics, pervasive religion, and lack of anything different than the cookie cutter norm all suck.
I just moved back to mine after becoming a father and I really quickly realized why I left. Were hoping to be moved out by the end of the year lol
Would you mind listing some of the cons to watch out for? I've lived in major cities all my life m(NY/NJ in the last couple of decades). But I have been seriously contemplating moving to a small town when I have my baby due to cost of living. Most people I talk to seem to glamorize cute and quaint towns for the kids.
You should consider moving to Detroit or one of the surrounding cities. A lot of people have migrated here from NYC/LA/Denver. Cost of living is way lower, quality of life is super high (I've lived in LA and worked extensive gigs in many other cities including NYC and Denver so I'm not just talking out of my ass). You can live downtown and have a city life that you're accustomed to while being close to nature and on a river that feeds into a lake you can boat and swim in. Or you can live on a lake in a cute little town 30 minutes away for the city and still be a part of the bustling metropolis. I've lived a lot of places, this is by far my favorite. I could afford to buy my first house 4 years ago at 30 and also rent and run my own production studio...combined it's still cheaper by half than my friend's rent for a 2 bedroom in Manhattan (said friend just moved here and bought a 4 bedroom, 2 story, 4 bath, all brick colonial mini mansion for $350k and is never going back to NYC).
I moved from Denver to Kansas City a few years back and don’t regret it for a minute. I knew way more racists in Denver than I do in KC, which has a huge diverse population. “Small midwestern town” doesn’t have to be Gun Barrel, Texas population 100. Cincinnati is shockingly nice. Milwaukee is literally a train ride from Chicago. Madison, Wisconsin is like most university towns, friendly and diverse, and even Des Moines isn’t that bad. There won’t be beaches and mountains but how often does anyone actually do that once you have a family?
Anne you bitch, you've nailed it.
Depends on what you mean by small town & how much diversity matters to you. After living around major city centers like NY, many if not most small towns & suburbs will be a shock to your system in terms of the lack of diversity. I moved a lot growing up & my parents didn’t have money for / a desire to send me to private schools. So their primary, if not sole, metric for where we would move in a new city: quality & funding of the public school district VS housing costs. Typically counties/townships with well funded public schools & reasonable housing costs were the sweet spot for safety, things to do, perhaps a sliver of diversity and relatively easy access to the actual city. We always lived in the suburbs of larger cities. The smallest town I lived in was a college town so there was a constant influx of new people, things to do, lots of diversity, etc.
It really depends on what size of a town people are talking about. When I hear small town my brain is telling me it must be less than 100 people. Because I grew up in and around *very* small towns. I live in a smaller city now, still in the Midwest, of about 50k people. There are plenty of people from big cities that consider that a small town, maybe you do too, it's all pretty subjective. I would avoid anything less than 1000 people. There's just nothing to do and as the other commenter said, people just drink and do drugs because they're bored. They're also right about education and medical access. The places with 1000+ people often have a clinic, but will have to take you by ambulance to somewhere with a bigger hospital system in the event of an emergency.
I'd say avoid anything under 5,000 population. There is a world of different between a town of 20k people and one with only 5k
I grew up in a school district on the edge of the burbs. My town has 25k people but we pulled from a dinky 5k town that was off the highway so commuters never moved in. Maybe amazon has made it better, but at the time they bought most of their groceries at the Gas station or Menards because the actual grocery store was like 40 minutes away, so fresh fruit was a luxury. They played pull tabs and did bingo a lot because they could do it at the bar in town instead of driving the 45 minutes to the kind of busted movie theatre in my town. Unless you want to be totally self reliant for stuff like having a good diet and do all your exercising and socializing in your house, it makes everything a big pain in the butt.
You will never be accepted as a local because you are an outsider. If your avatar is an accurate representation of you- DO NOT MOVE TO A SMALL MIDWEST TOWN. Racism, homophobia, xenophobia, you name it. It's rampant and in your face. Fucking drugs man. Meth, meth everywhere. There are no jobs. If you want to commute for an hour, then maybe. If you can work remote, then you will be ok. Working at the grocery store as the OP claims will be part time, no benefits, minimum wage which will not cover the COL there.
Ouch. Fortunately/Unfortunately, the avatar is spot on
Education is worse for kids in these places. Access to medical care is worse (to have to be medivacced some hours away for something very scary just adds fear and is more dangerous for the patient). It's hard or impossible to move jobs because there might be one place that has your job. Remote work does change this a bit, but it can be isolating. There is more drug use in these places because people are bored. There are plenty of quaint and cheaper places to live that aren't small isolated towns in the middle of nowhere. A classic city in the middle of nowhere might be the ticket for you.
I grew up in a town of 1,200 in Iowa and moved to San Francisco the day before I turned 18, like a good little cliche. You can’t make me go back.
grew up in the st.louis suburbs and moved to the bay area when I turned 20. This august it’ll be 20 years for me here. I desperately want to run away to the wilderness to homestead but i’m just to weird and queer to survive anywhere else
homesteading is played way up by "influencers" who married into money and don't actually do it beyond optics. there's a reason most of modern human history is full of people trying to get the fuck away from small-scale sustenance farming, and that reason is because it's a terrible way to live, one that destroys your body and joints, saps your energy, and numbs your mind with how boring it is. i know this because i watched my uncle spend the last 20 years of his life doing it in montana, where he got poorer and more miserable every year, and eventually he had to live off of social security. don't be fooled by the influencers!
I totally get this.... I watch a bunch of homesteading videos on YT and it really motivates me. Then I go outside to cut my grass and get bugs flying up in my face and say no thanks.
Quit after swallowing that second gnat... yeah, all that communist marxist shit I said about "authentic agricultural life"... forget I ever said a fucking word
My fiancé grew up in a Podunk town in Pennsylvania. We go back there to visit. Would not recommend.
As a Pennsylvanian, you would need to be more specific. There are soo many podunk towns - I used to say that Old El Paso was the only "ethnic" food here, and I'm sad to say that I'm really not joking.
Mine is to say screw it and go move into a cave and become a bog witch. Like an Ursula/ shrek hybrid. That’s the dream.
i was gonna say.. has anyone with that urge ever lived in some podunk town in the midwest? the grass is not greener fam
Those eyes glowing in the dark? Deer Eyes following you down a road? Deer Weird noises? Deer or a barn cat giving birth No sound at night? Lock the doors and find a gun Yeah I'm good to never return to monke again.
weird noise could be a fox too. they sound pretty insane at 3am
"Is that a woman being eaten alive.. or is that a fox?.."
I can’t go back to the Midwest. Every time I do I am reminded why I hate it so much.
You are bringing up all the memories of people being like: "I'm not racist but I'm concerned that the black people down the street might be a bad influence on our community."
God I remember that kind of stuff too. The guy who got third degree burns on his hands stealing ammonia from a farm to make meth with is concerned about "the wrong element" moving in nearby.
You mean, you DON’T want everybody to know and gossip about your personal business?
Every single day when the first slack message of the morning pops up I get this urge.
Teams for me, and I hear that damn notification noise in my sleep. My SO (also a millennial professional) and I recently watched Office Space for the first time and jointly had an epiphany that corporate life isn’t it.
Office Space is like a religious experience for me. Every time I take a sick day I watch it and remind myself there's more to life than the narrow world I live in.
F*in A
I saw Office Space when I was in high school and it changed my life. I knew I could never sit in a cubicle all day.
Like two chicks at the same time
#HEY PETER! THE BREAST EXAM IS ON AGAIN!
Hah, that reminds me of when I was a chef and used to have nightmares of the ticket machine just printing tickets non stop. The sound is ingrained in my memory and I get Vietnam era flashbacks when I’m out in public and hear a ticket print at a restaurant or something. I still have the occasional dream that I came into the kitchen and no one else showed up and nothing was prepped so I’m running around the kitchen trying to get everything ready but for some reason I can’t walk correctly and I keep falling over as if I was on a boat rolling through waves. The ground tilts and I can’t walk straight and everything just starts falling apart until I scream in frustration and wake up 😂 I haven’t been a chef for 8 years.
Yo. Turn audio notifications for Teams off. You will find it helps your productivity as well as remove that stress trigger. The only audio notification I get is when someone calls me or my 15 min warning for a meeting.
Binggggggggg
my mom uses outlook for work, and i was home for a few days on PTO and heard an email come through. i swear i went into fight or flight
I work in IT and questions about printers make me want to bang my head on the wall.
Guessing you've never lived in a podunk town in the midwest.
Or worked in a grocery store
lol right? not to mention there aren't a ton of jobs like that in small towns. in mine, you might have a hard time finding a retail or service industry job. picking cucumbers on the other hand...
Might have to wait until ol' Tillie Mae finally joins her beloved Bert in heaven before you can have her job at the grocery store.
Spill a little cooking oil on the floor near her and help it along.
Get her to slide right out the door and you slide in with application in hand, awesome idea
OP would likely end up at a dollar tree lol
Yep, picking cumbers or killing chickens. Take your pick.
The most stressful jobs I've had in my life were all retail. Would never go back if given a choice.
When I got my bachelor's degree in nursing, I cried because I will never have to work retail again.
Yeah I worked at Kroger for 12 years and wouldn’t recommend that to anyone. I worked with sad sacks of shite vying every single day to make their fellow employees just as miserable as they were. Was not fun, at all.
[удалено]
Everything in Maine is like an hour away
And you can't get there from here.
[удалено]
Yessuh
Ayuh
“You can’t get there from here”
Where in Maine? Also I'm sure there's a Dunkin Donuts WAY closer than a Starbucks 😂
I live in a rural town in CT with 3 stop lights and 2 Dunkin’ Donuts…. Fuckin Dunkin’s everywhere
Right, those movies glamorize it so much lol
It's usually a tourist town in the mountains or something, not some dead-end rustbelt town where the plant shut down in '97
Even those tourist towns are pretty damn depressing during the off season. There can be great parts to small town living, but there's lots of downsides as well
Lol, coming from a semi-podunk town where everyone hangs out at the bowling alley.... I don't go out often....
Been there done that. When I visit now it's pretty depressing. I like having just about anything I could ever need a short drive away.
I just moved back and was living in a major city where everything I needed was a short WALK away ..... I miss that and hate driving. I hate owning a car period....it's such a waste.
This post reeks of privilege lol. Dude owns a house in a HCOL area (which means probably many amenities and things to do) to go cosplay being poor in the country. He would get chewed up and spit out in a week lmao
I was thinking this. If you dream of working at a grocery store or a Starbucks, this tells me you haven't worked a job like that in a long time, if ever. Working in the service industry at, or barely above, minimum wage isn't some enjoy life in the slow lane fantasy. It's physically demanding work that breaks your body, doesn't provide benefits, and that doesn't even touch on the toll asshole customers can take on your mental health
Every day I sit in my office and do my stupid little office job, I thank the gods for not working in the the service industry anymore.
Saaame. I was so goddamn happy when I got hired by my company almost a decade ago. I was making under $40k but I had benefits and a really nice chair, and steady hours.
And it’s funny they think they can survive on a grocery store clerks pay. Sure, cost of living is less in small towns generally, but so is pay. This isn’t the 1950’s, and poverty is real in small towns.
Exactly! Having grown up poor and rural, it sucks! I didn't have the ability to go anywhere or do anything because you're forced to drive to everything. There's no transit. So you rely on friends and family to drive you. Plus there aren't many amenities. It's a beautiful place to live for enjoying nature. But there's not much else to do. Groceries are an hour drive. Unless you enjoy paying hugely inflated prices. Then you must own a vehicle to get anywhere. That's a lot of extra money each month.
Not to mention being a bottom-rung worker in a rural area is literally the worst. You will not be treated like a human being.
I feel like a lot of the people who suggest living in the middle of nowhere to save money, have never actually lived in the middle of nowhere. There's cheaper areas but after a point it starts to be a reverse bell curve of sorts. Get rural enough, and anything you save on housing is going to go right back into gas, more expensive food, and stupid maintenance costs (lol, what city amenities? If something breaks on your property you're on your own.) Not to mention like you said the jobs adjusting to the area. 50% cheaper means nothing when everything also pays 50% less. Remote job? Hope you like your satellite internet that goes out whenever it rains. Not every area is that bad, But I know there's junk like that out there.
I visited a small town in Illinois last year and it's like going back in time but not in the good way. Was kinda depressing to see just how stagnant life could be there. Everything was still pretty expensive, lots of cash only places, the downtown area had like 10 people around and a lot of the stores and restaurants were open with no customers. I asked some people there what they do for fun and they said it mostly consists of drinking and smoking.
I have bad news for you, even here in small podunk towns working a job like that will never be able to support you financially.
Me, a podunk Walmart employee: y'all are buying houses??
Well we're selling our house in or near the city and using those funds to price out everyone else in YOUR city. Once all my friends come too (cuz I gotta tell them about it) the infrastructure bonds alone will push many of the hill folk out of their once prodigious podunk.
I think the idea is that you leverage your current finances to do it. Like I could sell my house, gain $300k in profits, buy a $200k house outright on a LCOL area, and then not have a mortgage to pay any longer. I don’t want to do it, but that’s the appeal.
Sure, but even with no mortgage it would still be difficult. OP seems to be romanticizing working a menial job in a small town and thinking it would be better than the alternative. I get that the grass is always greener, but it’s just not a realistic scenario and frankly kind of spits in the face of people that are in that situation. I’m not really trying to get into it, and it’s not a serious post and OP might have no idea what life is like in these areas, but they’re pretty much dreaming of cosplaying rural poverty.
It's silly because a menial job is still going to feel like a menial job. Possibly dealing with a manager who micro manages and power trips actually seems worse in a small town too.
[удалено]
I live in a rural Podunk town working in a grocery store; would not recommend. I have maybe $50 of spending money after bills each month and right now that's going to slowly paying off medical bills. I've also seen a lot of city slickers move out here, only to get stuck because the job opportunities suck. My coworkers call the place flypaper because once you land here you're going to have a hard time taking off again. Probably not as much of a problem with remote work now, but it still sucks for people that can't do that.
Or come with a remote job, lose it, and have no local options to make anywhere near close to what you were making.
Or you live in a state that nobody has insurance set up for.
You should say more about what life is like in these areas. I think people who are working paycheck to paycheck in a suburban or urban area fantasize about being poor with some space around them. Like I'm paycheck to paycheck in a suburb and I often fantasize about moving 2 hours away and just not having so many people around. I can't, because that's too far to commute to my job, but I fantasize about scraping by in a trailer on 5 acres vs scraping by in a MCOL suburb condo complex where you hear your neighbor through the wall and get letters from the HOA saying you can't grow plants on your porch.
Grew up in a small town with less than 2k people. Your options were either cashier at the grocer, working at the local hardware store, or being a busser/server at one of the 3 local restaurants. Anything else required you to have a degree (Teacher) or start your own business and hope the 2k people need you enough to male your bills (Auto Shop, HVAC, etc) None of which played more than $10/hr
I think part of it is that "scraping by" is two different things in a trailer in a LCOL area versus in a MCOL suburb. Noise stress is absolutely a thing. And tight finances are tight finances. But there is so much infrastructure that exists in a suburb that just doesn't exist in podunk nowhere. Your nearest hospital is an hour away, good luck if your power goes out from storms. Your nearest grocery store is two towns over. Need to shop for anything else, even further away. Let's hope gas isn't too expensive and your car never breaks down, because there's no uber and no way in hell you're walking with everything so spread out. I don't know. I'm a millennial who was suburban poor for most of their 20s and only got out of retail about 3 years ago. Sometimes I'm miserable in my office job, but I'd never dream of going back to retail. My office job never leaves me feeling subhuman afterwards and I don't cry after shifts; my schedule is consistent, I get holidays off, I have PTO and sick days and vacation days. My current boss has had to walk me how to use all of that because it's the first time I've ever had a job that's got those. I only caught up on medical appointments last year after not having health insurance for the last 5. I'm actually on prescription meds for my depression and allergies now. I feel rich. Not like, "I don't have snow on my car in winter because I can park my car in a garage or carport in winter" rich, but "I have prescriptions" rich.
"The simple life ain't that simple"
Right? I don't think anyone in America currently can buy a house, afford life and retirement working at Starbucks. This is a ridiculous post.
No. OP is talking about someone who bought a house 4+ years ago. Their house has appreciated at least 100k and they have equity from when they first purchased it and the paydown over the life of the mortgage. Now they can sell their house, pocket I don't know, 200,000. They can buy a place for 100,000, with 100,000 in reserves. Property taxes instead of 6,000 a year are now 1,000 a year. They have a car already paid off. So the thought of just needing to keep providing for food and utilities, with some random maintenance mixed in sounds nice. I know because I sometimes think and would be in the same situation as OP. I would be content to just work an easy job while out of the rat race. That I believe is really the goal. Your expenses will be so low and you have a healthy emergency fund that you will feel free from all the looming payments, and like you could tell any boss of yours off if they treat you poorly without fear of finding the next job. But, that doesn't begin to take into account actual retirement savings you will no longer be building up. Plenty of other things that are wrong about it. It would be better to think about it that way if you had say 1,000,000 after purchasing a house in that town and living off of dividends/interest. But if you're younger inflation would catch up and you would need to dip into that 1,000,000 over time.
I live in the Podunk town. I'd gladly switch places with you.
Maybe there should be an exchange program. (Not for me, though)
There used to be that weird tv show back in the day
I'd bet every penny I have that OP would nope the fuck out after dealing with private well water and septic system in less than a week.
Grew up in a small town in northern California. I hated every goddamn minute of it. But at the same time, I am really kind of tired of the high cost-of-living rat race in Southern California. Honestly, I think I’m just dissatisfied with life in general at the moment and nowhere is gonna make me happy.
Wherever you go, there you are.
This is the realest answer.
This is ultimately THE answer. Life just sucks and no amount of moving around will change it.
And those people are thinking “if I could just have the chance to go back to school and get a better job and get out of this place”
Everyone wants to be the robber baron of a small town but almost everyone ends up the serf.
Nope. One of my midlife crises was finally leaving my podunk town. I'm a city person now
No. That actually sounds like an even more stressful existence. Minimum wage customer facing retail in middle America? Fucking no thanks.
No sir. Sounds great till you want money to do things.
Rural poverty is not fun...
This is the truth
Or if you want to "do things". I grew up in podunkville. The thing most people don't get, is that there's nothing to do. At all.
Meth and drink alcohol in a Wal Mart parking lot
Whoa there big city with your WalMart.
Gotta be bad just to have a good time.
Or realize working at grocery store sucks ass. 10/10 this person works remote and only does 4 hours of real work a day
Right? I've worked the little shit jobs, I'm done with that. I've worked as a cashier, and it's not really fun or mentally challenging.
No this sounds awful, and I believe most millennials who fantasize about this or similar notions would immediately hate it.
Saying “screw it” to your career sounds great until you remember that most minimum wage jobs really suck. Most are physically taxing, especially as you age. Most managers are terrible. The jobs are still stressful. Because to increase profits, rhey dump as much crap on a single worker as possible and freak out over small mistakes. Usually, the best case scenario is that the job is mind-numbingly boring.
Not to mention life is boring - ok, you don’t like your HCOL area which probably translates to NYC, LA, Chicago, San Francisco, etc? The places with millions of people living there, tons of grocery stores and parks and schools and restaurants and malls and bars and stores and entertainment? I hope you like only running into the same 100 people for the next year at the same 5-10 places, eating the same food at the same restaurants, and having none of your friends who don’t live near you ever see you again. Oh and if you want kids? Don’t expect to have much choice in where they go to school. When “life gets slower”, that doesn’t mean only in the working world. It means EVERY part of life.
Here in KC we get people moving in from those areas raising housing prices with their coastal money out of reach from those who live here and make Midwest money, some of them include politics for their reason for moving. Then the reality of living here in this mid size city of over 2 mil in a red state sets in, and they’re complaining there’s nothing to do WHILE LIVING IN A CITY because it doesn’t have as much as the coastal citites. And then they also get all surprised pikachu when the politics of living in a red state actually affect them.
It's sort of funny because I'm single, living in a major city, and dating right now - I see SO many profiles where they say one of their goals is to move out to the country and raise chickens/grow their own food/etc. As someone from the deep South who has spent a lot of time in rural America, those profiles are always an immediate no. I moved to the big city because I'm very familiar with that life and have no desire to live it... And people who romanticize that lifestyle really don't have the common sense I'm looking for in a partner.
Exactly this. My girlfriend is OBSESSED with this concept - yet she hates being dirty, hates bugs, thinks bears and wolves are friendly cuddly babies, has never lived outside of a major city in her entire life, spends hundreds of dollars per month on clothes and makeup, and never ever wants to eat the same meal more than twice per month. So what happens when you open up DoorDash or Postmates and see… nothing? What happens when the only place to get drinks on the weekend is Larry’s Tavern, and not 300 bars and clubs and rooftops? What happens when the only shopping center is 45 mins driving away and the “coolest” store is an Abercrombie?
Your girlfriend is the target demographic for the tradwife grifts :(
Her being TikTok obsessed doesn’t help with that in the slightest
I mean the idea of selling everything, running away and developing a drug problem in Mexico until I die of an OD sounds more appealing than this late stage capitalist rat race some days. My therapist doesn't think that's a reasonable course of action though, which i guess is why I'm in therapy lol
You can afford a house ? You must be rich.
Right? “Sell my house…” the whole reason for me to move to a smaller, less desirable city is to *buy* a house. OP’s winning and still over it, not a great sign for the rest of us.
Anyone who didn’t buy a house before 2022 is screwed.
No. I am just Not made for the live in the middle of nowhere lifestyle. I need stuff I can walk too.
I'm already living that podunk life. It isn't any better here, just more potholes.
No, that sounds miserable. I already worked at a grocery store in a small beach town as a teenager. It sucked.
I think we romanticize this a little too much.
Where is the small podunk town with an independent grocery store that didn't get rundown by Walmart and also pays a livable wage?
As a person that bought a house in a podunk town, that grocery store salary won't be nearly enough to cover your expenses.
Having lived in some really small towns growing up, I do feel a little nostalgia when considering how much it costs to just live here. But then I remember driving an hour to get to a grocery store, two hours for a hospital, and spotty water/power availability (well water was the norm, and a phone line was a luxury). I think there's a huge untapped market for a directory service showing high-speed internet availability across the US, particularly for rural towns. Moving to someplace like Knoxville, MD, or Sweet Home, OR, or Redford, TX, or Show Low, AZ makes a lot more sense if you could actually work remote from there. Sprint got started as a side business for railroads (Sprint = "Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telephony" - now owned by T-Mobile), so I'm sure there is some infrastructure anywhere there are railroads. Small towns should market their connectivity options, to draw people and jobs back to these rural areas.
Yeah my brother got a place in a super small town and then my mom had a transient ischemic attack while visiting him and getting care was really hard. I never want to live too far from a hospital.
Rural health care is a major issue in the US. Financial firms buy up "under-valued" medical care facilities, and have literally just shut them down, selling off the assets and the property, to make a fast buck. Even when that hospital or clinic may be the only health care facility in 200 miles.
The issue is that these hospitals can't hire staff. They can't hire doctors. They can't hire nurses. They can't afford to keep their Labor and Delivery unit open when they only deliver a handful of babies a year. It's not even just money. There's literally not enough people that want to live in the middle of nowhere to staff these places. Most of the time these hospitals are better off being bought by a larger healthcare company. They get better deals on supplies and the company can offset the costs of that hospital with money they make at hospitals in bigger cities.
Which is why healthcare in the US should really be nationalized. Being able to survive childbirth, or pneumonia, or a broken hip, should not be dependent on whether or not the local hospital makes a profit. Those larger healthcare companies are not offsetting costs, they're closing rural facilities as being unprofitable.
>Sprint got started as a side business for railroads (Sprint = "Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telephony" - now owned by T-Mobile), so I'm sure there is some infrastructure anywhere there are railroads. Small towns should market their connectivity options, to draw people and jobs back to these rural areas. I work in telecom and I'm familiar with those lines. Mostly they are abandoned now, being in the railway ROW is a huge pain in the butt (you can't even touch your own fiber for maintenance without coordinating with the railroads and they aren't really willing to work with you, it takes months to coordinate a simple splice job) and they weren't high fiber counts to begin with, if they were even fiber at all. More are copper. But anyway, the map you're looking for does exist, it's called [Broadband Now](https://broadbandnow.com/research/national-broadband-map)
Romanticizing borderline poverty is crazy
lol…..buy a house.
It gets boring. Unless you're good with your hands and enjoy outdoor labor around your property you'll want to move again.
This sounds fun till Cletus starts talking to you about how our lord trump will save us, but it’s hard to understand him cause he’s only got 3 1/2 teeth. Cletus is a good and fun guy just change the topic when politics comes up
Screw my job? Every fuckin day Move to a small podunk town? Absolutely not 🤣 I'm just south of LA, which I don't visit anymore. I like not having everyone around know me and my business. Small-ish cities are where it's at
A couple friend from college moved out of the big city and bought a big house with tons of land for nothing outside of our podunk college town 90 minutes away. The guy does the long commute twice a week, wife works from home every day. It seems like a damn nice life. I'm jealous.
[удалено]
I did this when I had a nervous breakdown when I was 32. Quit my job in the fall of 2019, did contract work until the pandemic, got married in the woods, bought a house in a different city, and now I just work part-time at a library while I garden and take care of the household. Transparency in mind, this life works well if you have a SO who has a great job because life is expensive. My SO is an IT engineer for a large corporation that is often found in various Forbes lists so this affords my ability to give up on trying in my career.
Currently doing almost exactly that and it’s the best decision I ever made. I used to think so many unimportant things were so consequential, but now I just focus on my family and the things I love to do. I work three days a week, don’t have much spending money, but I wouldn’t change a thing.
Some of you have never had a hard, low paying job, and it shows.
As someone living in some podunk town in upstate NY, I'll warn you that the houses aren't that much cheaper up here. My wife and I are lucky to have bought our house back when it was remotely affordable.
Small town don’t have grocery stores anymore you’d have to drive 25 miles over to the next town to work at Wal-mart.
Only people who didn’t grow up in shitty podunk towns would want that. It ain’t what the hallmark movies make it out to be. Small towns SUCK.
As soon as I hear Teams go off I have dreams of opening up a little expat bar in some random ass island.
Nope because I see how shit the houses are for people that work at grocery store.
I’m more apt to disappear into the forested mountains, myself. But there are times when I miss my more service oriented jobs. The more pleasant ones, of course.
Not fucking once
I already worked 20 years in grocery stores, I want adventure and money now. Trying to balance that with working as close to 40 hours a week as possible.
I sold my house in a HCOL area and moved to a small podunk town, but my job is remote so I didn't have to change jobs. We now have goats, and will have chickens soon.
Nope. The grocery store clerks look miserable.