“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.
“Stadtluft macht frei” but yes, everything else is spot on.
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There were free peasants outside cities. The specific reason is a serf could run away to a city, and if he managed to stay long enough, he stopped being a serf and became a citizen.
I agree with the sentiment, but Germans have a horrible track record on what makes you free.
Came here to try to make this joke. You did better than I could have, I was trying to create a Germanic folk hero named Arvid McFry
The prefix “Mc” or “Mac” is Celtic anyway, not Germanic, so you failed in that sense too.
And Arvid is Scandinavian. That’s why I didn’t do it.
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.
I grew up next to a farm. They stopped growing produce because the government regulations got to be crazy. They just grow soy beans and hay now.
Can they not poison the water supply anymore or were there too many strings attached to get their subsidies?
You know nothing about them.
Wait, you got paid? I just got grabbed by the neighbor whenever he needed another hand
I currently work at a farm and it is fucking hard work for $15 an hour. The only reason I stay is because family friends own it and I need money for college. At least I don’t have to deal with sheep lmao.
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
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Also less diversity, and rarely any good/interesting restaurants. I ran to the city for 15 years, now I’m in a small town and it’s fun to have private land (a little anyway), but I still miss miss late night outings, once a month brunches, and really good Indian, Mexican, Ethiopian, Chilean, etc food I could get within 20 minutes in the city.
The incentive being otherwise you die
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.
The reason we did dope instead of drinking isn’t a cultural thing. It’s that the dope man goes to the same jail whether he gets caught selling it to adults or kids, same as it was during my bad old days 20 years ago. Counterintuitively, if it were legal and regulated you’d see fewer kids doing it.
In a way, though, the culture and environment of the area I grew up in is exactly why we had so many addicts in our ranks and why we did heroin instead of drinking.
The county my hometown is in has had the highest rates of drug and alcohol addiction in the entire state for at least 50 years, probably going back to the 1910s (I wanna say its in the top 3 areas countrywide, but I dont remember), and a lot of it revolves around the tourism economy. A tourism economy means that money is made there during the brief time between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and the rest of the year the jobs dry up and something like 60% of businesses close up until the next year. So not only do many people make the majority of their annual wages during a 3 month period and hope it lasts the rest of the year, but there’s also very little to do in the area because everything’s closed and it’s not like you’re gonna hang out on a beach with 4 inches of snow on it. I used to work with a fisherman who would have his son drive the boat while he leaned over the front and used a chainsaw to break up the ice so they could get the boat out to fish in especially cold winters where the ocean would freeze over. The only thing that comes close to the frequency of drug and alcohol addiction there is homelessness. And it’s the same story no matter what tourist town/vacation spot you’re talking about. A veneer of glitzy vacation beauty and plentiful party drugs hiding the addiction and homelessness beneath.
But my generation turned to heroin because, as you said, it’s illegal and therefore unregulated, which makes it cool to do, but also because alcohol is legal and so our parents were the ones day drinking in bars or at home while we were kids, making it not cool to drink, and heroin was easy to get and plentiful. Post 9/11, as the war in Iraq and Afghanistan grew, heroin from the Middle East began to flood into New England ports, and the guys who sold the tourists and rich people in their summer homes party drugs in the summer, were selling heroin right alongside weed and Adderall to us high schoolers in the winter.
And I just wanna make it clear that my comment wasn’t some kinda dig at you or something, but rather that the greentext of “why would you want to leave the idyllic country life” and your response reminds me of the countless conversations I’ve had with tourists and wealthy summer folk who say “why would you ever want to leave, it’s such a beautiful place,” and how every other person I’ve ever met who came from a tourist town has said the exact same thing as me about where they grew up.
“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” exactly sums it up.
On Reddit, it actually got to the point where it was weird how often I would describe living in a tourist town without naming anything specific beyond what I’ve said here, and have people either say “that sounds like (the exact area I grew up in),” or, “I grew up in (the area I grew up in), and it was exactly like that.” I guess I kept bumping into them because Reddit was our addiction of choice. What else was I gonna do sitting in the fish market I worked at waiting for the 10 customers we’d have in the 4 hours we would be open on a winter day.
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.
Or they don’t call an ambulance because they cannot afford the $5000 bill.
That’s also a very fair concern that isn’t limited to rural areas but tends to hit them extra hard.
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.
Rural living has its charm sometimes, but I’m so fucking tired of driving 45 minutes to eat taco bell.
How much do you get paid to do that to yourself?
Living in a rural area? Its where my family is. Went through some shit and my mental health is better after moving, at the cost of convenience.
No I meant commute to eat taco bell lol.
lmao, it sounds good sometimes.
Truth. A trip to the hardware store was a significant chunk of the day.
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.
I may try that. Some people down the road put a 8 foot chicken wire fence around theirs to keep them out, but I kind of wanted to avoid looking like a prison yard.
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.
I’ve tried the hair clippings and these guys don’t seem to care. I’m a hairy guy, so maybe I smell too much like a sasquatch?
Haven’t tried the cat thing tho… there’s strays that live out back but I’m not sure if they do their business there so I may give that a try.
I’m a bit late, but try out a motion-activated sprinkler. That and inedible/smelly plants surrounding your garden. Works like a charm for my parents.
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.
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surrounded by weird people
Have you ever set foot in a city?
different flavors of weird for sure. Depends on which type you’re more comfortable around.
I’ll take the smelly screaming drug addict with a knife over the quiet, peculiarly sweet smelling drug addict with a dozen guns and a cousin-wife on the police force.
Yes, and I’ll tell ya what, I ain’t yet felt like if I stayed over too long the locals were gonna start raising some planks and rope like I do if I even look like I’ve so much as thought of walking into the gas station store to get a bottle of water out in the countryside.
Those rural folks want me dead just for existing and what I believe about the world ain’t doing many favors to that inclination.
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It’s probably not that extreme most of the time, but there are plenty of sundown towns in the rural US. If the other poster is a minority it can certainly get ugly just by them being there at any time. Just because it isn’t nighttime doesn’t mean that they will necessarily refrain from targeting them.
Hell, even being a white man who doesn’t look like a local can get nasty looks and unwanted attention. I’d say it’s risky to be there for anyone who doesn’t have a local traveling with them.
No, but things can totally get ugly
Countryside has more weird people per capita.
Like you don’t find tons of weird people in Cities.
Can confirm. Grew up in the hellhole that is rural America. Will never go back.
I wish I lived in a place with only 4 miles to the store. It definitely can get obnoxious haha
Yeah, try a 25 mile drive.
Unfortunately I do :'( lmao
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.
Also the explicit reason stated that she went away was because of basic empathy for others and duty to others for a positive impact on the world. I just realized that the entire plot of zootopia would be lost on a lot of people purely out of apathy.
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
I mean, do you think cars aren’t a thing in rural areas or something? You think us country bumpkins are riding our horses around?
No, but it’s much, much easier to get rid of them in cities where they can be replaced by subways, tramways, buses, bikes, and the like.
All of which make for a way better quality of life than car hell. If people wern’t sitting in unbearable traffic all day complaints about urban living would be far less common
Dunno. In rural areas I know there are more bikes than in city or cars in same area. Cause you know, cars are expensive.
What if you want to leave the city?
When you want to travel to the third world countries that connect the cities of the US you could rent a car, which is necessary because rural areas have apparently forgotten about public transit of any kind. In civilized countries, there’s a solid network of mass transit basically everywhere. It doesn’t matter that you’re in a podunk town, a bus comes by every half hour because it’s a necessity to have a regular bus more than a full one.
Bullshit. There are vast areas of the western US and Alaska where this simply is not economically possible or even desirable. The same is true for huge parts of Canada and Australia and other countries that have very remote and thinly settled regions. Even when I lived in Ireland, which is tiny and relatively densely populated, there were rural communities that only had bus service once or twice a day.
this simply is not economically possible or even desirable.
Life is not economically possible or desirable by capitalism.
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Then you take the train. If this is not an available option, you take the car, one of which you either own but barely use when staying within the city, or that you buy (which is the option I chose, it’s a lot cheaper than to own one).
There also should absolutely be trains that connect cities together too, it’s already mostly the case in Europe which is around as big as the US, including high speed trains between major cities, but there is also a lot of regular trains that connect moderately sized towns with their nearby city. This can be both a cheaper and faster alternative to driving a car if you go somewhere you won’t need a car (say, a city with very good public transit). China may be more comparable to the US as it is a single country with a similar size, but the size of their train network grew tremendously over the last twenty years, especially their high speed network. I guess a good start for the US would be to connect the major cities on the East Coast with high speed trains, such as DC, New York, Chicago, and other cities nearby, I can guarantee you there will be demand for that.
In fact, I’m about to take a high speed train from Paris to Lyon. Including the time I’ll have spent in public transit to go to and come back from the train station, it’ll take me three hours total vs four and a half hours by car without stops on traffic jams to travel some 400km (around 250 miles). The tickets cost me 90€ both ways, including the subway and tramway, while the same travel by car would cost me at least that much in not double.
There’s enough space out there it’s not an issue. Cars are a rural technology we bulldozed half the city to makebroom for and then complained about not enough parking and too much traffic
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Yeah, you didn’t know? As soon as you leave a city all vehicles disappear.
I hate that invisible wall
Nasty business when people hit it too fast
Rural areas don’t have the same density of cars that a lot of urban areas do, so a lot of the problem of high density traffic just don’t apply.
It’s like saying that rural areas also have people, so it’s not like urban areas have any unique people based problems.My grocery store is on the intersection of two five lane roads that are busy all day every day. The crosswalks are about a 20 minute walk apart.
A lot of things that people cite as benefits of small old towns are just benefits of not requiring massive amounts of parking and huge roads.
Ignorance plain and simple. Most people nowadays live their whole lives in big urban centers, they have an idealistic view of country life and take the conveniences of city life for granted. City life can suck, I won’t deny it, but living in bumfuck nowhere also has it’s major drawbacks.
Eh, I’ve lived both, now in the city, it’s got its advantages but I’d be lying if I said I don’t dream of going back from time to time.
In some cases it is.
I live on an acre about 100 miles from the nearest sizable city. I’ve got a workshop, pecan trees, a pool, a smoker trailer, a bonfire pit fifteen feet across, and lots of peace and quiet. No HOA, no city ordinances, no traffic, and the only loud neighbor is a donkey that brays a few times a day.
That would cost me at least half a million in the city. The little apartment I used to rent Pre-COVID cost me nearly as much as the house payment I pay now.
Is it for everyone? No. There’s no excitement, limited shopping and dining options, and anywhere I want to go is at least a twenty minute drive. But it’s great for me. My job sends me all over the world so I get my fill of the city while living in hotels. Going home is a breath of fresh air.
The key is to live in the countryside but not actually work in the countryside.
Yep.
Suburbs!
Having a decent income and wealth makes living on a rural location idyllic. Someone with a low income farming job and an acre in a rural location won’t see the exact same house the same way because they will be struggling financially.
Oh, for sure. I lived not too far from where I do now when I was younger and flipped burgers for a living. I had holes in the floor of my trailer where possums would come up at night and raid the cat food.
Still, being able to wake up, walk outside, and take my morning piss off the front porch while watching the sunrise was some compensation. Being out away from everyone is appealing to some people.
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Wow, good call. The highlight there is:
Urban consumers (may) spend more money.
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.
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
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.
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.
