As someone who did this and moved to the Rocky Mountains but grew up in the Bay Area'ish (Santa Cruz), I love my small town, but man do I miss the city. It's way easier to get away to the countryside when you have city money, harder to do the reverse. Also for unsocial geeks it's a strange social change. Instead of being anonymous at for example restaurants or stores, you know everyone, so everything has much more social interaction than the big city.

On a personal level it wasn't great, but the childhood my kids got, camping in actual wilderness instead of car camping, boating every day after I got off work, camping at wilderness boat only campsites where we had to swim our gear to shore from our anchored boat, catching brook trout with grasshoppers simply tied to the end of reeds (I was amazed that worked, though the stream was so packed with trout they could've just grabbed them though that would be illegal), seeing every wild animal with the exception of porcupines (this frustrated my son no end. Also, scariest animal to the kids? Grouse and beavers (when swimming), and yeah, wolves howling at night when camping). Picking huckleberries having to wear bear bells. Skiing all winter (kids unlimited pass was like $125 so cheaper than seeing a movie every weekend in winter, and it included the bus pass from the bottom of the mountain so we could just drop them off in the morning and meet up with them for some night skiing at the end of the day). I like to think while I messed up a lot that that gift of a childhood was special.

But it is a harder transition than you would think, especially for someone who in not comfortable with themselves. Funny thing about going away and finding yourself, you have to be ok with... yourself. Or else self loathing and self destruction sets in.

until they hit engineering manager and then its a big house in the suburbs lol

It was really my dream for a long time. But taking account the current geopolitical transitions, it may continue to be merely a dream for a some time.

Lol, NO!