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As someone who has actually managed to work remotely in a small city while employed by a major tech firm at normal pay rates, I can definitely say your scenario does not match my lived experience.

1) unless you move to a very small town, there are still plenty of people in your economic demographic. In the US, roughly 5% of households earn more than $200k. In a town of 70k, you’d expect there to be roughly 27k households and therefore 1300 households earning more than $200k. If you are currently making more then $500k you might be a little more out there, but then you really have no reason to move, do you? (Your techie peers at other companies don’t make that sort of money).

2) “Friends from work” don’t go away when working remotely. We still have “water cooler” conversations and members of my team have occasionally visited each other’s cities outside of work. We also do a ton of socializing when we are physically together for work.

That being said, it does reduce that aspect of social life. What fills it? Other activities- family/children, hobbies, causes, clubs, etc. I’ve lived in major tech hubs before- it did take longer to establish a social network while working remotely in my smaller city, but once established it has been much more fulfilling.

3) I apologize for criticizing, but your concern about not being able to socialize with the middle class sounds bizarre. Some of our dearest friends in this city are solidly middle class- 911 dispatchers, teachers, carpenters, nurses, and sales people. We met through sports, children’s school, and volunteering. We specifically chose to live well below our means (FIREing before the term existed I guess) so our neighbors are a varied lot, and we like them. We can’t invite them to join us vacationing in Europe, but other than that it’s there is little awkwardness.

> In the US, roughly 5% of households earn more than $200k. In a town of 70k, you’d expect there to be roughly 27k households and therefore 1300 households earning more than $200k.

This assumes uniform distribution of household incomes across cities of different sizes, which I suspect is a shaky assumption. More likely, the high earning households are concentrated in a short list of major population centers.

Not as much as you think. I couldn't quickly find the dataset where I looked at this before, but https://statisticalatlas.com/United-States/Household-Income has percentages of population earning more than $200k by state and MSA. The Birmingham Alabama metro area has 4.03% of its households earning more than $200k, and Alabama a whole has 2.92% of household earning more than $200k (the 5th lowest in the Union, btw). That means Alabama outside its biggest, richest city is still 2.5% over $200k. Sure, those are also probably concentrated in the other 2nd cities in the state like Montgomery and Tuscaloosa, but you are getting really far down the list of US Metro areas by population when you get to Tuscaloosa Alabama.

There are well off people throughout the United State, not only in the top 20 metros.

Even small towns have a decent number of high earning people, mainly small business owners.

> not being able to socialize with the middle class sounds bizarre.

These are your words, not mine!

If you're working remotely as a software developer then you're pretty much middle class by definition.

I think software devs, even remote probably make at least 100k, but I'm just guessing. That's a lot more than median us income of $46k (1) in 2019. Still not that far above dual income families. However they aren't paying as high a wages in rural areas as others pointed out so rural avg probably lower than big city avg.

1. https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/average-income-in...

"On your level" just screams pretentiousness. Since when is money the measure of a man anyways?

I'm not talking about some sort of scorecard but the fact that a lot of these low CoL areas have crushing poverty.

If you want to be the one-eyed man amongst the blind, go for it, but not everyone wants that.

Socioeconomic groupings exist in the metro areas too. Senior management hanging out with the workers is relatively rare. Because it's just a pain in the arse to guard yourself in every conversation and not seem like a twat lacking empathy when you talk about some benign thing you did last week.

I don't get it. I have lots of money. I've never had any feeling I had to 'guard' myself in any conversation with people from literally any social demographic. I mean, unless you're some kind of oddball, all you're using money for is buying nicer food, more space, and more time. So nobody's going to get upset because you're eating loads of avocados, even if it did come up in conversation.

He was not talking about you specifically.

If you have never experienced or observed stratification, then you may simply not get around much (in terms of social circles). It's not that strange, I cannot afford it either, I just made some chance acquintances, mostly through my socially far more capabele partner.

Class had become the most useful criterion to distinguish groups to me. It's not about guarding oneself explicitly, or avoiding interaction, but more in happening to frequent different kinds of sports/events, having different types of interest and being able to afford those types of hobbies. You won't see a working class person drive up to the club in his jaguar old timer for a game of golf and going for a Michelin star afterwards with friends, talking over a new investment opportunity. You see what I mean?

I come from the UK, which is pretty strongly stratified in terms of class (to my knowledge, the most stratified, at least historically). My observation was that, as long as you're straightforward and pleasant, people from all backgrounds are unlikely to dislike you if you come from a 'higher' social class. They'll have lots of ideas about who you are or what you're like, but they are mostly positive.

People from richer social classes, on the other hand, typically either dislike poorer classes for a variety of more or less obvious prejudices, or they dislike them because they project their own antagonisms, and thus feel disliked, then become disliked because they act 'guarded'.

My general basis for friendship is common interests and interpersonal chemistry. I think if people assume they have no common interests with people from different backgrounds, or they sabotage interpersonal chemistry by acting guarded, then they're cheating themselves.

Michelin star food is generally not all that much better than other food, golf is no different to mini-golf (aside from being less eco-friendly and less fun), and a jaguar old timer is just a particularly unreliable, unsafe and low mile-per-gallon Honda. Personally, I don't have much in common with people who define themselves by their career success, whether that's shown by fancy sneakers, or fancy cars.

The point is not whether or not the differences are meaningful, the point is the differences exist, and are reinforced by self-selection, conscious or not. Parallel culture if you will. You are right, it doesn't have to be hard to cross the boundaries, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

My point is the differences are backwards. People think that they're disliked by others, but they're actually projecting their own dislike of others. This happens in hierarchical societies because the people at the top necessarily owe their position to the suppression of the people at the bottom, but since they like to think of themselves as nice fellows, they tend to push all of the emotions this entails onto the people they mistreat. So behind many of these stories of boundaries, there's usually somebody from a wealthy background acting like an asshole to some poor sod, all the while thinking they're just struggling with cultural differences.

People hating avocado toast eating wealthy millennials is a real thing.

No, it's a fake thing created by corporate crony politicians to misdirect public attention away from their crimes.

It's not really the money, it's the level of education and ambition. I worked remotely from Mount Pleasant, Michigan for a year and had a difficult time finding anyone to talk with about things that were interesting to me. The only group on Meetups.com was "Housewives of Mount Pleasant."

Friends are peers that have similar life experiences and values (and humor). Sometimes people like that are hard to find.

IMO when you work remote you can work from a small town OR you can move to other places if you like. For many moving is not an option because the rest of their family is in a place. There are other options other than Mount Pleasant, Michigan and the Bay area

> Friends are peers that have similar life experiences and values (and humor)

This is an pretty narrow definition of friendship.

If you have a better definition, I'd like to hear it. I don't have many friends, so my definition encompasses all of them. Maybe if I had a better definition, I'd be able to make more friends.

I'd open up your definition:

anybody instead of peers

some shared experiences or some shared values and forget about humour.

FWIW, I'm probably not qualified as I probably have more activity partners, or context friends, than true friends but your definition seemed incredibly limiting.

A friend is somebody you know whose company you enjoy. Depending on context, it does not include members of your family.

Sounds like you were looking for more of a college town vibe. Austin, Athens, Madison, etc.

I'm currently in a similar situation: I'm working from a MCOL area and remote from the home office. I don't love the city, but it's a nice city for other people. (I am here because of my academic spouse - he wasn't offered a job in a technical hub.)

We end up saving amazing amounts of money, relatively speaking, but our social life has been difficult to fill in. College vibe helps, but there are vast benefits to large cities and I'm certainly missing those.

Or Ann Arbor or East Lansing

Doesn't a normal job restricts you more since you are tied down to your employer's area?

In a remote job, you could be travelling and be more social, engaging with different people every month. A digital nomad.

> engaging with different people every month

That's exactly what I'm railing against. Most people who have done this eventually recognise that it does not make them happy.

It certainly did for me. Permanent connections with imperfect people are better than some sort of forever quest.

Yeah sure and that's where you decide to have one settlement spot where you can spend few months every year.

I am only pointing out that you are restricting yourself by not choosing remote work. Some people can't self restrict or enact behaviours required for it to work. I can still choose to settle on one place forever.

> all those guys are skint and you aren't

British slang for poor, has no money, I just learned.