"Stadtliche luft macht man frei" is an old German saying. City air makes you free. Life in a small town can be stifling. That close-knit family wants you to be just like them. God forbid you want to do or see anything new. The moving-to-a-big-city trope is as old as cinema, and has strong roots in reality.
In the middle-ages in at least in what is now Estonia, if you ecaped to the city and lived there for a year and a day you would be set free from your serfdom. "Linna õhk teeb vabaks" same frase was used for that.
Mr green text has no idea what he's talking about.
I grew up on a farm you're telling me that was an idyllic life?
Farmwork is stupidly long days in awful weather, it's either hot, or freezing cold, or raining, or snowing. The pay is effectively abysmal and makes you wish you worked in Starbucks on minimum wage because that would be an improvement. You have all this necessary equipment you've had to "buy", which despite costing more than most houses is about as reliable as a Soviet era tank.
And that's just growing props if you're mad enough to also raise cattle then it's even worse because you've got all them to deal with and sheep in particular are more suicidal than a depressed lemming.
But hey, you get a nice view.
Well, at least a soviet tank can be repaired with a hammer, unlike a deere
Soviet equipment is much more repairable than any of the modern crap we have nowadays which is designed to be used and tossed in a relatively short timeframe.
Thick enough wood log works too
There's a reason the kids aren't taking over the farm. Not to mention that a 50 acre returned soldier lot can't provide for a family of six anymore.
Well it isn't subsistence farming by any stretch of the imagination it's full on industrial farming.
Most farms these days, at least crop farms, grow only two or three different crops. Mostly dictated by what will fetch the best price and what is currently being subsidised by the government. Often times you will find that farms are not growing any food stuffs at all.
Wait, you got paid? I just got grabbed by the neighbor whenever he needed another hand
I currently work at a farm and it is fucking hard work for $15 an hour. The only reason I stay is because family friends own it and I need money for college. At least I don't have to deal with sheep lmao.
is about as reliable as a Soviet era tank.
Are you praising farming equipment or saying Soviet era tanks are unreliable.
Almost certainly the latter, though im sure some soviet era tank specialist nerd will write up a 'bhut achthually ...' 5 paragraph essay on how soviet tanks were the best of the best and could be repaired with twigs and mud
You are currently depressed lemming
Is green text talking about the specific character in the picture?
Because movies like that belong on the “Lifetime TV” or “Hallmark Channel”. It’s been done. Maybe yet another “Can’t fix stupid” reductionist country wisdom beats city slicker smarts? Or make fun of city people who don’t know how to ride a horse?
That, or nobody wants to watch movies with people sitting around bonfires drinking cheap beer on your truck tailgate.
I grew up rural. It isn’t that exciting.
I grew up in a place that had more cows than people. Now it has more heroin than cows. I'd be dead if I didn't get out. Real rural life where you're working for a living eats people alive. What you want isn't that, it's this ideal where everything is simple and paid for and you're distant from the things you don't like about actually living in a community with people but all the amenities of that life are still immediately to hand. When someone you love dies because it takes an hour for an ambulance to get to your house, that is the rural life that's actually out there to be had.
Everything about OP's comment and your response reminds me of every conversation I've ever had with anybody else who grew up in a vacation town.
3 months of tourists clogging up every service you can think of and talking about how wonderful it must be to live there as they leave after their 3 day weekend of partying on the beach, and 9 months of the local kids doing heroin because alcoholism is more popular with their parents and you need some kind of addiction to cope with the lack of work and things to do outside the tourist season.
I spent 10 years training kids on how to cut fish, and every single one of them shared the same sentiment. Regardless of whether they wanted to move to the city or farther out into the woods, they all wanted to get as far away from that town as they possibly could.
Don’t forget your private jet to get back to civilization when you’d like some decent medical treatment, something other than satellite TV, or a dinner of better quality than whatever restaurant is next to the truck stop.
Yeah I was gonna say, the "city boy/girl goes to the country and finds themselves" trope is honestly way more overdone than the "country boy/girl goes to the city to find themselves" variety
Eh, my friend actually did that. I assumed that she had some sort of awful family she was running from, but actually they're nice and she visits them on holidays. She just wanted to be in the big city so much that she was willing to rent a single room in a bad neighborhood and constantly look for odd jobs rather than live out in the countryside with her parents.
I understand the draw. It's boring in the country for most young people. At least there's always something to do or something to see in the city.
I was a city kid that ended up in the country, and it's like a different world. It took me years to slow down to country pace. Now that I'm older I enjoy it, but it took a lot of getting used to. There's things I miss about the city but I prefer being out here where I never have to lock things up for fear of it getting stolen, cleaner air, and all the other issues city life brings.
The biggest issue I have out here is keeping the deer out of my garden.
Put in some big T-posts around the border, like 10 ft ones, one on each of the four corners. Once they're pounded in, string up some fairy lights around 9 ft off the ground and then another set around 6 ft off the ground. Assuming you have a ~4 ft fence with chicken wire for squirrels, this light configuration will keep them out--even if you don't keep the lights on overnight, since deer hate jumping into stuff they don't see ahead of time.
With this configuration, our garden has been deer-free in an area that has a ton of them. I see around 20 unique deer literally every day on my property, and I've never seen any of them in my garden, nor have I found any deer-eaten veggies.
A tip I got from an orchard owner is to use human hair clippings. They just got them from a barber shop and stuffed them in cans attached to the trees. Aparently the smell helps keep the deer away.
Also cat or dog urine can help keep them away. If you have an indoor cat then you can "mark" the area with used cat litter and that should keep them out. You can also just buy straight up bobcat urine online for that purpose. I'm not sure if it works any better than regular cat or dog pee, but it is available.
Another issue is that LBGT people often have to flee hostile rural towns for a city where they can be free to live. We're currently in the middle of a refuge crisis as trans people flee red States for mostly cities (small towns in blue states can be scary too) in places like Minnesota.
It's a sense of adventure and wanting to try new things. I grew up in a very small town, lived in a couple large cities (not Chicago, but you would get robbed every once in awhile and hear some gun shots). I currently live in a medium size city a few states from where I grew up and it's depressing to me than going home and seeing the people who have never even tried anything else.
I mean I can imagine the dating prospects are really terrible in the countryside, noone talked about that yet.
Dodging accidental incest is basically the most popular sport where I grew up.
Joking aside, where I grew up there were certain "clans" as we only somewhat jokingly refered to them. Basically large interconnected family units that were usually dominated by a single central family with smaller branch off families on the periphery. Dating someone within your clan wasn't necissarily off limits because that person may not actually be related to you, but if you were in the same clan then you knew your families were very closely linked and you have to be careful. If you wanted to be safe though then you just date someone from outside your clan. Basically if you mention the last name of that central family and they don't recognize it, then you're usually good; if they do recognize it then you need to do some more digging.
in a bad neighborhood
If it's not built after 2000, then the only reason it is bad is because people think it is.
Anon has never heard of the term "target audience".
See "every Hallmark TV movie". High powered female executive from the big city ends up in a rural town because of family/friend/work, falls in love with local stud and small town life, quits and moves to small town, cut and wrap.
This is 3/4 of their production and it works because it draws in the urban women who actually dream of this and the rural women who want to believe they're living a dream and all city folk are jealous of them.
She had 275 siblings. Getting away from that farm was the smartest thing she's ever done. She has no hope of any kind of meaningful inheritance. I'm honestly surprised a farm could support that many rabbits and still turn any kind of profit. It must have been subsidized out the wazoo. The last thing it needs is her hanging around, getting hitched to some redneck just out of high school, popping out a couple hundred hungry mouths of her own right before the inevitable foreclosure and declaration of martial law as the farmpocalypse occurs when her parents finally kick it and the tens-of-thousands of children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren raze the countryside in search of fodder. Just ask an Australian what rabbits are capable of.
Being clear, living in the sticks for 42 years of my life wasn't ideal. That is unless you like living in a dry county surrounded by narrow-minded, puritanical shitbirds that were working OT to make sure people either went to church, or publicly shame them if they weren't. There was also the in crowds that held people back or elevated them, depending on which family you were related to.
I do miss the hunting and fishing, though I can head back any time I want to do that. Meanwhile, I'll stay where I can maintain my chill by having copious resources readily available when I want them, and enough anonymity to enjoy them without anyone asking me where I was last Sunday.
Your spiel reminds me of Dylan Moran's stand-up bit about country life.
Why do we accept that urban life is worse than rural life?
Cars ruin cities. There's more we can do to make cities better but that's the big one
Ignorance plain and simple. Most people nowadays live their whole lives in big urban centers, they have an idealistic view of country life and take the conveniences of city life for granted. City life can suck, I won't deny it, but living in bumfuck nowhere also has it's major drawbacks.
In some cases it is.
I live on an acre about 100 miles from the nearest sizable city. I've got a workshop, pecan trees, a pool, a smoker trailer, a bonfire pit fifteen feet across, and lots of peace and quiet. No HOA, no city ordinances, no traffic, and the only loud neighbor is a donkey that brays a few times a day.
That would cost me at least half a million in the city. The little apartment I used to rent Pre-COVID cost me nearly as much as the house payment I pay now.
Is it for everyone? No. There's no excitement, limited shopping and dining options, and anywhere I want to go is at least a twenty minute drive. But it's great for me. My job sends me all over the world so I get my fill of the city while living in hotels. Going home is a breath of fresh air.
Because these characters are usually young and cities are exciting. Wanting to get away from people tends to happen later in life. That said, I know plenty of people in their 40s/50s who love city living.
It's not even that complicated....... the vast majority of people that make up the consumer market live in urban environments.
Yeah people want excitement from movies and TV and country life is usually quiet and might be considered boring for movies or TV programs or just wouldn't be considered interesting by most younger people.
She wasn't bigoted enough to become a small town cop so she had to become a city cop.
Despite that most incidents of racial profiling occur within the city where a multi-racial ecosystem is more prevalent and the cops don't even live in the city they police. But sure.
I've lived in high urban, low urban, suburban, and rural. They all have pros and cons.
If you're dating tho, the city is way better, but good luck finding practice space - if you're into that sort of thing.
There are dating practise spaces?
Haha, yeah, it's called the bar.
Lives my ideal life
Ftfy
Her dream was to be a cop. Having it be a low paying career, living in a small apartment, and being away from friends and family are things we call sacrifices.
You know, after leaving the country: I really don't mind losing connection with my racist family members joking about how "dropped nickels stay on the ground since picking them up is worthless."
And I certainly don't miss them and others bashing my gay friends for being different.
The open country has a lot of potential, but unfortunately a lot of people outside of the metropolitan are dumb and shit and stay prejudiced out of comfort and having no reason to learn.
Into the Wild was kind of the inverse of this. Obviously it didn't work out for the guy, but why does it have to? He had an idea he wanted to achieve and followed his dreams
Nothing works out on a long enough time line.
Lol, wtf
Because those "loving family members" IRL are usually nosy dickheads, and there is no dating scene in small towns. So it's either marry your cousin, or move to the city.
Not to mention job opportunities...
I my experience I am seeing how the trend goes on the other direction and more and more people around me actively choose to leave the city and go to rural areas. I think that this tends to happens around the mid 30s,!not exclusively, and might be also related to an specific location. I am central Europe based. It's just my personal experience tough.
Often the suburbs than strictly rural areas in America, but people moving to rural (especially scenic) locales isn’t uncommon.
I feel this too. I want space and quiet.
Theres something very soul crushing about decades of suburbanite living. Theres a lot of country/rural folks in the comment section who are singing all the bad parts of that kind of life, but they don't know what its like to live your whole life in one big cramped giant shopping mall surrounded by hundreds of houses withing a mile. with no nature in sight except the tiny ass overregulated national/state 'parks'. Nowhere to really go and nothing to see unless you're prepared to go miles since almost every town is so overdeveloped. The light pollution so bad only the brightest stars can be seen, some people live and die never seeing the night sky in its true glory. The real threat of not enough jobs and homelessness if you cant pay this months ever rising 1500$ rent, or sign up for decades of debt for a mortgage just for a small poorly constructed 2 story house. I want fresh air, and a beautiful night sky, to actually own a piece of land without being in debt the rest of my life, and not be bothered or seen by a single human being unless wanted, and to not worry about HOA bullshit and nosey onlooking neighbors watching me from across the yard. Fuck convinence, fuck 500,000$ homes, fuck middle class suburbanite yuppies who ruin every place they touch with endless gentrification to have a safe place for 'teh family', you want it you can have it.
I personally think a good life should have both: A place where you can rest, be free and enjoy the beauty of nature to the fullest and a place that makes you realize how fucked up society is and how important it is to fight the good fight.
I pity people who never make it out of the city. And i think people hiding away from the harsh reality of cities are being selfish. but not in an evil way.
We already have that, it's called the Hallmark channel and exists entirely to aggressively propagandize to rural stay at home moms to remind them that they made the good choice staying behind while everyone else went out looking for careers and how those city slickers are stupid because they can't ride a horse, nevermind how Karen hasn't even touched a horse, nevermind learned to ride, evaluation based on real facts is for those liberals and their critical gender theory!
What about both?
Go watch Kiminonawahow does anon quite literally live in ancapistan?
There is a good amount of evidence that the US government contracts some of the bigger studios and makes deals with them so that they portray things how the government wants them to be.
A big example is any movie involving the US military. They'll rent out all the military equipment for free as long as they get final say over the movie.
Not sure if something like this would fall under that, but I wouldn't be shocked.
I love the common American boogeyman known as "government". I like to imagine the president or any other of the fuckers in high positions going to the film studios and explaining to them what the government has chosen and what they're gonna show in the movie. Instead of their more common leisure time - coke, hookers and moralizing.
Some military movies are sponsored by the military (not the government), but as much as you'd like there to be some conspiracy, it's dead simple - the marketing guys decided it's a great opportunity to recruit people and the director got to make an expensive movie for cheap.
Isn't that a good strategy though if you're trying to project soft power by using your domestic film industry to your advantage?
American culture is one of its big exports, and you can gain a lot more cultural influence around the world by making cool movies with multimillion weapons systems by cooperating with filmmakers when they'd otherwise be sitting at the ready or in storage.
But also, the US government didn't have a hand in Zootopia's plot.
rural life can not be austainable.
move out of city for cheap house etc - than complain about no wifi, no doctors etc - force government to have fiber internet - yadda yadda
people who advocate rural areas are just big egoists and ignorant
You literally cannot grow sufficient food to feed the population of the city within the city. Every city requires massive rural areas for sustenance.
Rural areas have sufficient abundance to both sustain themselves and the cities.
can you give me any source for that?
i heard paris is considered a beautiful city. if all humans lived in a city as dense as paris we could all live in an area the size of germany.
growing population says it is impossible to feed the world with conventional farming as this will further reduce nature.
rural areas are whats destroying the planet.
also, were i lived the farmer has an ipad and the machines do all the work. nobody really needs to live there anymore as you can easily check from the number of employees in farming. constant decline. it is bs to think people need to be in thos rural areas but you can wait till it is 100% machine made.
rural life can not be sustainable.
Cities need farms to feed the inhabitants of the cites, farms can't exist without farmers (yet) and there's plenty of types of businesses farmers need to visit fairly frequently in order to live. This creates and sustains the small farm communities the dot the rural landscape between large cities
move out of city for cheap house etc - than complain about no wifi, no doctors etc - force government to have fiber internet - yadda yadda
Farmers need services too. Are you just saying everyone unlucky enough to be born outside of a major metropolis must go without medical care or access to modern services?
Also fiber is literally cheaper in the long term. It has effectively infinite bandwidth, requires no maintenance except repairing damage by excavation/natural disasters/wildlife (which any kind of utility line requires) and can run literally hundreds of kilometers without any repeaters or anything else to maintain the signal inbetween.
ISPs were (and still are in many places) utilizing worn out, sometimes over a century old telephone and cable television infrastructure to deliver internet to places that hadn't yet gotten fiber, and it perpetuates a digital divide that prevents kids growing up on farms from accessing services that might help them be the most productive members of society that they can be
people who advocate rural areas are just big egoists and ignorant
I think you're the ignorant one in this case
assumptions assumptions.
look at the facts.
co2 -> rural homes cause way more emissions
...so does their commute.
they cost, we pay
internet...extremely expensive to get fibre everywhere. ...so is public transport.
the cost, we pay
i do not see how a planet with growing numbers of ppl could allow rural areas really
Also housing in cities is artificially expensive because it's illegal to.built dense housing in.most of it.because of suburbanites who wanna play pretend farmhouse
it.because of suburbanites who wanna play pretend farmhouse
And don't pay for it
paris.
dense enough? considered worth living? because if all ppl would live i a terrible terrible city like paris, we'd have a shitload of nature back.
anyone who thinks one deserves to live rural just says his/her personal choice of lifestyle is more important than a future for the kids. rural areas destroy so much nature and take up way too much land.
