However I also know the dark side of rural areas, mainly substance abuse triggered by boredom and lack of opportunity. There is always a trade-off.
I don't know where people get this idea that rural America is some kind of idyllic, serene place. It really isn't, for the most part. If you want idyllic, you'll have to find some extremely remote place in the mountains of the western states.
However, I just spent 2 weeks in Japanese cities, including almost a week in Tokyo, and it was extremely clean. Even on trash day it didn't stink.
However, I haven't had the same experience in non-US cities like Tokyo and Munich. Those cities are just much, much cleaner in many ways than NYC, and it's not just the smell.
More frequent pickups could alleviate the problem though.
It's pretty bold to be talking about cities and mental health when about five minutes in a small town will vividly show you the backstabbing, gossipy, popularity contest bullshit that comes with "closely knit communities" of all types. Like someone said, it's all a big trade-off. Human beings can go thoroughly nuts anywhere they lay their heads.
From many of these conversations over the years I don't think the experience growing up could have been more different.
The town I grew up in was around 20,000 people. While I absolutely ran into people I knew when out doing errands, I don't think it was ever to the extent my mother-in-law (someone who despises small towns) imagined it to be. I am curious where this notion came from.
From where I grew up in the country we could drive about 20 minutes to get to a town of maybe 1000 people and it's very different than 20k. You probably have one small clinic in the 1k town (compare to multiple doctors and probably a hospital in the 20k town) and maybe a small independent grocery store (vs probably multiple regional chains in the 20k).
The difference of scale is a difference of kind too. And also, the image of the "small town" - the romanticized version - isn't of the strip mall laden 20k town, but of the 1k town frozen in the past.
But let me tell you both of those size towns suck for different reasons. The decay is more palpable now in the 1k town as the economic horizon has really contracted. That one grocery store is probably closed now. The 20k town may make a go at things because it has more residents and thus retail type jobs, but unlike the 1k town built environment is more gross and less quaint, and the strip mall filled landscape is depressing.
A small town is more like 1k, where you're lucky if there's one stoplight. And yes, I've lived in places like that.
A few extras:
* You can't exercise, because dogs don't just bark but also chase you, and no one cares or thinks you're the asshole for complaining because you're in the country.
* Daily life is /very/ stressful. Forgot milk? Well, fuck you, buddy, because you're either doing without it or you're making a 50 minute round-trip that costs $8 extra in fuel. Want a pizza delivered? Nope. Chinese? Hahah. Need someone to come out and provide service? Oh, sorry, the first five places on Yelp don't serve your area. Grandma's calling? Sorry, but you're going to have to get used to repeating things not just once or twice but also a third and fourth time because that one bar of signal isn't going to cut it.
* Depression, drug use, and other adverse coping strategies are literally epidemic -- my entire neighborhood of stable working adults where I grew up all ended up on some combination of meth/oxycontin/xanax/antidepressants with alcohol use in excess of anything I ever see at 2 am throughout the nightlife districts of a top 10 US city.
* Oh, do you think you might need to get actual mental help? Well, those handful of upstanding people who aren't addicts are now going to be judging the hell out of you. Most conditions are just you being weak minded or morally inept. And don't even think about talking to someone or others about your thoughts, because that's not something you do. (And if it's sadness, fear, anxiety, or hallucinations, expect to have everyone suggest spurious religious interpretations instead of physical explanations, which, honestly, as a devout Christian, I now find really damaging both to peoples mental and spiritual health.)
* Friendships are forged as a practical proximal matter and not by choice. No one else benefits your mind or academic or professional achievement, and you probably won't share common interests -- you're buddies because Larry's the most likable dude on your block. In fact, even among friends, most people hold a majority of views that you find seriously revolting, and very few people appreciate any kind of artistic or intellectual activity of any kind. Romantic relationships are even less glamorous.
* Did we go over your essentials yet? Oh, wait, that'll be $70/mo for 1.5Mbps DSL that can't stream Netflix. The water bill will be double any reasonable amount and wastewater is processed in your back yard and at your own expense/peril. If you aren't lucky, you may even need your own well. You'll also have to burn trash or contract a company to come take it. Groceries and house supplies cost 30-50% more per quantity, and you have very little to no selection.
* Trash, everywhere. This alone makes me question anyone who thinks mental health is in any way better in a rural environment. It's sick having to look at collapsing, skirtless mobile homes and junk cars and scrap materials strewn across 15 peoples lawns on the way to the gas station. Any "green space" consists of trespassing behind barbed wire instead of a neatly maintained park.
Yep, I've seen this with Christians: "you have mental problems because you have demons in you!" This kind of thinking is extremely common in rural America these days.
>If you aren't lucky, you may even need your own well.
Wells are pretty expensive. Sure, the water itself is free, but the electricity to run the pump is not, and even at the frequently cheaper electric rates that rural areas enjoy, it adds up.
>You'll also have to burn trash or contract a company to come take it.
When I was growing up in rural areas, the common thing was to save it all up and haul it to the dump yourself every week or so.
All in all, you make a lot of excellent points that remind me a lot of the time I've spent in rural areas.
Having had wells... The electricity isn't the least of it. These things require regular servicing. Hopefully, you aren't unlucky enough to have it back up... which happened to my mother soon after moving into a newly purchased home. You need to watch the toilet paper you use because some are better than others.
Not to mention the need for a water softener in some areas. I've lived in areas whose water smelled of rotten eggs. This same water would turn hair and white clothing and everything else an orange shade.
You're confusing wells with septic systems. Wells are where you get water (you pump it out of the ground), septic systems are how you dispose of wastewater (basically by dumping it into the ground in a concrete tank, from which it then percolates into pipes with holes in a "septic field").
You're right, septic systems can be a maintenance nightmare.
>Not to mention the need for a water softener in some areas. I've lived in areas whose water smelled of rotten eggs.
Yep, this is the other problem with well water: it frequently has sulfur in it, and is really nasty.
uh. if that constitutes stressful, how do you survive receiving bad personal news?
And let's be real, the cops don't show up during a crime in the city either.
Interesting you mention medivac insurance -- I spent a number of years in a very small town in rural west Texas and I've never heard of that. Numerous times I heard of the race to get someone to one of the towns with a hospital 45 minutes away, though, maybe several times a year.
Maybe it's not at as widespread as you think, or somehow this town of about a thousand people (with one gas station, one restaurant open part time, and no grocery stores) entirely missed out on the existence of something that'd probably have saved lives.
Due to the sheer larger numbers in urban areas, I'm sure you are likely to have the best of the best in cities, but everyone can't be treated by the top 1% of doctors.
There's rich rural (think of the Hamptons, Tahoe, Marin/Napa Counties) and poor rural (Appalachia, Deep South, Central Valley), just like there's rich urban (lower Manhattan, Pac Heights, wealthy areas of Taipei/Shanghai/Tokyo etc.) and poor urban (the Tenderloin, the Bronx, much of Baltimore or Detroit). I never see things like trash left out, drug use, etc. in rich rural areas, and it's usually a 5 minute walk to an organic food market. Conversely, I see trash, shit, junkies, mentally ill people, random stabbings, and so on all the time in the Tenderloin. While there may be some correlation between poverty and rural areas, it seems like poverty is a much bigger cause of various social ills.
Also, and while it’s probably controversial to say, I don’t think poverty in the inner city is anywhere near as hard to overcome. First and foremost, you have access to numerous social services and charities that don’t exist in rural settings. You can also literally just take a bus out of any urban ghetto every day and lead any kind of life you want. If you’re stuck in a trailer park surrounded by hell, for lack of a better description, you’re completely and totally fucked — especially if you’re a minor.
> You can't exercise, because dogs don't just bark but also chase you, and no one cares or thinks you're the asshole for complaining because you're in the country.
This is literally what pepper spray and similar is intended for. Don't go cycling without it! You have to look out for yourself if you're in the middle of nowhere. Not willing to do that? Then don't live or do things there. Idiot dog owners are everywhere, but a pack of farm dogs is no joke when the nearest person is more than a mile away.
The smart people who were crazy enough to walk or jog regularly carried 5+ foot ugly sticks (or spears/lances) and/or a firearm.
I almost had a 65 lb mastiff make it through the window of my dad’s lifted F350 at cruising speed, and that was the third attack in a one mile stretch. That was the day I decided I wasn’t ever going on foot again.
Wow. Where was this?! I'm accustomed to clueless pet owners but that's just ridiculous. Cycling regularly, I recall ~4 run-ins over as many years (compared to none in urban or suburban areas ever).
I suppose I'd graduate to rubber bullets or even bird shot if it was that bad, but at some point it's really up to the authorities to ensure some minimal level of public safety. What is animal control even for if they don't fix things like this? It sounds like you were located in a terribly run county.
That describes most rural counties in America.
Even if your neighbor or neighbors have well-trained or well-controlled dogs, you have to worry about wild animals more than you do in urban areas. I'm not talking about predators as much as prey: A mountain lion is scary, but most of them pretty well leave humans alone. A buck deer in rut is big and deer in general are just really, amazingly stupid.
Plus... there's nowhere to walk to unless you really like seeing not only scenery, but the same scenery, over and over again, unless you spend more money to drive someplace with noticeably different scenery. (Rural areas are big. You can drive for days without seeing noticeably different scenery.)
> Depression, drug use, and other adverse coping strategies are literally epidemic -- my entire neighborhood of stable working adults where I grew up all ended up on some combination of meth/oxycontin/xanax/antidepressants with alcohol use in excess of anything I ever see at 2 am throughout the nightlife districts of a top 10 US city.
Another reason to stay in your home or stick to a small group of friends with no real ability to branch out. Want another friend? OK, pick the person with whom you have no common interests, the other person you have nothing in common with but this person's an alcoholic, or the person who moved there and obviously left the big town for a reason you'll hear about in gossip which will make you very happy you didn't interact with them.
> Oh, do you think you might need to get actual mental help?
Have fun driving hours to and from the next big town in all kinds of dangerously crappy weather!
> Any "green space" consists of trespassing behind barbed wire instead of a neatly maintained park.
Yes. This is something which needs to be mentioned more often: Cities have more public spaces than rural areas, because in rural areas, land is being used. You can't just wander into a wheat field or a cattle ranch. You could be arrested. National Parks are wonderful, but most rural areas aren't parkland, and most rural areas aren't even close to parkland. BLM land is by no means even close to being the same thing.
Some European countries have "freedom to roam" laws, but they're also more dense than rural North America, so most of those countries don't have "rural" to begin with, by and large.
"in rural areas, land is being used" -- it's more that, in rural areas, land is being owned. Not necessarily used. I lived in an extremely rural area for several years and was surrounded by fenced-off land that nobody used because some rich doctor somewhere owned it. You couldn't hike on it, couldn't camp on it, certainly no one else could use it. What a shitty system.
And yes, I recognize that the system that permits some out-of-state doctor to "own" thousands of acres is the same one that would permit me to some day, and I don't give a shit; I'd rather structure the world in such a way that nobody could fence it off like that. Maybe as small a tweak as a 'right to roam' law in America.
Sure you cannot ‘order a pizza’ or anything else in this countryside (sometimes someone new moves in a few km down on another mountain who starts out delivering something, like pizza, but gives up pretty quickly), I can bake one in my homemade woodoven though, with friends who I met here and sound very different from the ones you met over there too.
If dogs attack you, they are not removed over there? They are here which is why that hardly ever happens. There have been none such incidents here for many years.
Radio beamed internet (point to point) is cheap and streams Netflix, Video conferencing etc fine and now everywhere is cheap unlimited 4g, so I can hike in the forest and take a rest with a funny cat video.
Water and electra are cheap and enough space to put solar for hot water and electric: waste is collected at waste points.
The only thing is that the ambulance comes late indeed, but you can have a chopper (for free) and the healthcare is excellent here (and free); but I would imagine a solid heartattack would kill me here, but it does so in most places, just here it is more sure. But in return for that I have clean air, a ton of space, and, opposite of your experience, far less stress; it is Spain, nothing is in a hurry here which is great once you accept it. Probably will save you a few strokes in the end. Everything is cheap over here as well, my neighbors live of 500 euros a month, something that can be picked up doing a few hours per month of coding for a city client while sitting in the garden.
The thrash also rings no bells and mobile homes are not normal (or even allowed long term), cars have to pay road tax even if they cannot drive until they are scrapped at an official scrapyard, so people have them destroyed etc.
I guess this really depends on the country; things like rural HK, Shanghai, Thailand (ChiangMai), France, Germany or the parts of rural Australia or New Zealand I have been for longer stretches are also not as you describe at all.
Also, a lot of people, including me, who grew up in rural areas, hate them after they leave for university etc but later in life start to long for them again in my experience.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/peninkulma
I like rural places fine but the constant barking kills me.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/83hj3v/air...
[1]https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=2452992&itype=CMSI...
That's plenty. There aren't any stinky farms or noisy trucks around. There is a lot of grass to mow, though.
All things considered, I like it.
Especially for those that grew up around it.
Grass fed cattle dung barely smells even when it's fresh. Same with horses. Pigs are the same, only when in concentration.
The dogs don't bark up our tree.
https://drugabuse.com/country-vs-city-addictions-differ-says...
Rural people are more likely to abuse alcohol, whereas city dwellers are more likely to abuse hard drugs.
But I still feel that city people are crazier and more dangerous on average. The stick and carrot aspect of big cities does drive people at least slightly crazy.
I would wager that the overwhelming majority of people moving from rural to urban areas are doing it to better their bank accounts.
If your optimizing for least effort for a given income level moving to the city is a no-brainer since it's where all the easy money is.
You can say that about literally anywhere. It's a matter of how doable it is, and how much effort it'll be, versus the reward, compared to just going somewhere else. The simple fact is that there's far fewer jobs in rural areas, and also there's far, far fewer good-paying jobs.
You do raise a valid point, which is that a car is a luxury. Having lots of land is a luxury. Having kids is a luxury. Living in a long Urban center where the grocery store is a 2 minute walk away is a luxury.
It's up to the people receiving the UBI to decide which luxuries they want to spend it on. You can't have it all unless you can earn enough to pay for it all.
I never said conditions like that should be added, only that we shouldn't give out enough UBI for people to live a luxurious lifestyle, which is what rural life really is in America, in a way. Think about it: what would happen to poor, rural Americans if we jacked the price of gasoline up to European levels, where it really should be?
>Living in a long Urban center where the grocery store is a 2 minute walk away is a luxury.
It's really not, it's simple geometry. If you pack people into a dense urban environment with tiny little apartments and remove the luxury of a car and lots of land, then a 2-minute walk to a grocery store becomes almost automatic. It's a tradeoff: you simply cannot have a 2-minute walk to a grocery store if everyone has a separate, freestanding McMansion with a giant yard. Anyone with a basic understanding of geometry should understand this. Put everyone into tiny apartments in high-rises and a quick walk to the grocery store is easy to accomplish (make sure the urban area has mixed-use zoning though).
You're actually proving their point for them:
>> which is that a car is a luxury. Having lots of land is a luxury. Having kids is a luxury. Living in a long Urban center where the grocery store is a 2 minute walk away is a luxury.
Cities arent perfect. I'm absolutely stressed over the hectic pace of a large city. But I'm not depressed and hopeless like those I know in rural areas.
Maybe we each have to pick our poison.