How to live on $432 a month in America
shagbark.substack.com
shagbark.substack.com
Supposing I've made peace with the main gist of this: Cut living expenses to a point where you can work ¼ or so of the time most of us spend working by living somewhere cheap and not being so materialistic.
The missing piece here is social connections. Family and friends. If I could take my in-laws and my 2 best friends and their families with me, I'd sign up to move to a rural place like this tomorrow. But it's impractical for nearly everyone in the whole country to make such a thing happen. This limits its appeal. This place is 90 minutes or so from the Montreal airport, which is actually not bad for rural places, but flights are not cheap, certainly not accessible on the budget described here, so for you to have contact with anyone outside this town, they're likely going to have to drop about $500 per person, per visit, and will be staying at the Super 8 since you probably don't have a guest room). So, implied but not acknowledged in this piece is the assumption that you are almost definitely going to only see your family and friends a few more times (maybe once a year each, if you're super lucky) for the rest of your life.
And unlike questions of money; food, entertainment, family and friends aren't fungible. You can start over and hope to make new friends out there, but you can't replace people. This is what would make this life untenable to me, and I'm not even all that extraverted.
But that aside, I suggest this is front page and meaningful not because it brings up a third option (to stay home, move to a city, or move to rural NY), but instead because it advocates accidentally for just staying home. Your family probably already lives in an area that is more affordable than SF/NYC/Paris, and they are there waiting. It's entertaining as an extreme data point but motivating for other reasons
This article is most interesting to me because I tried moving to the big city to be a big shot techie, and have been substantially happier living outside a major city in Minnesota.
Absolutely nobody that I knew in those cities lived near their family, absolutely all of them moved away to chase fortune and fame.
The NYC metro area is 23 million [1] which is about 7% of the country (23/300). There's a good chance somebody who works in NYC grew up nearby.
That said, if you chase fortune and fame for a decade and then retire to Minnesota you still come out ahead... Even if rent is twice as expensive in SF, if your salary is twice that then your savings are also twice as much which will go a longer way anywhere but SF.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
The demographics of NYC require and support the idea of a huge and constant flux of people from distant areas moving into and out of the city which matches people’s observations. Even the gender divide is abnormal, the largest age group is 25-29 for women and 30-34 for men despite more men being born vs women living longer.
Sure plenty of locals move into the city just as with any city, what sets NYC apart is it draws in people from much longer distances before most of them leave. The elderly population in NYC being relatively tiny.
And the locals start to hate you for buying up land and generally raising prices enough that working folk are squeezed out of the market. Some areas are starting to enact laws to prevent productive farmland becoming condos and hobby farms for retiring city people.
But yeah, this lifestyle is mostly madness. I watched others stay at home and they have decades of memories, families, and paid off houses. Grass is greener.
That said, now that I'm near the end of my career I've taken full advantage of remote work by moving to a rural area while maintaining similar pay. Honestly I don't know why more people haven't taken advantage of this significant arbitrage opportunity. To each his own.
These towns are somewhat popular with retirees, rural and quiet enough but within 2 to 3 hours of the city, international Airport, and so on.
Getting closer to my own retirement, discussions about "where" have occurred.
Thing is, I actively don't want to retire there. Frankly because there's nothing to do.
As I'm slowly gaining more free time, I want to learn new things (music, ceramics, etc) go out more, play more golf etc. Small towns with their small shops are lovely to unwind in, but personally, not for me full-time.
So yeah, to each his own. Which is great, we are all different, with different circumstances, different opportunities, different goals.
And yes, high speed internet removes a huge part of "have to leave" (or at least adds a big part of "can come back") to the equation. Plus remote work can pump significant revenue into a small-town economy.
And honestly, based on some cultures, home isn't free either. The moment I got back home, I was given a few months to find work, but had to pay rent in 3 months no matter what. I was doing temp work for one month while interviews finished
However I don't think that's what the parent poster meant. I think he meant "home" is the "home town" sense.
There's a perception that young people (for probably 60 years now) see "getting out of this town" as a major life goal. Small towns find it hard to hold on to folk in their 20s as they head off into the world seeking the excitement of a bigger city, industry location, or indeed just the option of choosing from a list of more than 2 places to eat.
The parent poster is suggesting that after experiencing that, and discovering the negatives (high housing cost being one), if you have a job which can be done remotely, then Starlink allows you to do that from your home town.
Of course this is a viable option for some, and likely not for most.
Parents telling kids in this world to "go work 24/7 on the treadmill without being able to save" should wonder if having kids wasn't something selfish they did like having a pet.
I was always welcome at my mother's home and she told me there would always be shelter and food for me, whenever I'd come.
The selfish people who kick their kids out of their home at 18 y/o are people best let out of my life.
If a kid is working, I see no reason why parents shouldn't let them
Like I said, it's cultural. Some parents literally need extra income just to keep the roof over their heads, and having an adult dependent at home is still an expense. . Some parents simply don't want to facilitate a full on NEET lifestyle and want to encourage a proper work ethic.
I agree that a kid won't just figure everything out the moment they turn 18, but I can empathize with a child also needed to leave their nest one day. Uniersity was the perfect environment for that transition, but we decided to cut funding for decades and move the costs to the 18YO's with no financial sense. A "party school" just doesn't make sense anymmore so if we don't treat it as a vocational school, you may as well have saved money and let them be a NEET for 4 years.
I charge them rent though - 33% of their gross pay. Not cause I need the money but because it allows them to afford to move out one day. In other words their lifestyle has "rent" built into it.
In other words I'm happy to offer a backstop. I'm less happy for them to simply ignore "becoming self sufficient adults" just because it's cheaper to live at home.
It sort of is. Opportunities in the small towns is limited compared to urban areas. As well as other social aspects like night life, entertainment, the culture of the residents, etc. The people argument of being irreplaceable works both ways; you're simply going to get more options when you're around more people.
> if you have a job which can be done remotely, then Starlink allows you to do that from your home town.
Perhaps. Both Starlink and jobs in general really don't want us to have such options, as seen in the last few years of layoffs and crashouts. Add in the cable monopolies and you see how WFH really isn't stable right now without a good connection.
It's all some variation of "crowded into a dark room with hundreds of strangers with deafening music, can't see anything, can't hear anything".
Whether thars worth wanting to move closer is a personal opinion. But a notable one in my eyes.
I can use electric scooter to move around most days. It's a lot more fun than driving my car.
Really, what these places really need is major policy reform to make them more livable. There's a reason why these places are where people want to live after all.
To help make this happen, I donate to two non-profit that works to improve transportation and housing accessibility respectively.
Please edit swipes out of comments. It's one of the first and most important things we ask for in the Comments section of the guidelines.
Unless those nonprofits work with local government to improve transportation, you're donating to scammers
I dislike having to drive long distances to do anything. In a city, my block alone has tons of stores I can go to.
Anywhere else I want to visit is just a subway ride away.
I do agree it's good to have parents and family around to help take care of your kids. That's even better in the city since the kids can just walk to there themselves once they're old enough.
I know some older seniors who can't drive anymore and it doesn't affect them at all because they can either take the bus or subway.
FWIW, I've crossed the border at both Cornwall and Ogdensburg when driving to Ottawa, and they were quiet when I crossed. Going from the US side to Canada was fast and easy, but the reverse wasn't true, and that was several years ago when crossing the border was quite a bit less stressful.
The single time I got pulled in to go pay tax on a gift for someone ($150 USD) they looked at my card and went "I'm not dealing with the tax paperwork on that (due to some native exemptions)" and waved me back out.
As for local air travel: you'd have to go 30 minutes from Massena anyways for 'proper' air travel - Ogdensburg now has once-a-day service to DC via Breeze. Traveling to Shmoocon was hilarious for only $30 roundtrip.
I just noticed that Syracuse has an airport with passenger service, only 2 ½ hours away, so that's another option, if the "international flight" hassle plus border crossing actually burns an hour.
OGS-IAD flights are great though.
Just checked flights from sfo to there, 500 bucks. I don't get how this is different than moving to another state for work.
Then you wouldn't be able to cut down expenses to "nothing"/month.
Social thing assumes expenses. Hobbies assume expenses.
Entertainment is a line item in the budget: Library + Fishing = “Free”
Libraries can be amazingly social, for eggheads. Lots of groups and events meet there in my town. It’s a full-fledged Third Space.
[Neither the library access nor fishing gear is without cost, but at least they already account for taxes.]
By the way, anyone who benefits from free stuff, for example installing ad blockers, and earns $17/hr, should seriously consider tithing 5–10% to tax-deductible donations. It’s a matter of economic justice.
Libraries are high-tech and high-maintenance. If the community prioritizes their mission and invests in them, it works out. Sometimes, not so good.
Literally every human activity incurs a cost. Well, you can become a Hikikomori, so your only expenses will be electircity and internet.
I'm not equaling anything with anything. I'm pointing out the reality to people claiming that "oh it's so easy to maintain any kind of hobbies and/or social life without spending a penny"
> I do almost nothing with my time that cost money
Oh, I'm sure you do plenty, you just don't assume there are expenses in what you do. I'm not claiming they are huge expenses. I'm just saying things not free
Not any, but a sufficiently large amount of options. You may not enjoy those, which translates into “you will need time to adapt to it“, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
I meet with most of my friends der outdoors, for walks and hiking. We bring our own bottled tap water (I could never imagine to live in a place without good tap water) and snacks or cooked food, blankets, games. We usually take our bikes, or trains for longer distance trips. We throw parties in public parks. We go camping with tents on semi-illegal public areas. (The Park4night app for example is great for that.) All of this and more can be done for daily social activities and vacations at very little expense.
I’m writing this from a bakery with self-service, and there’s a family teaching chess to a girl at another table. Beautiful.
Compared with most of my social environment that decided to work full time, I think I have a lot more flexibility and voluntary social interactions. They are usually tired after a day of forced interactions; I manage to almost exclusively have voluntary interactions. I do not work with people who I don’t like. My time on this earth is too precious to waste on that.
It’s totally fine if the adjustments and adapting (not tradeoffs, because on a needs-based analysis it doesn’t require any) are not worth it for you (which raises the question of currency), but you and others in this thread make it sound like a horrible lifestyle for anyone, which is simply not the case. I would go as far as to claim it’s easier to maintain an unhealthy lifestyle with lots of money than with little. It’s just that most of us are so used to the stress that we had to stop listening to our own bodies (and often silence it with pills once it starts screaming). Spending money helps to obscure the real underlying need, and too often serves as a short-term patch. A limited budget forces you into thinking and feeling into what it is really about.
It can be inspiring to some to hear stories of people who found creative low-cost solutions to get their needs met. No need to question their ability to take care of themselves, and imply that they need to do without some crucial element of life and suffer.
> Not any, but a sufficiently large amount of options.
...
> tents, blankets, bikes, train rides, bakery...
(also, depending on amount of hiking also shoes, backpacks and some other gear)
To quote myself, "Oh, I'm sure you do plenty [of things], you just don't assume there are expenses in what you do. I'm not claiming they are huge expenses. I'm just saying things are not free"
> No need to question their ability to take care of themselves
There's only one need: to read what your opponent actually writes.
I’ve been gifted 3 used tents in my life, and offered a lot more. You do not even need your own and can join friends in theirs. In most places there are free bikes that need less than $20 in parts to repair. Friends of mine collect free bikes by the dozen and repair them in their community bike shop, as volunteers for a non-profit. And so on. Nowhere did I mean to imply that you might not benefit from money. The topic is not about free living, but living on the cheap.
That being said, I know people who lived completely moneyless on purpose, as a challenge, a life experience, and without suffering/unfulfilled needs.
That I agree with it is only easy for me because I do not have to care if I spend too much. It is easy to make the choice though, doing it effectively is of course hard. I do believe this article is pretty bad, but you can build a life along those lines if you want to.
I think the hardest is living cheap is when you do not have any money
As for climbing, you don't need a $200 climbing harness you can tie your own Swiss seat out of rope ($2/ft.) and buy a couple of snap links ($4-10/ea.). I would buy a lower-end harness for $30 though.
Spread out over several seasons that is as close to "nothing" as you can get, and is well within reach of any person with a pulse.
35 years ago I played DnD with a single AD&D 2e player's handbook and DM's guide shared among us all, campaigns and items out of Dungeon Magazine and Dragon Magazine hand-copied from issues at the library, and a player miniature made out of a film roll canister that I used whiteout to paint a design on. Our greatest individual expense was dice and I think those were less than $10 for a set.
Hobbies are only expensive if you let them or want them to be.
That being said, for tenista you need to pay entry. For climbing, you will be kicked out of gym on top of it being uncomfortable. Climbing gym don't want you injured due to badly made seat - it makes other guests feeling bad.
Climbing gyms aren't cheap. Climbing rocks outdoors is fairly cheap.
And you need to travel to the place where that climbing suitable rock is.
As a happy side-effect, it let me get into muzzleloader season with some support from people with a lot of experience. In Vermont, muzzleloader season falls during the damnable month between Thanksgiving and New Year's when the days just keep getting shorter, and there isn't usually enough snow (where we live) for snowshoeing. Having a reason to get out in the woods and be really present and observing nature when I otherwise would have trouble is outstanding for my mental health during that month.
That's not to say there aren't opportunities to climb. A rock gym just opened near-enoughish-by and I have friends who climb outside weekly at a nearby crag.
This is one way gentrification happens.
Assuming everyone is only out after appreciating house prices. While the locals who lived there before you might like that the house gains in value, depending on how large the group is and what the culture is, they might not like it at all. There is a reason some rural people continue living in rural areas, and bringing parts of the city to them might not be ideal for those people.
Also if your primary goal is a cheap lifestyle, you're much less likely to gentrify anything.
They ain't got no clue, and will almost certainly make things worse.
Then the Free State Project happened and the intense liberty seeking of the Libertarian party kept everyone occupied with arguments about bears and taxation. Meanwhile the rest of New England legalized cannabis while New Hampshire remained in a strange state of suspension. The influence of Libertarians has been so chaotic and unpredictable that what was considered the most likely result of Libertarian influence now seems completely out of reach.
This powerfully demonstrates how seemingly minor or irrelevant factors like political networks, tone, and tempo can end up being as important as core political issues and their direct consequences. Metaphors like piloting the ship of state through stormy waters take on additional meaning in this context.
The IRS estimates per-mile deduction at well over 60 cents per mile. If you have to drive 15 miles to the grocery store and back, your grocery bill goes up $18/trip. If you need to drive 15 miles to work and back, take $90/week out of your paycheck.
Then there's the fact that whoever is The Employer in that region - if you lose your job there, you're fucked. So The Employer gets to abuse every rule in th book because who's going to complain and risk losing their job? If The Employer decideds to drop everyone's pay by 25 cents/hour, what are you all going to do? Answer: nothing.
Meanwhile in the city you can go anywhere you want within a 500 square mile area (or more) for well under $100/month and commuter rail will take you even further for not a lot more. And you can do other things while using said transportation. No "self driving car" needed.
As a sidenote: the same author complains about the "loss of the $50 motel room" and laments they're 3x more expensive now. Days after complaining that housing isn't actually that expensive. The guy has to be a troll...
Oh, and also not factored in: almost every aspect of rural life is heavily subsidized, and I don't just mean direct assistance. I mean literally everything you stare at when you roll through a rural town was subsidized in some way by the federal government, and most of them either don't know or will never admit it.
For fucks sakes the government actually runs a program to subsidize rural Americans getting to fly around on barely-occupied turboprop planes. But heaven forbid a city get some federal funding for electric or hybrid transit busses that will serve several thousand people a day.
It’s because rural voters are both active and reliable regardless of their party affiliation, they get out the vote. This in turn for the fact that many rural counties account for a great many house seats and can swing senate elections, they have more power than numbers suggest.
If urban voters were as persistent and consistent as rural ones they could easily flip the narrative, but in my experience (and by looking at a lot of election statistics) a huge chunk of apathetic eligible to vote voters live in urban areas, so you don’t have the same en masse consistency and persistence
I also wonder how close it is to the nearest hospital or urgent care.
Yeah, it is a bullshit/clickbait article. No healthcare? Yeah, let's see how long his wife will put up with that. And, literally, there is zero cost for heat. Do you know how cold that place is in the winter? Here is what he wrote:
> as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a little extra in electric for that — or they could have the Amish deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in a wood stove, very cheaply.
Still: This person should setup a YouTube channel to document their life. It would be like the boring/suffering version of people who sail around the world on a yacht.
It gets tricky if you want a civilized humidity level, though. You need to control leakage to achieve decent humidity and you need to control condensation to avoid damaging the window trim or other parts of the structure and to avoid growing mold.
This area is unincorporated and the nearest towns all have a few thousand people or less.
When we moved here I was actually surprised that we had a hospital in one of those small towns. Its part of a larger network that and the city an hour away has a big training hospital and med school, I assume that's why there's a smaller hospital in our area.
For reference, our only "grocery stores" withing 45 minutes are Walmarts and Dollar Generals.
It's basically that ancap meme of building your own infrastructure: water, electricity, access roads, clearing the vegetation that constantly tries to reclaim your property. I've never owned so many things in my life until I moved here, many of them just to be able to tend the wilderness around me.
But shoveling and cutting things has been an eye-opening experience in terms of how many processes the high-energy urban civilization hides from us. Even with steel/power tools, it’s brutal out there.
Okay, but you're inventing a strawman there, since there are millions of places to live that are far closer than 15 miles away from basic services. The outskirts of Massena for instance, are about 2 miles from Walmart.
> whoever is The Employer in that region - if you lose your job there, you're fucked
The article is specifically about how with a low cost of living you don't even need full time work. It's not about moving to a company town to work a 9-5 at a factory.
> a city get some federal funding for electric or hybrid transit busses that will serve several thousand people a day
I mean, they most definitely do get that federal funding -- this fiscal year there is $1.5 billion available. Here's[0] last fiscal year's winners. But I assume the meaning of your comment is that it bothers you that someone somewhere complained about that fact? I doubt it's the rural folks complaining, probably car drivers in the city complaining that the money didn't all go to fixing the potholes, the same cranks who complain about bike lanes, etc.
It is interesting how this proposal that people even just consider rural living as a thought experiment seems to have triggered a lot of people. If you love the city yet simultaneously think it's too expensive, other people opening their minds to living somewhere else is good for you. It doesn't have to be for you for it to be an okay idea.
[0] https://www.transit.dot.gov/funding/grants/fy24-fta-bus-and-...
I think you are manipulating and substituting concepts, and these calculations of the cost of the trip include expensive cars of highly paid city workers. And if you recalculate the cost of the trip taking into account cars that are used outside the city, then the amount will be several times lower. Probably 5 or more times lower if people are interested in the maximum reduction in the cost of travel.
>almost every aspect of rural life is heavily subsidized
I don't know, show me the data. Maybe the city guys are just saying that it's all subsidized, while they themselves are completely stealing all the allocated funds, taking advantage of the lack of control. I recently watched a program about how government-funded projects were costing 10 or 20 times more. So, without credible evidence to the contrary, let's assume that what we see around us in rural areas has roughly zero subsidies, and all allocated funds have been completely appropriated by contractors.
>But heaven forbid a city get some federal funding for electric or hybrid transit busses that will serve several thousand people a day.
This is blatant hypocrisy. We have already sorted out how rural areas are "subsidized". And under these conditions, we are asking rural residents to pay for the transport of pompous urban asses? If this transport really moves so many thousands people as you said, why don't these city people pay for it themselves from their huge city salaries? Why do you want to put your fat fingers in the pockets of the rural guys?
Every round trip ads maybe $5 right now. We don't have to drive to the city every second day.
Couldn't you say the same for cities since they live on food produced outside of cities, energy from the Gulf and products imported from China?
This is pretty naive. Farmers aren’t subsidized so that farmers have cheap food, they are subsidized so that the city you’re hyping doesn’t riot because they run out of food. Farm subsidies exist for everyone who’s not a farmer.
Things like farming, forestry and so on aren't possible without basic local infrastructure. It's also reasonable that farmers can buy groceries, their kids can go to school, and they have access to healthcare services.
Without farming city folks would starve to death, so I wouldn't complain about things being subsidized. Feds fund lots of less important things.
Your comment does focus in on the interesting point in that connected places have perhaps not scaled as well. Or perhaps there is some pareto front of locations on cost vs connectedness we need to imagine in our heads. Very interesting.
Unfortunately the appeal to ancestry fallacy is always a terrible idea.
You see this in the nutrition space where “influencers” go on and on about how our ancestors ate, forgetting that our ancestors died extremely early relative to modern humans.
Similarly, our grandparents lived pretty terrible lives in many ways.
The reason to complain about the high cost of living is that the U.S. has an incredibly high GDP and yet Americans live highly precarious lives, not that in certain very specific ways our ancestors had it slightly better, which as you point out leads to all sorts of issues.
Starlink and a local grocery store means the vast majority of the US is able to support a lifestyle most of humanity could only dream of until fairly recently without actually being that expensive. Year round bananas for dollars per pound is a fucking miracle of logistics.
Not that long ago one of my coworkers was effectively living in minimum wage in a major US city and tossing everything else into savings. Excessive number of roommates, no car, cooking simple vegetarian meals at home etc. At the other end if he had a major medical condition, drug addiction, etc he’d have been “fucked,” except for the fact modern medicine simply wasn’t available at any price again until recently so should we assume it’s normal.
No they didn't, stop using averages.
Childhood mortality is only one factor, and I think at this point we're all aware that the "life expectancy was 40 years" statistic has a huge asterisk next to it. But yes, our ancestors really did die much, much younger than us.
No, people who say that they “died extremely early relative to modern humans” mean the bunk dying at 40 due to old age myth. Not dying at 65 rather than 80.
Your link seems to show graphs going up but not why.[1] The medical breakthroughs have been, like first of discovering hygiene, vaccines and antibiotics. Which does exactly nothing to debunk what the OP[2] called “appeal to ancestry fallacy”. That we know medicine now (like hygiene, antiobitics) do not discredit claims like, you should eat like a hunter-gatherer or something like that.
[1] This seems typical of “data” outlets.
While it's true that average life expectancy has increased, the point is that it was absolutely routine for people to live into their 60s, and not uncommon for them to live into their 70s or 80s.
See e.g. https://www.sapiens.org/biology/human-lifespan-history/
Our ancestors also had more children, less rates of depression and mental illness and the modern rates of socialization, marriage, etc are all in steep decline.
Therefore maybe the cardboard box apartment, transient friends, and access to all that nightlife isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. While we’re a lot richer and more well off it doesn’t seem like people are happier.
That's entirely subjective. My grandparents are no longer alive but I'm confident they would find many aspects of the average life today to be terrible.
As others pointed out these claims are often skewed by high childhood mortality rates.
Beyond that, though, I'm curious why you consider the number of years lived to be a primary concern?
I'd rather live 50 good years than 80 miserable ones. I'd also rather live to 65 than make it to 80 with the last 30-40 years spent increasingly propped up with medications, doctors appointments, and invasive treatments.
While it's true that average life expectancy has increased, it's not really accurate to say that "our ancestors died extremely early". See "Did Ancient People Die Young?" at https://www.sapiens.org/biology/human-lifespan-history/ :
> Mortality rates in traditional populations are high during infancy, before decreasing sharply to remain constant till about 40 years, then mortality rises to peak at about 70. Most individuals remain healthy and vigorous right through their 60s or beyond, until senescence sets in, which is the physical decline where if one cause fails to kill, another will soon strike the mortal blow.
They would move 1,000 miles or more, or even across the sea and then send back and forth letters every few months. "Alice had a baby, she named him Robert Joseph. I have secured work at the textile mill, and am saving to buy a plot of land. The weather here is cold in winter, but the summers are somewhat more tolerable."
The interesting thing is, I feel like they moved back then mainly because there wasn't sufficient land or jobs where they came from. Today, the urban dwellers this article is talking about has an equal dearth of land and jobs available to them in the city, but they don't feel like the countryside has anything to offer them either.
These things just don't happen anymore. To find better work (especially outside of tech), people move, some constantly. Siblings wind up across the country or further from each other and where they grew up. Elders are either left behind or move into retirement homes.
There are exceptions, and those who keep some of that support network find the real boomer superpowers of sharing costs (financial, time, and labor alike) and inheriting wealth. But the ease with which people could leave home for good is one of many factors that make emulating boomers difficult, if not impossible: that rural cheap house isn't 10 minutes from the rest of your family, your childhood friends, and your co-workers anymore.
Your original text, edited for sequence and clarity while preserving your voice:
This doesn’t apply to the U.S. or Canada, nor has it ever since their foundings, possibly excepting some natives. The American frontier was declared closed by 1890, long before the post-WW2 population surge to California. Before that, New Englanders left farmland to settle the Midwest. Later came the Great Migration of mostly Black Southerners to northern cities. Anglophone North America has never been a peasant society where families remained rooted for generations.
I'd hazard that a few parts of Appalachia remained relative stable, and poor, across more than a couple generations.
That said, I don’t know if I’d want to live in a depressing small town, unless it had a good diner.
Seriously. I don't wear them a lot, but when I do the lack of stimulation is instantly relaxing.
Only downside is you can't sleep in them.
One who sneers at rural people and habits will probably not get along. And if you take too much offense at rural people sneering about urban things, likewise.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of racism in upstate NY. I do know rural NY black people, and they do fine, but I'm not sure they appreciate the way insults are thrown about "present company excluded". It's those attitudes that kept me from wanting to stay.
This is so heartbreaking.
I live in a suburban area, and have friends and neighbors from around the world -- Trinidad, Sri Lanka, Korea, Canada, and I _love_ that aspect of where I live. As I get older, I don't like the din of lawnmowers and leaf blowers. Many of my neighbors have lawn services, and the ZTRs and backpack leaf blowers are even louder than what your average joe would have to do the same job.
On top of that, since there is land by me, the local government's zoning board has approved of more and more warehouses. As such, semi truck traffic has increased significantly, and somehow they all seem to have unmuffled straight pipe exhausts. I've contacted my representatives, but none of them seem to care. The state rep passes it off to the district rep, who passes it off to the township, who passes it back off to the state. The only winning move is to leave.
The point of my tangent here, is that a place like rural NY seems idyllic to escape the noise. Anecdotes like yours, though, steer me away. I understand that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy in that regard.
On a return trip from Florida we booked a room in Florence, SC for the night. Everybody was staring at me, but I was exhausted and figured that it was just in my head. We ate breakfast there the next morning and that's when I realized that we were the only white people there. About 50% of the population of Florence is black.
It was an interesting experience, and it gave me the opportunity to understand a fraction of how it would feel if the roles were reversed. And this was with friendly people with no malicious intent or fear!
Silicon Valley is not populated by people who are there for family and friends. Silicon Valley is populated by people who left their family and friends to go participate in a gold rush.
Silicon Valley is populated by people from other continents who came to participate in the gold rush, family and friends be damned.
I really don't understand the antipathy towards the fact that you can live on $432 a month in America. I just really don't. With some tradeoffs, you can live on $432 a month in America, and this fact makes some Hacker News commentators very very angry.
From the time I had to live a year going to paycheck advance every month because of an unexpected auto repair bill (leaving that cheap typically requires a used beat up car).
Or the time I woke up with an excruciating pain in my side and went to ER which resulted in bills that lead to years of payments.
People do this experiment every day in the USA and the experience is pretty bad.
EDIT I’ll grant this is all a fine trade off for some people. But having lived it, I can definitely say no thank you.
And if you and you spouse have jobs and kids you probably need two cars, and school is another cost so I would say 400$ is pure fantasy unless you want to live insolitude, fishing in forest.
Normal people need near school/preschool/highschool/job/store etc. And this is why you have cities. It is cheaper for society to concentrate population around those buildings.
The article describe a life of low spending/low revenue, so suddenly buying a plane ticket becomes a huge expense.
There is no antipathy against the $432 a month life, just comments that people have valid reasons not to choose this life.
"Keeping in touch via Internet" for me is a pale imitation of what I want from a friendship. We text a few times a week. I visit each of them 1-2 times a year. I miss them a lot.
This isn't to claim it's impossible to do better. But I have a feeling that especially those on the "urban" side of the friendship just have a hard time making time for say, a Zoom call with you on the same frequency as they may have gone out with you for dinner or drinks. Especially group dynamics don't allow this: If you were part of a group of 5 friends that hung out together, they'll just start hanging out without you, and no time will be opening up in all of their schedules to devote to tele-friendship. Those friendships will suffer.
And remember, the "low cost of living, low earning" thesis we're discussing does mostly rule out even those "cheap" flights (which stop being cheap really quick once you have a family, so multiply all prices by 2, 3, 4...)
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/03/united-states...
Ans it's also why there are homeless people un big cities when from a material point of view they could be living a half-decent life in a rural place instead.
Humans are social animals, and most of our behavior are shaped by this characteristic, even if some people don't seem to realize that.
Rather, the friction is making them endure the travel time is, I would say .
For example, my daughter took a small fall on a jungle gym, so small that I didn't even think she really got hurt but she landed really unlucky and broke her arm. We went to urgent care but she needed surgery to put pins in. Modern medicine is amazing. Totally healed, not even scares from the pin, but it is not cheap. Expect to pay at least $17K [1] for this w/o insurance, our was significantly more. And with insurance, you're not living on $400/month anymore...
Cars break down, pipes back up, etc. etc. etc.
[1] https://www.talktomira.com/post/how-much-does-a-broken-bone-...
There’s also ACA credits that don’t have an asset test.
> Frequently Asked Questions
> Who qualifies for the Essential Plan?
> Residents aged 19–64, living in New York, with incomes 138%–250% FPL (e.g., $21,597–$39,125 for a single adult in 2025), U.S. citizens or eligible immigrants, not on Medicaid or Medicare.
Fake numbers but for the sake of arguments: he bought a $100k house, I bought a $300k house in a more expensive city. Real estate did a 2x, his house is worth $200k and now he can't afford to move to a $600k place like mine - while I can move to an area with a similar cost of living as where I live now.
The gap is even bigger because prices go up faster in big cities.
This suggests that there might be a market for a rural "community", as opposed to solo living.
Perhaps you feel like this needs to be called out more explicitly rather than just hinted at. I think another concern that the author doesn't _highlight_ but is plenty clear is that this sort of lifestyle probably is more amenable to the able bodied, with their frequent allusions to hunting and fishing.
So while the author doesn't explicitly list out all possible issues, and everyone will have different priorities and opportunities in their life, I think the author is plenty clear on what they're describing, and the concern you raised is easily inferred from what they're saying.
FWIW, I grew up in rural nowhere (population 150, nearest town 45 miles away) - and I honestly don't know how anyone can live out in the boonies without a car. Taking the bus that goes 3 times a day is one thing, needing to move stuff is another thing. I mean, obviously there are plenty of people that do manage - but sooner or later you'll become completely dependent on others for certain types of transportation.
Also, there's clothes, house maintenance, and lots of other things.
Are there bus lines in the middle of nowhere?
The author is being somewhat misleading in the sense that this is not the type of bus service that one would use for your weekly commute to that 10 hour shift at the gas station, never mind the three or four times per week that you would need to cover the bills. It may be fine doing errands in town, where the arrival time and departure time don't much matter. It may also be fine for spending a day or two in the city, assuming you have the budget to stay over night.
I'm not saying that the type of lifestyle alluded to is impossible, but it is not going to be the type of lifestyle accessible to young people. Then there is the question about whether they are equipped to live that type of lifestyle.
Even Ottawa is not out of reach at only 80miles.
I've done some riding on rural roads with no shoulders, and it can be as scary as heck. At least on winding roads in wooded areas. That's from the perspective of someone who is fine riding on fast and busy urban roads during all seasons. Winter maintenance is also a huge issue if you are riding to work. If you're doing seasonal work, that's fine. You just wait until everything is plowed for winter forays. If you're working all seasons, you cannot maintain a job when you cannot reliably reach the job site.
More often than not people are put off cycling by weather conditions not because it is that hard, but because they haven't put enough thoughts and preparation. Most people ride bicycle with subpar or no lightning, fenders, and more often than not have the wrong tires and protective gears for the job. This require a wee bit of investment but totally negligible compared to the money that is usually spent on a car.
That said, I don't think it would be fair to expect my wife to enjoy that lifestyle. I cannot imagine taking a child to a dental appointment under those circumstances.
So not a regular service schedule, but you can call and schedule a ride and it won't cost a lot.
I think when people write these articles, they should have lived the life instead of just totaling a few expenses. It is very hard to live without at least a few unforeseen expenses above the base budget. The life proposed here is like a 19th century life, waiting for the stagecoach to take you to where you can pay your property taxes, and then spending the day in town because the next stagecoach out doesn't come for hours.
I guess, if the math holds, you would be paying around $50/month to heat it in the winter months.
E: changed kW/h to kWh per the nice commenter who suggested as much below.
That said, it might be a better use of time to work, then get the wood delivered.
Kinda like those people that got free _waste_ oil from restaurants to run their vans. It's not something you can replicate literally anywhere but it does exist. Industrial waste has to be disposed of somehow and often people are happy for you to accept it for free.
> as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a little extra in electric for that — or they could have the Amish deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in a wood stove, very cheaply.
That's it. The line in the budget for heat is there and was left intentionally blank:
> Heat:
You can't just hand-wave away the cost of electric heating at the temperatures they get in upstate NY, even if the 0.04 number is accurate year-round (which it almost certainly isn't), and wood-burning stoves use way more wood than the author appears to be imagining with their "scrap wood" comment.
[0] https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/massena/new-york/unite...
It takes somewhere between 7 and 9 cubic metres of wood a year to heat about 800 square feet of house. It costs about CAD 1500 for a tandem load of sawlogs plus the cost of fuel and maintenance of the chainsaw and hydraulic splitter plus about 100 hours of labour bucking, splitting, hauling, and stacking. And still there are mornings when I had to break the ice on the dog's water bowl in the kitchen when it's been below -30 C for several days in a row.
You're not going to survive a winter in that part of North America with just "a few scraps of wood" for heat. "A few carloads" is maybe going to take you to Christmas and they'll simply find your thawed corpse during a warm spell in March.
But it is extremely important to point out that the American "rat race" cities subsidize areas like this. There would be no road in front of this house without those subsidies. These areas are net negative economic contributors that depend on federal and state funding to exist, including that bus transit that this person is relying on (not to mention the American factory workers who grind out their shifts in urban centers to make those buses).
The author claims to be living the life of great-grandparents, but it’s not like he’s a subsistence farmer or something. As a metaphor it’s kind of like claiming you’re a wild animal living out in the wilderness living a simple life of virtue when in reality this existence is more similar to a raccoon living out of the dumpster of modern society’s surplus.
Why bother building a self-sufficient community like the Amish where they build their own homes and grow their own food and build their own buggies, clothes, furniture, and breed their own horses when you can survive in a cheap depreciated house someone else built, use the library and transportation that other working people pay for, and the roads that were built by the workers who actually work some significant hours?
I am sure it works on some level but it doesn’t seem to me to be a very positive alternative to a lot of other lifestyles.
Apart from all that, there are so many flaws with this article.
The budget didn't include mortgage/housing cost, I guess it's just assuming you're paying cash? How does a person with this kind of lack of gainful employment come up with $29k?
Water is $0? Even well water requires some level of upkeep and potentially replacement and re-drilling.
Most rural towns in the US absolutely do not have this transit available. You'll need a working maintained car plus insurance almost everywhere that looks like this.
Internet, use library - again, with what car? Aren’t a lot of the methods available to make income dependent on internet access?
The heat budget is just blank which makes no sense, heat in upstate new york is not cheap as you need a lot of it.
Education for your kids? How is that going to look out there? Are they going to be trapped here? Will they even have the option to opt out of this lifestyle? How easy will it be to do homework at home with no internet? You’ll rely on a rural bus schedule and use the library during open hours only?
I might also point out that a lot of modern society lifestyles that aren’t so far on this side of extreme of frugality are really easy and comfortable lives. Not all of them, a lot of people live difficult modern lives, but at the same time the “most people” who left the farm to get a job in the city did so for a reason.
I guess you could say that the extremes of society can make for some interesting reading.
It's even more important to point out that places like this grow the food and do the manufacturing that those "cities" you like would collapse without.
The author isn’t growing any food, they’re just living adjacent to those people.
Most manufacturing happens in close proximity to major cities.
Farms need rural infrastructure which is what the anti rural subsidy people don’t seem to understand.
I think part of my objection to this lifestyle is that the author is essentially a burden on their community by their own choice. The community would be healthier economically if this person wasn’t in it.
Now, all of us may eventually become a burden as we age or if we become disabled. But doing it by choice is a different thing philosophically.
It’s bad for the person doing it in that they are going to depend on external factors keeping that lifestyle staying stable. If the library closes [1] or rural public transportation gets cut [2] this author now has to change up their life a whole lot to compensate.
If you’re already a person who generates an economic surplus you can roll with those punches more easily.
It’s bad for the community because this person is consuming more resources than they produce. Everyone in the community is slightly poorer because their tax dollars are supporting an able-bodied person who essentially refuses to work.
People don’t like to admit that they live in a metaphorical anthill. The ants who aren’t working and haven’t saved for retirement are factually a burden. I’m not saying we should all be wage slaves and we must work or else we have no value, but I think the author is essentially describing an undesirable extreme.
[1] https://members.olc.org/news/Details/ohio-house-budget-reduc...
[2] https://www.masstransitmag.com/management/news/55292030/us-d...
The hypothetical person is paying property taxes on the house they own. He’s paying income tax on his income. He’s paying sales tax on the food and necessities he buys.
I live in state with no income tax. If I decide to live in a cheap house, eat cheaply, and save most of my income does that mean I’m a burden on my community because I’m not paying enough property tax and sales tax?
In addition to the taxes he’s paying, he’s taking a previously blighted property, fixing it up, and maintaining it. He’s providing a service to the owner of the gas station by working there a few days a month. He’s presumably purchasing things from local stores instead of driving outside the community to shop. Maybe he’s even volunteering or providing other help to people in the community.
All in exchange for a few library books and some bus trips. I think most communities would love to have him.
That in itself is a simple fact that you can verify with basic publicly available government budget/taxation statistics numbers.
It only really works out okay because not everyone is doing what the author does. If everyone did what the author does we would have to drastically change how we organize our society.
A shorter way to say it is that the people who build the roads, fill potholes, and pick up garbage tend to work a full time job. If they all decided to only work one or two days a month (current unemployment rate: 4%) we’d have an instant crisis.
And maybe that realignment is okay and we could do that, but that’s not how it’s set up now.
There's a few problems here. Yes if you take total government expenditures per capita, he's not paying that much in taxes directly. But most of those costs are fixed. If a new person pops up in the US, it doesn't actually cost the federal government an extra $20k a year.
Over a century ago we decided that the more money you make the greater proportion of our total fixed costs you have to pay. There are various justifications for this, the more wealth you have the more you benefit from those government services, diminishing marginal unity of money etc...
But the point is if you're just going to look at total per capita expenditures, looking just at the federal level for simplicity, you need to make around $100k a year before your federal taxes exceed that.
By your argument anyone not making $100k a year is consuming more public money than they are returning and are thus a burden on society.
Your premise logically leads to that absurd conclusion. Obviously the rest of society is necessary in order for the people who do make $100k a year to exist. By your logic someone who lives on $5k a year but who writes open source software for free that some company uses to make $100 million dollar a year is a burden on society.
Someone who creates art that inspires millions of people, or someone who makes articles, games, or videos that provide millions of hours of entertainment, is a burden on society if they give away their work instead of sell it.
My mom was a burden on society because she raised children instead of working outside the home--even though she now has 3 adult children paying hundreds of thousands in taxes per year.
>It only really works out okay because not everyone is doing what the author does.
That's true of nearly every lifestyle you could recommend. Or hell even every piece of good financial advice.
Having 6 months of savings is almost universally considered sound financial advice. But if right now every consumer in America cut all of their discretionary spending to build up a 6 month cushion, it would completely destroy the economy.
That doesn't mean that it's not a valid recommendation for a financial advisor to make.
The author isn't recommending that everyone in America live this way, he's saying that if you can learn to live without all the things you think you need, this is an alternative. If you are the type of person who can't stand the idea of working a 9-5 for 40 years, this is something you can do.
Most people will never do this, but just the fact that it's available as a relief valve is I pretty amazing I think.
Not everything is about money. A healthy rural society has a variety of people in it, some bring in more money that others, but the mix is necessary. Otherwise people will leave.
This guy for example seems to be able to write, and has lots of spare time. Perhaps he helps his neighbors. There's no money involved, but the entire community is better off.
Let’s say you’re in a collectivist community. No money is involved. Everyone contributes to the community by providing both needs (infrastructure, maintenance, etc) and wants (culture, arts, beautification, etc).
Would the person who chooses to contribute to community duties 1/10th the time and effort of the amount the rest of the community puts in face social consequences?
I think in most tightly-knit communities of this sort, they would. Money is just the exchange mechanism we use to enable more complex exchanges.
> The budget didn't include mortgage/housing cost
True, but I don't think you can get a mortgage for a $29K house. I'm guessing the guy is saving up for his house by sticking in the rat race until he's got his $29K saved up (presumably made easier with his wife?). Then, he shops around for a house on a bus route. I suspect it is possible, especially in a state like NY.
> if the author of this article gets cancer I bet they'll want to visit a hospital where doctors are working 12 hour shifts grinding out the era of "overabundance."
This is one point where I disagree. I'd really rather that doctors were working shorter hours. I don't want someone taking care of me if they're at the end of a 12 hour shift. Forget about the fact that it's so bad for her, it's also bad for me and the level of care that I get.
> Water is $0? Even well water requires some level of upkeep
Oh yeah, we just paid $800 to replace our pressure tank. His roof will need to be replaced one day, the gutters will leak, etc.
I actually think I detect a bit of tongue-in-cheek in the article. I think this guy will do this for a while, enjoy his adventure, and then go do something else.
It's one of those cases where the "freeloading" is more miserable than just working, which is why abuse isn't rampant.
Not a lot of people with this kind of low budget have a 700 credit score.
If anything you could say we’re able to subsidize this despite the “rat race”.
That's one way to look at it.
Another way is that you're living off of the economic surplus you were producing while working a highly paid 9-5 job that paid a shitload of taxes. Now it's your time to live off the surplus you produced and take it easier.
> I am sure it works on some level but it doesn’t seem to me to be a very positive alternative to a lot of other lifestyles.
It's not a very positive lifestyle from the standpoint of increasing the GDP to some maximum amount, yeah.
That's the first thing I thought about.
His budget of $432/mo doesn't include health insurance. But $5K/y probably gets him Medicaid eligibility. Let's assume he's on Medicaid, then. In NY state, that covers quite a lot of dental care, if you believe this: https://www.health.ny.gov/health_care/medicaid/program/denta... Not saying it's a good option, but it's there.
> Taking the bus that goes 3 times a day is one thing, needing to move stuff is another thing.
What kind of things do you think he might be moving? He probably has just about no possessions with that budget (and a 600 sq ft house). In a pinch, perhaps he can rent a truck from Home Depot. Apparently, there is a Home Depot in Massena, NY, so maybe it's not quite so far out in the boonies as it seems.
Personally, I wouldn't do it - the lack of choice would get very unpleasant very fast. But it could work for some.
And working 5 more hours would get him a some better garden tools, and 20 more he could support a family of 3 And if he just got a higher paying job, he could even get a car!
If he is on medicaid then he isn't "living" on 432/month. That would be living on 432/month PLUS whatever medicaid is worth, likely well north of another 500/month.
Then the kids need schooling, either in-person or remote. that is another 10k/year/kid. And you need some sort of local police/justice system to ensure nobody boots you off your homestead. But even once you account for all those local costs, there are things like national security. Living a peaceful life on a remote farm is only possible because the country is ringed by police and armed forces. Those things may be a thousand miles away, but someone still has to pay for them.
Well, not for long at this rate.
Oy vey
Him and his wife were also in their 20's, and their kids I think were already a few years old when they moved to the boonies. All healthy.
It's an extreme example, but this is a good read:
https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/simpleLife.h...
Things have changed since:
"In October of 2011, we moved from Las Cruces, NM to Davis, CA. Along with all the good things listed below about Las Cruces came bad things. Vicious dogs loose on the streets (one bit my wife while biking) and in parks (I came close to getting myself shot during a confrontation with a dog owner). Crime (the little old lady next door got burgled twice in one year, once at 3 in the afternoon through her front door). After living in extremely cheap places for 8 years, I came to realize that these places are extremely cheap for a reason (because people don't want to live there if they can avoid it)."
From what I heard it works extremely well, not the least because it's more dignified and keeps people engaged, active, and self reliant. The modern notion of the drooling, dependent nursing home patient is a product of our (artificially!) atomized system.
Why would you want to live out in the boonies without owning a car?
Just get a car.
They’re not that expensive, you can get a used beater for not much more than an iPhone. If you don’t want a beater, you can probably afford to spend a little more with the money you save from living out in the boonies.
Most people who live in the boonies owns a car.
> The living conditions there were miserable. Due to the construction method, the room was difficult to heat, it was damp and teeming with vermin. (...) The Housing Act of 1901 prohibited living in sod huts.
If the author says "you can live like your grandparents" to mean "in conditions that were already considered miserable for the standards of 1901", that's not a great selling point. And while I sympathize with the underlying message to a point, I would argue against romanticizing the past. Sure, my grandfather lived in a cheap house he built himself, but he also came back home every day with bleeding fingers that my grandmother would treat.
Places heated with wood stoves are NOT damp or miserable. I loved it. Working on doing it again.
Also you miss the point. For tending the wood stove a few times a day in winter I got to not go to work 30 hours a week.
A vaguely well constructed place with a wood stove doesn't have to be damp and miserable. A sod hut is going to be. Imagine a tent except it has grass sod for a roof. It's going to be moist all the time.
Plenty of ye olden construction and heating methods are perfectly fine even today. A sod hut is not one of them.
Top ten occupations, 1920: Farmers, farm laborers, clerks, salespeople, servants (bellboys, butlers, cooks), textile workers, machinists, carpenters, and teachers. All of those jobs, even the less respected ones, had infinitely more societal respect than the common jobs hiring in rural America today - such as stocking shelves at Walmart or working at a gas station. You could be a simple farm laborer and have a wife and kids and a place in society. Today, though, a young man working at a Walmart or a gas station will struggle to attract a stable partner or the respect of the world around him.
Your career = your social status is a very American point of view
Eat meat and vegans will look down on you
Ride a bike for transport in America and you're poor, do it in Europe and it's normal
Nomads will judge you on your experiences and travel, not your career. Wealthy CEO thats invested everything in their work but never left their home country? Low status
Go out on your own and take a risk of starting a business in Asia and people will be confused why you'd do that vs the safe path
Invest a tonne of energy into making money and anti-consumerist folk will laugh
Skinny? Better bulk up lest the bodybuilders see you as low status.. but wait, if you bulk up people will judge you for being vain. Shit
The status game isn't winnable. Best thing you can do is surround yourself with people of similar values
Coming back to the article topic, often times society's judgment saves people from making stupid decisions. For example, in non-HN circles, "I am going to go move far away from anyone I know to live in a dilapidated building in one of the most depressed towns in the Northeast and work at a gas station" would garner enough judgment to stop that person in their tracks. If you've ever been to a town like this, you realize that is a good thing! Statistically, they've just been saved from ODing on fentanyl! Same thing for all kinds of socially undesirable behaviors. If you think people do crazy shit now, imagine what they'd do without a society around them.
I don't agree the judgement itself should be the factor that stops them. Having that as an overly strong measuring stick is incredibly limiting. It's an indicator of something, sure.. but you should look for actual reasons and where it's coming from
If you ask "everyone seems to think this is a terrible idea.. why?". Well in the 'dilapidated building in a depressed town' case you'd pretty quickly find 100 reasons not to do it, as you pointed out. In a lot of other situations though there are none. Everyone is just following everyone else and no-ones truly considered the alternatives on their own merit
I'm with you that there's a good balance. I don't see a reason in being actively non-conformist or anything. There's an innate drawback to not conforming.. it makes you a little weird and un-relatable. Just need to make sure the benefits make up for it
"Today, though, a young man working at a Walmart or a gas station will struggle to attract a stable partner or the respect of the world around him."
You could not afford a good life as a farm laborer.
From personal experience I can tell you confidently you are wrong.
The part you are missing is you only need to work 10-20 hours a week MAX. That means you have an enormous Amount of leisure time to do what you want with your life. Trust me when I say plenty of young women love the idea of not working a lot and instead having wilderness adventures.
Want to see it for yourself? Go spend a summer in the Yukon. If you love it, stay the winter. It’s nothing short of epic.
- learn music instruments, perhaps join a local band or share samples on the net with enthusiasts
- draw, paint, sculpt, all of which has many options of techniques and cheap materials. As with music, the only limit is yourself and the the expense of your instrument but you don't need to use expensive techniques to enjoy
- make a year-round vegetable garden, thats' often time consuming and you won't need much terrain
- read tons of books, learn philosophie, math, history, whatever makes you find interesting. And in 2025 there's the option to read blogs for those that feels like it. watch movies, listen podcasts.
- cook whatever you eat, get creative and share the food with your neighbor or the receipt with the internet users
- do more sport. 1.5h/day practice of yoga, tai chi, swim or whatever will influence the rest of your day
- participate in local NGO or crate the one you want to, from homeless shelter to business and startups free guidance, animals caring and astronomy enthusiasts.
- to support your cheap live, learn to like the chores: hand wash your dishes and clothes. Sounds super boring, but how boring is an Amazon warehouse job ? I'd choose the dishwashing+podcast.
- use the bus or walk or bike to the wilderness, you got time. You don't need to get to the super-far-and-wild spot to enjoy the nature anyway.
- in the wilderness you can: walk, run, off-road exploration, climb trees (yes, that's still a hobby), listen and learn to recognize birds, mushrooms (beware), plants, insects, draw (that you can do anywhere), get aromates for cooking or leaves for tea, sleep in a tent, collect fossils and minerals. Become a local guide.
- get a cheap computer and play (not that) old games. Bonus if you live somewhere where internet is cheap, try some MMORPG (ok not too long to stay sane). Here in France unlimited 1Gb connection is 25€/month.
- learn to knit, wave, sew. Some people find those fun, and make extra money on local handmade shops.
My first time up there I met a lady in her 40s who had just worked 12 weeks at a mining camp. She was bummed because that was the most she’d ever worked in her life. Had 10 acres, three kids, monster log home. Great life.
Alaska is also heavily subsidized by the federal government for strategic reasons.
Musical instruments are the opposite of cheap, knitting materials and art materials (even the cheap stuff) costs money, you can’t legally form a NPO for free and you won’t be able to volunteer very well if you can only physically travel to the center of town on rural public transit or bicycle your way around a wide rural area.
The kind of biking and hiking at the amount of distance and time we are talking about isn’t free either, a decent bicycle that can do heavy mileage will cost money to buy and maintain. Plus all these sports will cause you to burn more calories necessitating more expenditures.
(Also have fun riding a bicycle everywhere on country roads with two narrow lanes and 55mph speed limits)
Cooking creatively for a group isn’t really a part of a $300 survival meal planning budget, and it’ll get pretty boring without some of the kitchen equipment that helps with that hobby.
In addition to that a lot of stuff that is cheap was not actually budgeted by the author of the article. In his example there’s no home internet or water budget, so even washing clothes or playing a game online isn’t in the budget.
You can get a OK used guitar for $300 that will last for years. That’s a few extra shifts at the gas station.
> Cooking creatively for a group isn’t really a part of a $300 survival meal planning budget, and it’ll get pretty boring without some of the kitchen equipment that helps with that hobby.
If you have your own garden, you can do a lot of creative cooking cheaply.
You don’t need a ton of kitchen equipment to enjoy cooking, and if you spend time searching for deals at thrift stores, yard sales, or on Facebook marketplace, you can get pretty much anything you need for almost nothing.
>no home internet or ware budget
Just add $1000 a year to the budget and make it $6k a year instead of 5. Adding in a few extra conveniences doesn’t materially change the author’s thesis.
Cooking a huge moose roast is very cheap when you shot and butchered it yourself. (Rifle was $250)
The bike I rode to work everyday cost me a case of beer.
The car I drove 50,000km all over Yukon and AK , into the arctic circle a dozen+ times was $450. Registration was $13 a year.
If you think you need internet and tv for entertainment, go live in the Yukon. You’ll be so busy doing unreal stuff you won’t have time to sit inside.
Some people just don’t believe reality.
How much did your legally required car insurance cost? The median rate seems to be around $200 a month from a quick google.
Just adding in the most modest vehicle completely destroys the author’s budget.
I believe your reality, but I don’t believe in the amount you are romanticizing it. If it is so amazing why are you not doing it anymore? Because you just told me there’s no need for internet out there because it’s so jaw-dropping amazing, you wouldn’t spend any time on the internet arguing with a loser like me?
Vehicle got 32-35 mpg. 1.8ltr 4 cyl with selectable 4x4. I had a job.
> How much did your legally required car insurance cost? The median rate seems to be around $200 a month from a quick google.
$550 a year.
> Just adding in the most modest vehicle completely destroys the author’s budget.
Double the authors budget and you live a wicked life and don’t have to work much. I’m talking about living in the most jaw dropping landscapes many people see in their entire lives.
> I believe your reality, but I don’t believe in the amount you are romanticizing it. If it is so amazing why are you not doing it anymore?
I didn’t say it was perfect, but a heck of an adventure and totally doable. I left to drive around Africa for three years. Bigger adventure.
> Because you just told me there’s no need for internet out there because it’s so jaw-dropping amazing, you wouldn’t spend any time on the internet arguing with a loser like me?
I’m not arguing, and you’re not a loser. I’m adding information from my own first hand experience, rather than assumptions and guesswork.
That specific solution is what the author of this piece proposed for the woes of the young people of America, not wilderness adventures or anything else.
Only on HN would I have to explain why this might affect your romantic life, but here goes. Statistically speaking, for men aged 25-54 in the US, being poor [1] nearly halves your chances of finding a partner. Chances which, I might add, are already not great, and certainly not improved by your lack of car, reliable heat, social connections et cetera.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-...
[1] men earning 150% of federal poverty level for a one-person household
I don't really see a point in living a big city with the remote job I have and that many others have if I can live in a smaller area that still has humans but much cheaper way of living. Everyone claims it's about living in a city with available services but I see those same people decry how much the food costs and also that they have no friends and can't find someone to date. My thoughts aren't as articulate as I'd like them to be but I guess I'm ultimately trying to say is if I'm going to be miserable, why not do it on my own land for a lot cheaper.
I'm sure some city people do take advantage of all the diverse options the city gives them, but it seems like a lot of them ended up there for other reasons and then use that as a rationalization for staying where everything costs so much more.
However – I do think there is a sweet spot. If you can get a remote job that pays decently well and doesn’t require an excessive amount of time – and live in one of these cities – you can actually manage to see and do everything.
For example - I lived in New York for a while doing exactly this. I worked remotely and so could avoid rush hours on the subway, at restaurants, etc. and I had enough time and pocket money to explore the city.
> a recession hits and you can’t find another job.
Suppose you avoid all remote work. You live in San Francisco. If a recession hits and you're laid off, now there are 10,000 local unemployed tech workers trying to get 5,000 local jobs. Similar risk of unhappiness.
I don't believe that remote positions as a class are more likely to be eliminated than any other, so I just think of jobs located in "Remote" to be just like jobs in any other city, "Remote" just happens to have more jobs than any one city, and has unlimited housing for sale or rent at every price point.
I went remote in 2018 and couldn't be happier with my choice. I'm on my 3rd job, although Job #2 required me to be onsite for about a year starting in 2019.
The bagel places were indeed good, but not noticeably different than the hipster bagel places in my city.
Wood fired pizza was good at several places, but again...none were noticeably different than the wood fired oven fancy places in my small city.
The game stores are much bigger in my city due to lower real estate prices.
Times Square was the biggest disappointment. It's literally just standard big box store crap like GAP and M&M store and stuff like that. I guess that one's on me as it's a tourist trap.
Central Park was cool, but not as good as the multiple large parks in easy driving distance.
I could go on and on like that, but essentially I can own a home for a fraction of the cost to rent there. The only real difference is in a metropolis like NYC, you can meet up with people for any interest you want practically. You want to learn Klingon? I'm sure there's people doing that in NYC, but not like a city of 150,000.
Edit: the tap water was superior to my towns.
The great thing about New York is the prevalence of basically every nationality, with its own designated neighborhood. Places like Flushing, Corona, Brighton Beach, etc. These are also the areas that inexperienced tourists don’t visit.
If you visit again, definitely try to venture out to those areas.
Pointing out that it's the same old big box stores doesn't really connect to the draw of it. Most people don't go to Times Square to shop, they go to _experience_ it, and its entertaining. But it's not the place you're going to on a normal Saturday night with your friends.
But I grew up in a town of less than 5k in the Midwest. The nearest cities and towns were all less than 50k population. Rent is, of course, incredibly low. There are even dozens of small universities in the area. The nearest city of 100k plus is more than an hour away.
There are vanishingly few hipster spots in these places. You get chains, more chains, suburbs, and a couple of mom & pop restaurants. Some of which are decent, but most of which are disappointing. The variety of cuisines is extremely limited. To see any kind of major entertainment, like comedy or concerts, is a two hour drive. The major airports are two hours away. Your options for outdoor recreation and activity are extremely limited: not enough people for lots of recreational sports. Too much farmland for beautiful parks. Too flat for winter activities. Too few people to have a variety of cultural events or festivals.
You can, of course, be very happy living here. But what you get is extremely different from city life.
Like you say, there are small cities that can check a lot of boxes. But I’d go out on a limb and say that’s not typical for small town America, and not everyone is happy in suburbia either, even if they have their own cookie-cutter home!
Driving to smaller airports - just arrive 50 minutes before departure.
1. People who like the mega cities/metastacities. They genuinely enjoy the idea that they could never “fit into their head” the city in which they live. It’s just too big. You can never possibly exhaust all the possibilities, much less keep up with all of the changes. They can be intensely loyal to their abstract city, abstract because they can never physically/socially experience the entire city, so it mostly exists only in their head. But the endless horizon of that abstract city is where they really live, and why they like it so much. Never boring…of course neither is a war zone.
2. Smaller right-sized cities, defined as cities/regions that you can just about fit into your head. Big enough that they are rarely boring, especially if you take advantage of the third dimension of time/local history. But small enough that you can experience the coziness and stability of fully living in that one space…in other words, a home.
3. Smaller towns of which you can exhaust the possibilities in just a few years. If you grok the place, it is supremely cozy, and you can deepen the sense of that by raising a family and becoming (an old phrase) a pillar of the community. You go deep socially instead of craning your neck across an endlessly broad horizon. You also have the third dimension of time/local history. And you have the additional option of defining your location not just as the small town, but rather a whole surrounding region as your actual home. For Americans this is easily an area of 60-100 miles/100-160 km radius, given our love affair with the automobile. That regional view then gets you into the second level of a small city, enough stimulation so it’s rarely boring.
And there’s always cyberspace. The small town life isn’t so extremely different when that part that is online is so similar for everyone, big city or small town.
For extremely different, try 19th Century Western life, or 20th Century non-Western life.
NYC pizza (and even north of the city) is generally a step above most other places. You can find similar quality pizza most places if you look hard enough, but it's nice being able to stop almost anywhere in NY and get good pizza, better than the best you'll find without having to do real research in most places. The common open-front place in NY has great pizza. Where I am now (suburbs of another fairly large city), I have yet to find a good NYC-style pizza.
Bagels in NY fall into a similar bucket. If you search, you can find good ones elsewhere, but it's downright easy to find good ones in NYC (though that's less true outside NYC/Long Island than it is for pizza).
And man, the black-and-whites. To date, I've never found a good one outside NYC.
Times Square is an experience, not a place you go to shop. And not a place you go to wander around on an average Saturday night. Yeah, it's a tourist trap, but that's the experience it is. It's entertaining to walk around/through; on a rare basis.
I loved working in NYC (I lived about 90 minutes north of it at the time, but didn't need to go in every day, so the commute was less of an issue) and I very much miss living in NYS. Rarely, I'm there on a business trip (it's been years) and I plan my time out so I can have pizza for dinner.
When I was a kid I was drawn to NYC by the little hole in the wall restaurants, delis, coffee shops, funky stores. All owned and frequented by colorful local people. Technically these things still exist but they're mostly corporate chain versions of what used to be there. The unique experiences that the city still has to offer are too expensive and exclusive to be accessible.
Ironically, if I want unique food or local weirdness nowadays, I can find more of it in my lame hometown than I can in most cities.
There is a growing divide and there are many towns (and many parts of metropolises) where its a weird class inverted food desert. There are tons of boutiques and vintage shops, and more tatoo shops than you'd think is necessary. Maybe there's a upvamped "bodega" with fishwife tinned fish, and apples for .80 each. "Main street"s that seems pulled out of Disney's imagination and Rick Caruso's execution. Six coffee shops and a bunch of restaurants but no grocery without driving, no affordable gas without driving, no public schools without driving etc.
You'll also find some of the most ambitious people in the world.
Does the cost of rent justify it? Depends on what you are looking to do.
My wife, on the other hand goes bananas when we visit the city and just can’t get enough of the food. She’ll eat when she’s not even hungry because she just wants to experience this or that meal. I play along because I think it’s cute and we support each other’s goofiness, but I legit don’t get it.
Before I moved I owned a house and justified living where I did by saying stuff like
> country people can make a day trip to do that too.
...but I was lying to myself. Rounding friends up to drive 90 minutes then hop on light rail for a half hour before even getting in the vicinity of where you're going has a very real chilling effect on planning fun time. Most people just end up drinking Mai Tais that a bartender pours out of a plastic jug at a riverside dock bar instead.
Different strokes for different folks, but I think everybody should give each paradigm a shot and decide what they like.
Hard agree. I think the article is right that most people haven't even come close to trying the lifestyle he's suggesting.
1000%. I would complain about driving the 12 minutes just to get out of my subdivision (before moving into town). Just what you say, there's a "chilling effect" when everything you want to do is 30 mins away.
If you have a “friend profile” and you want people to match it, a city is wonderful - more people, more matches.
Thing: all friends within 5 years of my age, similar jobs, education, etc. Go city! Or college maybe.
But if you’re old country or old rural and want to be friends with those around you a suburban or rural area can be fine. You end up making friends with the ten year old next door, and his parents, along with the retirees on the other side, etc.
Good point. There's no possible way to have fun in a 27-bedroom house on a 100 acre lot.
This hasn't been my experience at all. I live in an urban area and I haven't eaten at a chain restaurant outside of road trips in years. I only eat at chains when I'm on a road trip and need a bite in the middle of nowhere. Once I drop into where I'm staying for vacation off the road trip, I'm eating local restaurants or cooking for myself if I'm out in nature. The fantastic food scene in my area is a huge factor in why I live here.
FWIW one can make the same comment about large US suburban home dwellers. Most of them just store stuff they rarely if ever use. Most of their less frequently used things are in varying states of disrepair and many of these folks would probably be better served by using communal amenities kept in good condition rather than storing sports equipment that they use once every 5 years in a dusty, mothball filled storage closet. Most folks in car-oriented US suburbs use their cars as mobile living rooms and do all sorts of illegal things (like makeup or doomscrolling their phone) in their car and only incidentally use them as transportation vehicles. But that doesn't stem the demand for folks who want to live in these homes.
The fact is, aside from job considerations, there are people who choose their density based on their actual preferences. One set of preferences may seem silly coming from a different set but that doesn't make them right or wrong; it just makes them preferences.
I grew up in Kansas City, lived 27 years in the Bay Area, and now back in the midwest (in Omaha).
Guess what I miss most about the Bay Area? (It's not the traffic and it's not In & Out.) It's all the amazing Asian restaurants. C'mon Omaha!
Having said that, the wife and I have found a decent Asian grocery store and figured out how to make some pretty good bulgogi....
This is the move. My partner and I are Asian and we participate in Asian community things in the Bay. A lot of asians that came from less urban areas made their own food sourced from the high quality but unknown-outside-the-community Asian grocery store!
They say they want to be able to walk to places more. But they also want a big suburban-style house with bedrooms for everyone and storage and garage and lawn etc, easy parking for them, nice wide roads to drive everywhere on and tons of free parking when they get there. This makes it impossible for the area to be walkable unless everyone else lives in small apartments and there's actually only enough parking for just them to drive if they feel like it.
In my opinion, it doesn't work that way. Yeah everyone wants to be the special 1% like that, but only actually 1% will be. If you really want to be walkable, you personally will need to live like that too.
Pretty much everywhere has a political majority of single-family homeowners, and if each locality decides on its own it doesn't want to have multifamily housing, then you wind up in a situation where almost nowhere actually allows it.
The reality is that it's mostly about living in a city with available jobs
What's the job market like near this lovely little $432 per month place described in the article? How am I going to pay for it?
I have had to travel across the country multiple times to “live where the jobs are” so I find it hard to believe that the whole time I could have not done that and just picked some remote isolated corner and live like my great grandparents homesteading?
Sure, I could live in the middle of goddamn nowhere, grow my own food, make my own clothes, build my own house, etc, etc, etc, but at the end of the day it's never over. I'll be out in my 70s and 80s doing that until I die. Sure, that might be an ideal life for someone, but that someone is not me.
First of all, unless you're 18 you should, if you're playing the game correctly, be saving for retirement already, right? That money, which you get to bring with you, will go a lot further in the country.
Plus, Social Security exists, and again, that check will be the same amount regardless of where you live in retirement, so that'll go a lot further there too. The longer you've worked for "city money" already, the bigger your SS check will be.
Even if you wait until you're just before retirement, moving out of the expensive market is one of the best ways to ensure a retirement secure from the worry of having to keep being economically productive till death.
I think you underestimate the financial resources of those who most need to take a route like this. They're not likely to have anything saved and likely have lot of debt, too. Which leads into...
> Social Security exists, and again, that check will be the same amount regardless of where you live in retirement
That is no longer a guarantee, and my retirement planning assumes that it will no longer exist in the near future. I have spent the last 25 years paying for it money I could have saved for retirement instead, and likely won't see a dime in return because the Republicans want it gone. We're realistically looking as a full elimination, means testing to receiveh benefits, massive cuts to benefits, or a work requirement (or some combination of these) all in the name of giving massive tax cuts to the group of people who will never have to work ever again in their lives, and neither will their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.
> moving out of the expensive market is one of the best ways to ensure a retirement secure from the worry of having to keep being economically productive till death
Let's constrain ourselves to just the location that the author of the original post suggested. How far away is the nearest hospital if I need treatment for cancer, a heart attack, or a stroke? What are the healthcare opportunities out there? Will friends and family be able to get out there to visit?
The author is so disconnected from reality that its wild that none of this crossed their minds. It just seems like a "those damn millennial and their avocado toast and Macbooks" instead of actually looking into what it means to move out there
The author also commits what to my parents, would be a cardinal sin - suggesting that the next generation have a worse quality of life than their parents, which used to be something that got you disqualified from running for dog catcher in most of this country.
To me, it's advocating that "number of dollars you earn per year" and "number of dollars spent on luxuries" is not so simply correlated with "quality of life." That's one aspect, but "number of dollars it takes to satisfy each level of Maslow's pyramid in the place you live" and "number of hours you have to work" and "how stressful is your work" are huge contributors to whether you can be happy (have a good QoL).
Many people work 40-60 hours per week and hate every minute of it, despite earning six figures. Some of those people might be much happier working 5 hours a week and living in the country.
Have you ever lived out in the country, grown your own food, made your own clothes, and such? That's so much more work than five hours a week, and at peak times, much more than 40 hours a week for a harder life that you do not get to retire from when you get old.
Have more amenities, not live in a shack, and sure it would cost 4x more per month but certainly not as decadent as the author claims living in “the city” (read city of 25,000 more than an hour away from anything larger) is.
>And for those who might be quick to point out that there could be a dearth of jobs there, note that when people say “there are no jobs” in a given area, they generally mean that there are no jobs that could produce a normal, upper-middle-class lifestyle there. Which, even in Massena and Ogdensburg isn’t entirely true. But even if it were, the Stewart’s gas stations in both towns are actively hiring part-time cashiers at $17/hr. These places will let you work just one day a week if you like, and seem to be pretty good about flexible hours. In this case, you could work just one ten-hour shift per week, and in so doing, earn more than 30% of what you need to live well at this particular house with just four days of work per month.
1. Buy, repair, and flip MacBooks on eBay 2. Do stuff on Fiverr 3. Mow lawns 4. Clean gutters 5. Set up a little stand and sell baked goods or tamales 6. Make YouTube videos or shorts about (insert your nerdy interest) 7. 3D print something and sell it on Etsy
All these things are things I'm sure I could do personally, but don't have time to do because I have to work 40 hours a week to earn enough money to pay for my mortgage in the expensive place I live. But all that goes away when the only thing you need to shoot for is to clear maybe $800 on a good month.
And also, if you have modest savings for a city person you could do with far less earnings, as interest on $200,000 = $10,000.
Those might pay well in the city, but nobody making $17/hr is going to pay more than $10/hr for lawn mowing.
No internet at the house in this scenario, so that's a lot of trips to the library.
>2. Do stuff on Fiverr
See above.
>3. Mow lawns 4. Clean gutters
These are both viable in the summer, provided there is some "landed elite" in the area that makes more than the $17/hr the gas stations pay. I guess you could shovel snow in the winter.
>5. Set up a little stand and sell baked goods or tamales
Doing that legally requires licenses and registration, but good idea. Do the people of upstate New York enjoy tamales?
>6. Make YouTube videos or shorts about (insert your nerdy interest)
The first point again.
>7. 3D print something and sell it on Etsy
The first point again.
> licenses and stuff
What? No, nobody selling tamales outside in the country (or probably the city either) has a formal license to do so. Nobody cares unless they're trying to get you shut down because you're being a jerk (say, selling them right outside their restaurant). Also, what if I told you, you could pick whatever kind of food the people in the area do like, and teach yourself to make it?
Great financial advice happening on the orangesite.
Really good stuff.
When you're at the absolute bottom, you're not gonna make ends meet by playing by the rule and the enforcers generally leave you alone because you can't get blood from a stone. So for the people living on $400/mo running an unlicensed tamale stand or parting out cars or breeding pitbulls or whatever isn't as risky as it would be for someone making real money.
But yeah, the advice here is generally out of touch.
Sure you might get lucky if you keep your head low, but maybe you won't get lucky and you lose the gamble and are put in a WAY worse situation.
Are you possibly confusing "per week" with "per month"?
He should've said either "one 10 hour shift per month will make 30% of what you need to live here" or even "one 10 hour shift per week will make more than what you need to live here."
I think hé means one should do all kinds of small projects.
$17 x 26 h = €442
One 10 h shift per week is to much apparently.
> In this case, you could work just one ten-hour shift per week, and in so doing, earn more than 30% of what you need to live well at this particular house with just four days of work per month.
What he probably did was write that one shift is more than 30% of what you need, then switched gears to write about four days of work per month, but forgot to remove the 30% number.
40 hours per month is much less than 40 hours per week
"Why aren't more kids embracing a life of poverty? How dare they ask for anything better in a country that produces more wealth than any other?"
"live of poverty"
You're really doing a great job exemplifying the attitude which guarantees misery.
The whole point is that living a simple life in the country, with minimal amount of time spent working (thus maximum free time) is arguably a much richer and more fulfilling life than, say, a life where you and your spouse each earn $200,000 working 40-50 hours a week at a Very Important Job that you drive to in your Range Rover and BMW, and getting to spend 1 hour most nights with your family before falling exhausted into bed in a house that cost $2 million, just to wake up and do it again tomorrow.
How are we the homes of the largest economies in the world, cities known not just by name but by brand, around the world and: - day care worker can't make enough to move beyond improverished and day care is expensive - teacher can't make enough to move beyond lower middle class and school (even public once you add in all the trips, certs, childcare for non-school days) don't make enough - your burger is $15! but the person making it apparently should live in a wifi-less shed.
Not very long ago at all, this economy was about finding opportunity. Now it seems to be about aiming to reintroduce feudalism.
>> the Stewart’s gas stations in both towns are actively hiring part-time cashiers at $17/hr. These places will let you work just one day a week if you like, and seem to be pretty good about flexible hours
432 / 17 = 25.4 hours a month. A few more hours than that to pay social security, but no income taxes and they would get the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Of course, it depends a lot on the job. Some jobs only exist in cities, while others are almost exclusively rural.
for certain values of "a life" of course. The article alludes to our 'great-grandparents' and indeed, we wouldn't be here if the majority of people 100 years ago didn't build "a life" in rural areas without any of the things most of GenZ (and if i'm honest, millennials too) think "a life" requires.
But the word "build" you used is telling. I think you mean "buy a life" -- that's what pursuing only the City Life is doing. In the country you would indeed have to build a life. To figure out what would make you happy and build it, whether that's a club of fellow board game enthusiasts, or a restaurant that you open, or a small chicken farm, etc.
I don't blame the young people, they've only ever been shown a fashionable, extreme-consumption-based narrative of what "a life" should be. Expensive vacations, designer handbags, luxury cars, kitchens bigger than that whole $29,000 house (and that cost $100k for the kitchen alone). That's what we've been told happy people need.
I'm just deeply unconvinced that any of that automatically brings happiness, and I am very convinced that the amount of work it takes to pay for all that is 100% bad for those of us who weren't just born into wealth.
That gas station in the article? Gone once the corporation that owns it deems it a frivolous expense no longer worth the upkeep. Now what are you going to do? Find a job at the diner? Ok, how sustainable is that -- the town is not growing, the economy is dying, and the incomes are stagnating.
The author made his way by hitchhiking and vagabonding after leaving his folks' home. Guess what, surviving like that relies on civilization's infrastructure remaining viable and maintained -- it's leeching off others work and toil to selfishly sustain oneself without giving anything back.
And what about how the author currently sustains himself? Is it by humbly working at the gas station? No, he maintains a substack and social media presence to pay all his bills. He's an entertainer larping as an outbacker. He's an older Christopher McCandless -- developmentally arrested and antisocial.
It's not about fashion or luxury or "buying a life," it's about securing a means of self-sustainability, managing risk, and being a part of the growing world around you -- and not recoiling from it, shutting one's eyes, and pretending everything will be alright (tell that to anyone whose nation transitioned into communism -- hah!).
It sounds like they’d find a way to be miserable anywhere. I live in a medium-density neighborhood of a large US city. I have multiple close friends within a five-minute walk, and I’m constantly meeting new people who share my interests. The music venues, restaurants, and yoga studios are nice too, but having so many potential friends in close proximity is what really makes the city great for me.
It’s not necessarily easy to start making friends though, it definitely doesn’t happen automatically. Maybe in small towns, people are more likely to notice you and spend time with you, because they also have fewer people to choose from.
When I’ve lived in small towns I found dating almost impossible, though.
> if I'm going to be miserable, why not do it on my own land for a lot cheaper
Bro. Please go make some friends, or find a hobby or vocation you like, or get religion, or something! You don’t have to be miserable, at least not all the time. Renouncing society will probably just make things worse.
They’re terrible if you don’t. There’s inherently less diversity within a smaller population.
I grew up in a small town. (4000 people, largest nearby was about 15 miles away and 20k. The nearest “city” was 100k and 80+ miles away. Maybe visited that city region once a year. Major city (500k) that was 180 mi away I never even saw growing up.) Even being a straight cismale nerd was considered the bane of my existence. There wasn’t anyone else I met who shared my level of interests. I saw how people who were gay were treated and it was quite grim. Imagine now you’re adding in multiple facets like race, politics, etc.
These small places work well for those who fit a certain mold. You’re not gonna have an easier time dating either if you have any modest requirements either like education, income, beliefs, etc.
The main issues with cities is that they’re very competitive. If you’re not a competitive person or don’t have whatever attributes the market rewards, it will be very challenging. Especially with dating as the pool to most people feels “unlimited” and therefore people will keep looking than settle for someone who is ugly or whatever issue you have.
And what are the chances you would find an acceptable partner for you in the small town if you didn’t already have one?
This part has me screaming shenanigans. Unless you basically don't leave the house, you need a car outside of like 8 American cities. More believable would be a pair of used bikes.
It seems like they have a good number of routes and do route deviation within 3/4 of a mile of the bus stop.
Most of the bus routes here seem to run maybe twice a day, once early in the morning and then once late in the afternoon. There's a few more frequent ones that run on the hour but it looks to be closer to the denser cores.
You change your schedule to handle that, and they usually will drive the van (barely a bus) up to your door.
Okay but the dude is making $5K/y which means he basically has no job and he sits around in his house all week or goes hiking etc. His most exciting day of adventure will literally consist of taking the bus to the library to check out a book, and bringing it back home (while reading it on the bus, perhaps). He can totally afford to plan his entire day around the event.
There are thousands of American towns that are about 10k population - large enough to have a Walmart and other stores, small enough to walk across in an hour or so.
Some of the middling-old sections only have one sidewalk. The oldest have them on both sides of the street, and the newest developments have them also, usually.
I see from Google maps that here in Illinois the situation seems to be a bit better... (E.g. Morris, Rantoul and even Du Quoin). Du Quoin seems very inexpensive and seems like it would make a better argument than somewhere truly rural (it even has Amtrak service)
I can’t say for sure, but I think this is much more typical of American Walmarts than it is to be able to easily walk to them.
Streetview of your opponent as a pedestrian trying to access the Massena Walmart: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ufTWTHxHCReFP8VA9
If it's snowing or just cold out I'm still ordering food.
If I'm mildly sick, ordering food.
I'm going to guess that you're a really good shape that a 2 km walk isn't a big deal, but I don't think most Americans can do that.
Shit that's horrifying.
I have health issues and walking 2km a day to try to help fix. So I see 2km a day as basic. 6-10km run a day would be "fit" IMO. things as humans are designed to walk.
Living in suburbia means I have to walk "for the sake of it" although I cam make it useful e.g. get some milk!
As for cold. Anything above minus 5 should be OK just wear stuff like skiiers wear which can be got cheap off brand.
2 km of walking in a day, even in great weather is exceptional for me. I probably average 1km or less.
And I'm not a car owner. My family members will literally hop in a car and drive 30 minutes over walking .5 km to the grocery store. They like the other one more they say.
Like a lot of comments have already mentioned these towns don't even have sidewalks. You'll be walking on the side of the street risking an accident
How? It just doesn’t compute to me that someone would ever see that as onerous.
Most Americans would be able to do it if it became a regular occurrence for them. 2km of walking is not much even if you sit around 24 hours a day.
I think in US it just cultural. "You are walking?! With your feet?! How?!". Unless you more likely to get shot walking via some neighbourhood I can't understand that.
You’ll walk more than 500m through the aisles in Walmart buying your groceries.
... Wait, what? That's less than half an hour walking at a fairly relaxed pace.
https://www.ssa.gov/ssi/amount
So you have a ton of people trying to make it off that.
The cold weather is really the red flag for me.
>Considering that the property has a well on-site, water is free, and as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a little extra in electric for that — or they could have the Amish deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in a wood stove, very cheaply.
He glosses over heating, but for a full house that can easily be 200 or 300$ dollars.
Snow tends to cause problems. Now if he wrote this living in Florida or something it would be more practical. No risk of freezing. Walking or biking is possible year round.
I'd actually love to see a bike first city, but outside of a few college towns I don't think it exists in the states
Not at $0.04/kwh for a 600 square foot house it won’t.
> there’s never been a better time to try to “make it” in America and live the older version of the American Dream. If we can’t see that now, it doesn’t necessarily mean that things have gotten bad — it might mean that our perception has become grossly skewed by an era of hyperabundance, marketing, reality TV, and social media comparison syndrome.
With an extremely strong emphasis on "older version." This vision of life is not the life that most "black pilled" people were raised to expect or plan for. It is very accessible and is extremely discoverable thanks to the internet (with electricity costs like that I'm surprised crypto miners haven't moved in) - but it's a level of self-dependence and isolation that most people do not want. However it's absolutely true that it's never been easier to live a "frontier" lifestyle, only now with 3d printing and amazon and other bountiful resources to fill in traditional gaps.
Real "billionaire goes homeless for one night to prove the stupid poors are lazy and stupid and need to hedge their expectations" type of energy
We have never been more productive in this country's history and yet we cannot even meet a bar set in the 1950s.
It's frankly ridiculous as is this piece.
> utter failure of local, state and federal government to provide housing, public transit, education and healthcare
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per...
1. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/globalization-did-not-hollow-o...
From the article:
> Note that this includes taxes and transfers, including in-kind transfers like government-provided health care.
So excluding housing, health insurance and student loan repayments etc.
And he does sort of have a point. You could probably afford an apartment _somewhere_, just not in any of the places you consider desirable.
So new houses have more than doubled the pace of inflation in my hometown.
But when we moved in there was no mall, no Best Buy, few jobs. It was much more rural. This happened all over. Things got more developed. Areas that are desirable now weren’t necessarily desirable 30 years ago.
Plus the houses now are so much more insulated and air tight that heating and and cooling costs a fraction of what it did 30 years ago. And the houses are much bigger.
I don't think that this approach is "scalable" and I don't think it's a good idea for most people (perhaps not for anyone). I do think it usefully focuses attention on how so much of cost of living is not exactly one line item, but the massive interconnection of modern life. Living in a place where you can have access to the networks (literal, social, medical, etc) you need for the rest of your plan.
I wouldn't want to live like this! But the fact that one could until one got sick (a common limitation on many creative ways of living the modern US I find) is interesting. I think the fact that there are similarities to traditional frontier living (wood stove heating included!) makes it a particularly interesting.
Edit: Arguably, I think the problem is that the USA achieved the original "American Dream" and simply stopped thinking about how the world was changing and what a modern re-envisioning of that dream should be. Pointing out that you can be an impossibly good frontier pioneer in 2025 could be a way of pointing out to people that we need to move on and stop imagining a thing we can active as the pinnacle. We need to imagine living in a world where everyone who works full time can afford housing and healthcare, where performance is rewarded but isn't required to simply live and where we can let living in the woods safely fade into history as a thing we can certainly do if we prefer but should stop idealizing.
I don't judge you - I also live in a VHCOL area and my wife wouldn't even want to move 30km where the housing prices are half of where we are now. Such is live.
But saying you couldn't afford it is false - you can't afford it where you'd want to live, is more accurate.
If (and only if) you aren't socially different from the communities you'd be moving to. Being gay or trans, for instance, might mark you out as a target in a lot of the places where you could live this cheaply. Plenty of race, religions, or political beliefs that would make it untenable.
It's hard to claim that any American can achieve this.
Political beliefs do divide the town, but national politics are actually less divisive than I've experienced in larger places. Trans folk do have it harder, but we seem to judge the few we have as individuals. I'm sure there are other towns where these things are much less true, but I wouldn't automatically assume it couldn't work in Massena for anyone with the right attitude. I think it would come down to the individual.
But plenty of places will absolutely run you out of town for having the wrong religion, race, or sexual preferences.
Clearly this breaks down at a certain size, and it may still suck for people on the minority side tho.
Honestly it still sucked to be trans in Vermont, it's extremely isolating especially if you dont have a car or live in Burlington/Brattleboro. The reason why so many queer people move to cities is that cities are really the only place queer people can have a semi-normal social life, and not because they're fleeing Westboro Baptist Church style bigotry
Not only that, but there certainly aren't enough cheap houses in cheap areas like this to meaningfully make a dent in the large number of Americans struggling to afford housing.
It's a lot harder to hate a group when your kind neighbor is one of them. Debate and rational arguments dont actually convince most humans. Kindness without the expectation of anything in return and possibly even hate does.
"He/she is one of the good ones..." is a fairly common turn of phrase.
It is right, but - if you were one of them, would you risk your life to maybe bring in some change?
The missing thing is health care. If you're young and immortal and willing to take risks, sure. This attitude won't last into middle age. My wife had cancer, and without health insurance I'd be a single parent right now. Maybe you can lean on public assistance like Medicaid (if it continues to exist), but this isn't really a scalable solution for "we can all live cheaper". It only works if enough people stay in the rat race to pay for it.
"Cheap" health insurance for a youngish small family is >$1000/mo. That really isn't optional in the US.
We don't have any money to treat sick people, we need to make sure the networth of billionaires continues to grow.
We need to fund military bases all over the world and conflicts in places most of us can't find on maps.
You find how truly alone you are when you can't afford your medicine. No longer an "American" you're a freeloader, a parasite. Perhaps God himself hates you.
And Blessed are the Billionaires for God gave them so much.
According to Google, person in Spain spends on average $4,432 per person per year with some $3,113 of that being paid by the government.
The US government pays out $6,000 per person per year or nearly TWICE as much.
The problem is that $6000 is still less than half of the $14,570 per person per year (2023) healthcare costs in the US.
And of course, the US government payments don't cover everyone equally. They only cover the elderly and some subset of the very poor (mostly kids).
The only fix is reducing US healthcare costs to something more like the rest of the world, but that requires sharing drug R&D costs evenly with other countries (raising your costs), reigning in insurance companies, eliminating over-credentializing of doctors and other medical professionals, fixing school cost/debt, and reducing/eliminating the massive amounts of unnecessary bureaucracy/paperwork (allowing doctors to reduce staff and see more patients per day which reduces overall medical costs).
Given the reaction to the article by the commenters here, I don't think we need to worry about a mass movement of people wanting to live like dirty hippies in the Massenas of the country.
The article is just saying, "Here's one of the things you are allowed to do". There are trade-offs, the same as there are trade-offs for the people moving from India to Silicon Valley to make money, but who won't see their families more than once every year or two or three.
If you’re making a just a bit over the poverty line, you’re in the sweet spot for ACA subsidies, which would put you at close to no premium.
Even making 150% or the federal poverty level (about $40k for a family of 4) you’d pay very low premiums for a cheap plan after subsidies.
I didn’t bother to check if the article gets any more serious from there.
I am glad people like this exist because that means there is less competition for the climate zones I can live in without having to perpetually struggle with the urge to kill myself on a daily basis. I am from the Gulf Coast and the years I lived in Seattle were a constant fight with seasonal depression. Once I left for sunnier climes again all of that just vanished.
Every time I visit the beach, I remember: wow, I really hate this!
Not really no. Cooling always uses heat pumps (air conditioning) while heating only sometimes uses heat pumps. And cooling usually has a smaller temperature delta than heating. It comes down to the relative costs of natural gas and electricity where you live.
https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/why-does-it-take-more-...
Every electric and mechanical device we use produces waste heat. Humans and pets produce waste heat. The sun shining on a roof and through the windows heats a house.
Take the example of DC with average summer highs of 87 and winter lows of 28.
If it’s 87 outside a house with no AC full of people and pets, running appliances computers and lighting with the sun coming through the windows will easily get up to 100.
You AC needs to effectively move the temperature from 100 to 74.
The same thing applies in the winter. If it’s 28 outside a well insulated house full of people and residual solar heat would likely never drop below 48 or so.
Also the article picked 74 degrees which is fine for the summer but insane for the winter. Especially at night when the low temperatures hit.
If you pick something more reasonable like 68, you now have 20 degrees of heating and 26 of cooling.
Then when you consider that adding 20 degrees to the outside temperature means that in the summer you will need to run the AC pretty much all day. While in the winter day time temps + 20 degrees puts the indoor temperature right around 70 with no heat.
> It's not though.
It always has been, for humans. Energy cost != financial cost (or ease).
ie You can't settle on the bright side of mercury surface, but you can on the dark side of the moon.
I also grew up along the Gulf Coast and live in Seattle now. I've had a bunch of other friends and family who have moved to the Pacific Northwest. Some love it and are still here and some lose the will to live and wilt like sunflowers in the dark. I don't know of any way to predict how the gloom will affect you. You just have to come here for a year and see how it goes.
The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise. …
Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs. They tyrannised over the paidagogoi and schoolmasters.
I'm nearly sold, but I haven't sat on the furniture yet to see if it will be hard enough.
It has a Walmart, Home Depot, BJs (similar to Costco), a main street with several businesses. A walkable grid with sidewalks in that main town area....
Feels like reaching that this place is so desolate and depressing.
Check out these pleasant-looking houses in the summer: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Massena,+NY+13662/@44.9264...
Edit: I've spent a few more minutes on Street View. This is not at all the podunk backwater that the author makes it out to be. They've got plenty of commercial streets, and big blocks of houses with nicely trimmed lawns.
I suppose this actually makes the author's point more strongly -- even if you have very little money, you can live pretty nicely in Massena!
Massena is small but not that desolate/small
The article however rather oversells the economic opportunities of the area - the two best employers are a nearby Indian casino and the prison system, both of which have their drawbacks. Otherwise there is a reason why all the local farmland is slowly being occupied by the Amish, they’re a group that doesn’t care much about the lack of opportunity.
As you can guess, this has led to a big divergence in outcomes. My relatives who have found remote work are living like kings, and the ones who haven’t are really struggling.
I dunno why I’m writing this. I guess it’s just funny to see Massena written about. And Massena is the big city compared to the surrounding towns.
I'm currently living below my means in a small village in Mauritius, but I'm planning on moving to a big city in a big country ASAP because while living like this is good for my bank account, my mental health is taking a heavy toll. Not to mention how challenging it is to find a date.
As a young person, IMO the best thing to do is move to a place where you can make some good lifelong friends, and build a solid network for employment opportunities. Saving money while living frugally only served to dampen my social muscles.
Why do you assume that they are no kids in the neighborhood?
I suppose another option is that they don't actually care if their kids have friends. Perhaps parents are enough, in their view.
"My wife's expecting, but I hope she can wait. 'Cause this winter looks like it's gonna be another bad one"
"The roof is leaking and the wind is howling, Kids are crying 'cause the sheets are so cold. Woke this morning, found my hands were frozen, I've tried to fix the fire, but you know, the damn thing's too old."
Their expatriate buddies down in Mexico probably aren't shivering through an upstate New York winter with nothing but a wood-burning stove for warmth, the way this guy proposes.
Considering that the property has a well on-site, water is free, and as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a little extra in electric for that — or they could have the Amish deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in a wood stove, very cheaply.
Maybe "a little bit of electricity" or "very cheap scrap wood" appear to be the vague plans for how to handle heat.
You could run a 1.5 kW heater 24/7 for roughly 40 USD a month. Just make sure the space is well insulated and not too large - but we’re talking about basic living, so that should be easy.
They already have 30 USD per month for electricity in their budget. All year long.
> which is more than half the size of my suburban home)
How much space you need for a single person? 30-40 sqm (300-400 sqft)? That’s more than you need.
Sure, middle of winter night you might need a bit more heat, but then in June you’ll be using close to none.
Not to argue (?) that their house is too small (??)
And their $30 electric budget explicitly excluded heat.
Sincerely, someone who moved from Buffalo NY to Northern California and has never once regretted it.
> After all, constant sunshine is the weather of the dullard. The lover of hot, lazy days and breezy, cloudless skies fancies himself a lordling — he insists that the earth be his womb-like chamber of easy, saccharine delights. He is the same man who enjoys sugary-sweet sodas, on-the-nose political commentary, prefers his novels to be cheap and gutless, and his women botoxed and spray-tanned.
No very close reading is required, I believe.
But having read through most of the objections I still find myself enticed by this. If I mentally place myself in this position I think I could quite happily live a few decades without talking to anyone for weeks or even months at a time. I'd still have my pets to give me companionship. Load my kindle up with a thousand books I want to read and just work my way through it. Pick up writing as a hobby and spend the rest of the time working at a gas station and fixing up the house and/or grow some food to offset the reduced income.
Healthcare is an issue. Doesn't seem like a viable place to grow old. Once you become too frail for physical work it's probably just time to die, which isn't great.
Proenneke built his own log cabin entirely by hand, using only simple tools (many of which he made himself), and filmed his daily life, including hunting, fishing, foraging, and crafting everything from scratch
I wanna see how it's possible to live a decent life in civilized conditions (roof over your head, running water and sewage system, electricity, heating) on $400.
Given humans are also just animals that had lifestyles before money and modern society was invented, this doesn't seem like a useful distinction. Either you're talking about your personal preferences you don't want to lice without or money isn't even part of the picture in the first place. Where that line is personally drawn is just as arbitrary to this point at $1 as $1,000,000.
Overall though I agree the article sheds light where we don't normally tend to think. At the same time it crosses points too often to make that those focus of conversation. That is to say it makes a good point with just a little too much PoV twist inserted so people who don't agree will think about that statement instead. E.g. don't complain about not having the home prospects of a boomer because you can live like your great grandparent - which would be something ~40 years prior to the boomer comparison, even for a zoomer (-> driving pushback against the idea owning a house at all is the same as the lifestyle the article laments hearing about -> driving conversation like the above paragraph).
I see people come to London from other parts of the world and ask where they can live that is nice and a 5-10 minute walk from the office and I usually laugh in their faces. If you can afford to live that close in central London (even before you think about "nice"), then you don't need to work. Even single car parking spaces in central London cost more than family houses elsewhere in the UK.
When I got my first place it was on the outskirts of London, cost 20x the average UK salary (and for which I obviously took out a huge mortgage for that basically took 75-80% of my salary at the time to pay), and took over an hour on public transport (which was also not cheap - walking is free but probably about 4 hours each way) to get to central London. And this was just in the 2008-era - it's never been cheap (or even reasonable) to own nice property in the center of a large global metropolis like London where you are 10 minutes walk from your office AND transport AND entertainment AND everything else unless you are ultra wealthy.
People need to lower expectations about locality/proximity and affordability before things become viable. This isn't a new problem.
If you are a minority concerned about the culture of red America, the 2016 and 2024 elections both provide excellent county by county color coded maps for you.
Telework is what really unlocks this if you’re a developer.
The Midwest also has many medium sized cities. Not as cheap as small towns but not as expensive as the coastal real estate cost traps. I live in Cincinnati, which has three universities, four Fortune 500 companies, a small startup scene, and over a dozen small neighborhoods with walkable streets (overall you’d want a car but you could get away with not using it every day).
At some point the only economically rational decision is to leave very high cost of living cities. I tell people for cities like SF that it might be good to go there to launch your career but look at it like a college. If by 30 you are not making — for SF I’d say over $300k — then leave. You will never get above real estate in those places unless you are approaching mid six figures.
It also negatively impacts what you can do. Even if you can earn that, it might be with golden handcuffs to a FAANG. Think about that. If you want to start a startup, one that is not lavishly funded enough to pay that, then leave. If you just don’t want to be golden handcuffed to a monster mortgage, leave.
If you like very long books, you should read "The Power Broker", a biography of Moses that explains how he used his job as state park commissioner to become one of the most powerful (and controversial) people in New York.
But that means you don’t get the latest iPhone, cook basic foods at home and rarely eat out, repair your own appliances, and so on. The hardest part, I think, would be dealing with the social expectations of society at large. 1960 living standards were universal in 1960, but nowadays you’re fighting the entirety of Western marketing machine.
Universal for whom?
Why do people always have to call out "the latest iPhone". Most people can't afford the latest iPhone, nor do they try. You might as well say a Lamborghini. Why can't you be honest and just say "a smartphone".
Using that phone for 5 years would only add like $60 to their total monthly expenses. Is that truly unattainable? Is that really what is keeping people from buying a house?
You can save quite a bit of money by living this way even in high CoL areas. That's how a lot of people without high incomes in those areas get by - by getting handy and resourceful. Through that, they often develop/discover talents and skills, and save a lot of expenses.
For my part, I've done all my own landscaping, installed/repaired/maintained my home appliances, built my kitchen cabinetry and other furniture, etc. I estimate these efforts have saved me at least 100k over the years, probably much more.
I don't think it's nearly enough to offset the housing, education and healthcare unaffordability crises, but it's a way in which regular workers get by.
However, the call-Uber/Doordash/Handyman for everything lifestyle isn't something that works unless you are highly paid and have no kids.
Even that is only true in a very narrow sense. My great-grand parents built a 600sqft house in a small town and lived their most of their lives. But they built that house right next to their parents. They lived within 5 miles of their combined 9 siblings. They were within half a mile of their church and half mile from the my great-grandfather's union hall. The town was small, but thriving, with multiple department stores downtown. My great-grandmother worked in two of them.
They did not isolate themselves into a dying town with few opportunities far away from their friends and family.
What millinials and zoomers are really struggling with is the hallowing out of the social and economic institutions that supported our collective wealth and well-being. These struggles may manifest as complaints about the individual ability to afford housing, healthcare, education, etc. But there are not individual solutions to these problems. They are structural.
The flourishing town probably grew that way organically, not because of government support or because some company opened a big facility there.
It's true that land is more expensive now, but even if you could buy your own town and settle people on it, organic growth is basically illegal or impossible nowadays.
They have a publicly operated utility that seems to be working well for them. It's a good story! Direct link: https://nysfocus.com/2023/06/21/public-power-utility-massena...
It's multi-dimensional, not even limited to just that. We are living in a world of increased scarcity. The deleterious effects of an increasing population are very real. From a labor point of view, it's not just increased labor supply resulting in devaluation of said labor. There are tighter margins in the managerial and corporate level of things as well. Modern societies are complex things that attempt to cover all of their bases by inventing whole portions of economy through structured, financial support from the top down. This means that on a fundamental level, additional capital must be appropriated by the organizational arms of society, including the cost of labor to organize and implement such a thing to begin with, which further reduces margins for the managerial class and for the labor class. On top of that, these can be counted on to compound the effects of increased competition at all levels in the relevant industry through artificial flow of capital sustaining said competition that otherwise wouldn't exist. The idea is that more people, more labor, more value, win/win/win. But in practice, we're already burning a mind-boggling amount of entropy attempting to establish some sensible bare-minimum degree of equity. More labor just means a greater degree of a fake and "manually" structured economy to stop whole swaths of society from collapsing in on itself. It's not to say these systems of equity are bad, but they prop up an inflated population number and THAT reduces the relative importance (and thus power) of everyone as a result.
We also have to account for changing climates. Celestial systems aren't static in the slightest, and the status quo changes quite radically and quite frequently. We're currently living in an ice age. During a hot house period, the overwhelming majority of earth's surface ends up being about as habitable as mercury. Even without anthropogenic climate change (which probably just tipped the scales), the fact of the matter is that the climate changes by itself too. It wasn't that long ago that MENA was a lush, green paradise. Only 8000 years or so which is an infinitesimal drop in the bucket. At some point, we were going to enter another hot house period where only a couple coasts are habitable. Wanna guess what that's going to do to scarcity?
Of course, to whatever degree these things exist have no linear, predictable relationship with some single-value macro (or even micro) economic KPI. The highly chaotic system of society is full of nth degree causal feedback loops which are completely beyond prediction. There are nigh infinite more problematic effects of growing populations as a result, I can't hope to be exhaustive about it, or asterisk every permutation of these abstract causes and effects.
There's a lot of rhetoric to be found which assures and assuages that thermodynamics isn't real. There is no relationship between population and scarcity, or if it does exist, it's very minimal. We're not operating efficiently, and we need to do that before we start to examine the relationship between population numbers and quality of life. The convenient part that they leave out is what a society built around "efficiency" (in the sense that they mean) actually looks like. We already have places where humans live according to extreme principles of efficiency: Submarines. It really is efficient to live in bunk beds and eat in cafeterias. Not sure many people want to live like that though, so why the fuck are we trying to build such a world?
Like even the framing showed how a ridiculous premise it was.
> as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a little extra in electric for that — or they could have the Amish deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in a wood stove, very cheaply.
Also, conveniently, neither appear to have an associated cost so we don't have to worry about whether the financial math works out.
I live in the northwest, so I can't speak to upstate NY, but downed trees on state and federal land near roads is free to take. Every day there's people posting rounds of wood for free to take.
It's hard work, but it's good exercise and rewarding.
There's some upfront investment: $200 chainsaw, an old maul, and an old pickup truck, but those amortized over a decade is practically speaking $0 heat.
There's some upfront investment: $200 chainsaw, an old maul, and an old pickup truck, but those amortized over a decade is practically speaking $0 heat.
I feel like this is really stretching the definition of "$0".
.. a cargo bike might be a better choice
If you're living on $432 / month and working 30-40 hours at this cashier job then using your off days to grab and process wood is honestly pretty miserable. There are slums in developing countries with higher standards of living because they can heat their "house" (read: tent or hut) with oil.
He also mentions other forms of employment, like raising rare herbs, so maybe he's got a little homegrown operation going that doesn't take much time.
Other than that, again, not sure how different it is from living slums in underdeveloped countries. Me, I'd rather just save up and buy some oil.
We cut wood for our own use and also sold it, so it didn't require 100% of our time to keep the heat on.
Say you do have a wooded plot, the first year or two it might not be so bad, lots of wood near the edges where you can drive up to to load and move, but what about after that when you have to go deeper into the woods? You need to get in there, it may not be accessible by truck or get swampy where you will get stuck, and now you are considering a tractor or other vehicle, a decent expense to obtain, in order to not have to carry all your wood an armload at a time through the woods longer and longer distances. Chains and gas and oil for cutting it aren't expensive but not free, nor is maintaining a gas chainsaw if you seriously use it for all your heating wood, doubly so if you aren't already mechanically inclined enough to repair engines. And then you still have to split it. There are cheap splitters, but cheap spliters will only split the wood that took little effort to split with an axe, and less than half the wood you cut is going to be that easy to split straight grain wood, so you are either going to need more for a splitter or to be physically fit and capable enough to split a lot of gnarly wood by hand. Some people enjoy it for the exercise, I do, but not everyone is up to it, and it is such a hard physical activity that you need to be in good health to maintain it.
Also splitting mauls are a gimmick, they take far more effort than a long handled axe and are only a good option if you are otherwise incapable of using an axe. Speed applies more kinetic energy than mass, kinetic energy is half of the mass times velocity squared, so doubling the mass you are throwing around is far less effective at applying force into splitting than trying to double your swing speed. And that is the biggest "trick" to a good axe split, swing speed, which is why you want a long handle. Mauls are far slower than an axe, take more energy than an axe to lift and swing, and are far less capable of splitting more gnarly wood as the more aggressive edge angle has a much harder time splitting into and separating the grain as much of the energy merely crushes wood fibers before it bites in and starts wedging. If an axe can't do it, a maul won't do it even more, and then you are getting into a sledge hammer and steel wedges anyways, and a wedge and sledge are easier to set and more maneuverable than a maul with a big ass handle on it.
Burning wood is a decent way to heat a house if someone is always at the house in regular 8 hour intervals or more, but it has a lot of caveats and is not what I would call free. More like subsidizing a portion of the cost of with hard physical labor.
I live in a country where for half of the population wood is the default fuel. There's a reason it's a lot of peoples job.
It's cheeky because it frames itself as rejecting the status quo, when actually what it is doing is saying "accept the status quo wholesale and just move to somewhere the status quo hasn't reached yet." And of course, if enough people do that, no one will be around to fight against the status quo anymore. The main difference between this and Thoreau's cabin in the woods is that Thoreau could have chosen to do differently.
Massena's about the size of the town we moved my parents from after my father had a stroke, though it's a lot poorer (in 2013 nearly a third of the population was below the poverty line, and that's before Alcoa closed a chunk of operations there). It does have a hospital (25 beds, not-for-profit) and given the demographics I'm 100% positive that it's one of those hospitals that *needs* Medicaid to survive.
I'm pretty sure that doing this really would feel a lot like going back and living like your grandparents or great-grandparents did - all the joys of the 1950s.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was data center work available though - with cheap power there's probably someone there doing cryptomining or maybe even hosting AI processing.
> Electric: ~$30
> Water: $0
> Heat: (no, it's really blank)
> Transit: $53 for a 30-ride pass for each person living there, assuming you go to town 3x per week at $2/trip. Multiple options to take the bus to town each day from this location.
> Food: ~$300/mo.
> Telephone: $8/mo
> Entertainment: Fishing and library, free
> Internet: Use library
This author cannot be coming at this from a serious point of view with this absolute embarrassment of a cost breakdown. There is no accounting here for heat (which is sort of important in the middle of "American Siberia"), property taxes, homeowner's insurance, healthcare, or saving for retirement.
> I’ve known men who grow rare Chinese medicinal herbs in greenhouses on a tenth of an acre to sell via the mail; or my uncle, who takes lumber from old barns and crafts it into shelves to sell online.
Damn, I be that would be a lot easier with an Internet connection at home and a smartphone.
I'm in literally the middle of nowhere in a one-horse town and it has 1Gbps wired to my house and they just put in a second company with 5Gbps the other day, which is wild.
Going into the armpit forgotten realms of the US is, however, not appealing in the least despite its financial practicality on limited means.
Convincing people to move to a remote area while at the same time seeing literal ghost towns develop, is not something I would recommend. What happens when the public utilities fail? The roads need repairing? One of the _many_ blizzard-like seasons can knock out critical infrastructure.
Don't forget the free fishing rod/equipment.
So yeah, you do have to have some timber available. But if you live in the kind of place he's talking about, there's more than enough to go around. Most of the land where I live is in crops, but there are enough trees along the creeks and in rough areas that all the people burning wood don't make a dent in them.
My parents would heat their home this way. Actually, I think they still do. They'd gather all sorts of wood from fallen trees on other peoples' land as a sort of "service" aka- they haul it away and you don't deal with it. Is it worth the cost savings? I highly doubt it. They're just not good with managing time/money.
From what I can tell both of his services are pretty popular.
Of course it depends on the land and the house. But here's some Reddit comments also estimating the need at < 1 acre
https://www.reddit.com/r/homestead/comments/1jnpbug/how_much...
And even with a well managed rotating stock of trees, you are going to at best get just over half a cord per acre. And in my area which is as close to the same weather as Northern New York as it gets, I would expect they would need atleast full 3 cords of wood to make it through a mild winter, more if it is a colder winter or if no snow builds up to help insulate or if you live on an open plot where wind can blow over your house.
I wouldn't even consider trying to survive on my own tree wood unless I had at least 10 acres to harvest off of, and it would still depend on the type of trees growing there and is still kind of straddling the edge of sustainable long term.
Maybe if you went full 16th century and started coppicing the woods and maintaining bare minimum heating you could do better, but coppiced woods also takes a decade to initial establish and maintain and nobody has coppiced woods just sitting around waiting to be utilized.
Wells are not "free water" unless you never have to worry about any sort of repair or maintenance.
In Minecraft perhaps. Wood costs money to get, process and adequately use, the well also has maintenance costs.
And I'd use a heated vest.
I've got a relative who lost his job last year, his wife gave birth in Long Island soon after and they paid pretty close to nothing.
Whether that is giving up living in comfort or making small changes to their habits.
I think the relevant commentary here is to look at what happiness looks like for you. For a lot of folks they are just going to mentally masturbate to alternative ways in life. For the select few that make those changes content like this is critical.
Thanks for spreading the seeds.
Lots of HOA communities exist with condos or townhouses. Example prices would be $175k for 3 bed, 2 bath condos. These can be found all over the country. Add a little more on top of it, say $250k-$300k and you've bumped up to a 3 bed 2 bath townhouse with a garage. For the price of a downpayment for a dump in a major metropolitan area, you can own a 20-30 year old construction fully paid off. And that's a mid-case scenario.
In a low tax area a place that's paid off like that might cost you $400-500/mo between taxes, homeowners insurance, and HOA fees. The big "GOTCHA" everybody comes up with is health insurance. Well between medicaid and Obamacare you can get sizeable tax credits up to fairly high incomes. If you're making around $50k/yr in my state PA, you can get around $1500/mo in credits with a family of 3, and end up paying ~$1200 in premiums per year.
There's literally nothing blackpill about this lifestyle. It's as walkable as any suburb, with the same CHATGPT-style standard of care healthcare that exists across the country, and it's actually more convenient to get from point A to point B in a car than in most major cities or in high density suburban areas. Fiber internet is likely more accessible and reliable too, unlike how it would be in decrepit city buildings.
A lot of pros, and not many cons - sure it isn't $432/month, but you can make situations like this work for $2-3k, which opens up an endless number of careers, projects, and opportunities to live off of.
Coincidentally, recently thinking of Handmaid's Tale for some reason... I was clicking on towns on Google Maps, on either side of the NE US border with Canada, and was struck by many of the featured photos of these places being abandoned-rural-decay.
Probably because overgrown abandoned human activity is interesting to photographers. And maybe that constitutes the majority of photos from those places being shared with Google Maps.
But I also had an idle thought of what-if there was a conscious effort to discourage people from going there, like a town that's kept off of maps. So I started looking around for hints of sensitive government facilities, developers buying up large swaths of land, etc. The first thing I found was an industrial marijuana-growing operation.
I didn't know what to make of it, other than that land might be affordable, and hopefully Amazon delivers.
Am I missing something or is this implying that you need to work 34 hours a week at the gas station to live there. That's.... basically a normal, full-time job, right? It's a strange way of putting it.
>At the end of it, most people don’t want to live this way. That’s OK — I’m not here to judge them. But I am here to tell anyone who is fed up with the housing market, tired of living the “4HL,” and sick of seeing our country’s heartland regions continue to crumble that there are actionable solutions to their problems. They could do it today. They could make the change if they wished.
No one is angry that they can't buy a piece of shit shack in middle America where they will have to walk an hour each way to work at their (as suggested by the author) gas station cashier job in the deep snow all winter.
They are angry that in much of the latter 20th century, when the actual "boomers" (rather than the previous generations that the author is disingenuously using in their place) could afford a home that was near jobs and community without being in the top 10-20 percentile of earners. They're angry that this is no longer the case for a number of reasons depending on whom you ask, to include housing as speculation, generational wealth destroyed by medical debt, onerous zoning and regulations preventing housing development, selfish older generations selling their homes (and therefore much of their generational wealth) to fund either lavish retirements or more medical treatments, etc, etc.
Yeah you can live a 1910s rural lifestyle on the cheap, sure. Hell, get a tent and a backpack and you can live the hobo life in any of our major US cities today! But this is ignoring the obvious question, which is: If the productivity of our nation has exploded so tremendously since that time, where has all of the wealth gone that one would even dare suggest that we live a life of sufficient poverty to be suspended in that century-old way of life?
Also, you can make any number of easy tweaks to his formula to allow you to have conveniences that would make your life orders of magnitude richer than the true 1910s were. For instance, a $3,000 car, Internet access, etc. Also, anyone coming into this experiment with savings from a few years of "big city work" has a huge amount of capital to play with to set themselves up. $200,000 in savings would give you $10k a year in interest income to live on at current rates, for instance.
The whole point is mainly one about being honest about WHY we have to work 40-60 hours a week so we can stretch to afford a million-dollar starter home, two luxury cars, designer clothes, and IG-worthy vacations. Some people would arguably be happier working little to not-at-all, or working for themselves to make $10k a year and devoting the rest of their time to whatever makes them happy. Why is that so offensive an idea?
I have never met a single person of my generation for which this holds true. If this is the perspective that the author is trying to refute, fine, but I cannot say that it is a common one.
> $200,000 in savings would give you $10k a year in interest income to live on at current rates, for instance.
Come on. Most Americans will never see $200K in their life. [1]
[1] https://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/resource-library/rese...
And I don't think most people can't afford to save $400 a month. Lots of people save that much.
Only one of those we have control over. If starter homes cost a million what can you do?
This is not what they aspire to, or what 95% percent of the people living there aspire to.
Sure, the fishing sounds good, and the country living, but living without a car? No TV? Never eating out? That's weird, man.
This guy's life is no more representative of how most people in red states live than any blue state office worker who idly talks about going to live on a commune is representative of how people in NYC live.
Sure, lots of folks from any culture have a dream of getting back to the simple life. But it's an idle fantasy for almost everyone.
Wait, so they're angry because people are spending their money on themselves for fun stuff at the end of their lives? Or maybe even using it for un-fun medical care? Rather than handing it over to their kids? I don't know what to say. Except that I'm glad I never had kids.
Anyone moving to bay area for a higher income job would have most of these issues.
A forum full of people willing to migrate for better income and lifestyle should not be criticizing "cost of moving", "social connections", "health disabilities" and "retirement".
Your criticisms are all reasonable, but they are exactly the sort of things I'd hope to see discussed in the comments. And they are! I think the article is a good starting point for a discussion on what's possible. I'm nowhere near as extreme as the author of the piece, but I live a life much closer to what he describes than most people here.
Rather than being soured by the response, I'm glad to see both the pros and the cons being discussed. Yes, there are lots of ethical issues about living the way he suggests. There are lots of things you'll be doing without. But there are also lots of upsides about living in a way that you have time to do things besides just work and sleep. Which parts of the response did you find souring?
I don't buy lunch. I don't eat "nice" food. I don't drive nice cars. I don't eat out often and have never in my life run up a bar tab over $30. I have under $20/mo in streaming services, buy used/free furniture etc, etc. If I did to all those things the monthly cost would not even make up the ~1k/mo difference between my "got in early" mortgage and what rent on a shitty 1-2 bedroom costs these days. I live in a 1200sf house (in a post-industrial town with an industry more or less killed by globalization, so not like it's somewhere nice) and have the biggest house of anyone I know under 50. This is not a "people won't settle" problem.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely am "making it" in that I'm hitting milestones like home ownership, retirement contribution, etc (at the expensive of day to day material conditions, of course) but if everyone behaved like I do to do it the economy would collapse.
There's a discussion to be had about laws, codes, zoning, etc. and how they've done the same things for housing that the same people's regulatory legacy has done for cars.
And to address rural New York specifically, it is a goddamn dump. You think coal country is bad? You think a bad part of Detroit or St. Louis is bad? it ain't got nothing on <shuffles cards> Oneonta. We're talking boarded up to occupied houses ratios one step short of abandoned mining town. You either work on a farm or live off welfare up there. Oh, and the property taxes are pretty crushing in NY, you'll be better off in a comparably crappy town in just about any other state.
Somehow I think grandpa would be suspicious of this tale of bootstrapping just being socialism. But why not? I think people in the left have been insisting that if we gave people a robust baseline for free (by taxing the rich), we could revive this sort of lifestyle.
>Electric: ~$30
>Water: $0
>Transit: $53 for a 30-ride pass for each person living there
>Food: ~$300/mo.
>Telephone: $8/mo
>Entertainment: Fishing and library, free
>Internet: Use library
>Medical costs in case a moose kicks you in the nuts while fishing: ~$500000
Someone help me manage my budget, my family is dying.
If you (generic you, not parent) happen to be one of those who flagged it, maybe you could explain why?
Stressed communities like Massena are defensive: outsiders (particularly relatively wealthy ones) are typically a target, and are unlikely to get a plum job that goes by word of mouth. That effect is amplified when people don't have the assets or kind of life they want to protect for themselves, so they have little to lose and a big chip on the shoulder.
To me the sweet spot for young people would be the in-law unit in a great neighborhood where you could do professional work. Learn from the best, and deal with people more interested in a clean, secure transaction than extracting every advantage they need (e.g., buy good engineering used from someone who loved their car). Even wealthy people aspire to pare down to what they really need, because the simplicity restores irreplaceable time.
If there are thousands of ways to do wrong and few to do right, give yourself your best opportunities. Make yourself not only useful but reliable and graceful. Anyone under 30 (or anyone at all?) should be budgeting 30% on making the future selves they really want to be.
BeWelcome.org is free accomodation for travellers, so if you need somewhere for just a couple of nights, you can stay. It’s safe; there’s an entire safety team dedicated to handling complaints.
If you settle down for too long though, it is recommended to share in paying the rent or utilities, out of politeness.
The kids slept in two sets of bunk beds in the bedroom. The parents slept on a pull out couch in the living room.
I’m not saying I want to live that way. Just pointing out that people have lived that way before.
I wonder at what point we’ll see this become a trend as young-ish people realize that the trade off is worth it for them. Will we see a reverse migration from the cities at some point? We did some of that during Covid but I haven’t seen any numbers on much of it “stuck” post-COVID especially with RTO. Anyone seen any stats on this?
New Mexico, Arizona, even Florida if you're into tropics - have pretty amazing weather, no? And there must be low COL locations there. Now, imagine living in Canada. The warmest place in all of the country is south-western BC and it rains most of the time (the nature is amazing though).
When you talk to people from a major metropolitan area about culture outside of a major metropolitan area, they're very often not talking about culture. They're talking about entertainment, and a specific kind of it.
I live in semi-rural Michigan and the idea that there's no culture here is just kind of absurd. The culture just doesn't consist of having a constant stream of touring musicians and restaurants for you to spend money on.
Agglomeration effects are real and there are centers of dance and music around the country that exist in self-reinforcing cycles of training and performance. These scenes come and go but they don't arise by themselves in isolated dying towns.
Some styles of dance and music, which are a component of an overall culture, are totally centered in large cities. Music is a bizarre thing to bring up -- bumfuck nowhere Midwest smalltown is the origin and inspiration for plenty of music that is listened to well outside of the geographical region it's from. Hardcore punk has plenty of representation from gutted Rust Belt locales, and Midwest emo is straight-up named after it. They do arise and perpetuate themselves in isolated locations, all around the world.
Of course there are cultural aspects that large cities will have and more rural areas won't, as well as the other way around. Neither are lacking culture by virtue of lacking the other's culture.
More different kinds of culture (diversity), more examples of each kind (quantity), and usually better examples of any cultural component which is available in both (quality).
Rural areas certainly have cultures of their own. It is not binary.
But you cannot reasonably compare the cultural opportunities of urban vs rural and assert that rural is not lacking, unless you are thinking of your personal preferences only, and the rural area you're using for comparison happens to match up very well with your own preferences.
If you're looking to be involved in culture for just a few hours at a time by going to a restaurant or show and not being involved much past that, you're going to be painfully bored here. I don't think doing that is a moral shortcoming or anything like that, but there are a lot of people that are doing that, don't realize it, and misinterpret the lack of opportunities to do so outside of a large city as that place just not having any culture at all.
You lost me here. Weather is probably the most important thing to me. Cold weather gets into my bones and leaves me low and uncomfortable. My body physiology is such that even if I wear appropriate clothing, I end up sweating under them and paradoxically get even colder. Winters for me just mean being cold, wet and uncomfortable and is not worth it for me.
Don't live in this area, it sucks. You'll have 8 months of miserable, not enjoyable winter with winds and freezing rains, 2 months if suffocating humid summer with mosquitos and ticks, and maybe relatively enjoyable September. Ask me how I know.
If anything, your correction proves my point. Most people don’t want living alone in a cabin as their ending.
And I'll agree that "living alone in a cabin" ... while you are the object of a nationwide manhunt ... is not how people want to live!
This is strawman to the point of rhetoric and reminds me of the "you can afford a house if you'd just stop eating avocado toast all the time." I'm actually not sure if the article is meant to be rhetoric with a pitch for small town America or if it's an actual argument that happens to have a lot of bad faith claims.
I hope OP is enjoying where they live. I also hope they visit small towns where skilled tradespeople are losing their jobs and businesses due to shifts in America. I don't think telling them to work at a gas station would go over well.
Especially tenable for the tech crowd, where salaries are high and potentially scales well with more effort put in, even if for a short duration.
I think this all the time too. Would be interesting to try to start a colony like this.
You could make the payment trading options with an almost meager portfolio. Evil stock market and corporations could buy you a free house.
I was in South-Eastern California just visiting desolate areas. One place I stayed at had absolutely nothing: the nearest place to get food or gas was Bishop, CA, a 50-minute drive. Coming from a big city the desolation is appealing at first, but gets tiring pretty soon.
Assuming it's not high income but a real scrounger, this is leaving out way too much. Out of pocket health insurance will easily quadruple that number. Utilities could too, depending.
For the other 20 percent, it’s best to go to a private clinic, where the care is as good if not better than many US clinics but at 10-20 percent of the cost.
And the private clinics are not subsidized.
My wife just got an MRI at a private, fully for profit imaging clinic. The total cost was $217 USD for a study with and without contrast on a 2023 Siemens scanner. Labs for the contrast approval were $6.
What people pay in the USA is in no way justified by equipment or facility costs. Runaway liability and profiteering, perhaps. But not because of the “quality” of the healthcare or the equipment.
But I don't really buy the argument that healthcare quality is the same elsewhere. Like, do you really think you're going to get the same care for, say, long term multiple sclerosis in the United States versus Guatemala? I feel a lot of the "the care is the same" comes from younger people who have had relatively easy interactions with the healthcare system. When you're over 70 it's a totally different ball game.
You have two elements in healthcare , for the most part: expertise, starting with basic medical education, then gained by reading and being exposed to patients, going to conferences and other experiential factors. People are ill, injured, or old everywhere, so this opportunity is well distributed.
Apart from that, you have technology, and people with money pay to have access to it, and people with money are also everywhere, so that too tends to be distributed.
There are also a lot more doctors per person in many developing nations, because education of doctors tends to be highly subsidized in those countries. You get a lot more of a doctors time and focused attention with your consult.
It’s when things are rare that it can be harder, but even then, sometimes the leading specialists start out off the beaten path.
All I know is that it's gone up tremendously since then, and my family plan costs about $2100 a month.
US healthcare is extremely high quality and timely if you can pay for it unlike the crap "free" Canadian "healthcare" I used to have with 12 month wait times for procedures and 50%+ marginal tax rates.
no, its more like, what if you lived in a country where you were forced to buy a mercedes or die of starvation, regardless of your socioeconomic status.
I dont doubt that Canadian healthcare is deeply broken, considering its close proximity to the US system, leading to extreme pressure from perverse incentives.
I have spent the last two decades living in developing nations in Latin America, and I can say I have been very pleasantly surprised.
Where I am right now, The public systems cover 80 percent of what people need at no cost with government hospitals and clinics. Any community >200 people will have a clinic, and any reasonable town of a few thousand will have a hospital. There are government Pharmacies that distribute most common medications for roughly 25% of the standard (very low) pharmacy price.
Alongside this is a thriving system of private pharmacies and "clinics" Often, these are fully equipped hospitals, with trauma centers, cardiac units, the works.
One of the nearby ones, for example, consists of seven towers and many other buildings over several city blocks and includes hundreds of specialist practices, three separate hospitals, two imaging centers, etc. All fully for profit and privately held.
The cost at the clinics is typically about 10% - 20% of US cost, and includes the use of new, state of the art equipment from Siemens, GE Medical, etc.
Very good health insurance coverage for me, a 60 year old man, runs a little under $100usd a month, and covers 90-100 percent, including a reasonable allowance for vision and dental.
This is not a wealthy country, and the general tax rate paid by most people is a 20% sales tax on non-essential items, roughly 20% import tax on luxury goods and personal vehicles, a fairly high fuel tax for road use. There are other taxes for top 1% earners and corporate taxes, but they are not onerous.
The public and private system is thriving, and is becoming a hotspot for healthcare tourism for the USA and Canada.
Naked Greed is not the only way forward, and private / public hybrid systems can thrive side by side.
Its worth mentioning that the government provided insurance, typically extended mostly to mothers and children, is also pretty good, covering 100 percent, but each usage requires an approval process that may take several days. Anything else, you go to the hospital where they will provide primary care / stabilization if it is a complex situation requiring ongoing care.
On the government side, there is a clear priority towards care that can result in good outcomes. Pallitive care and diseases that inevitably result in near-term death are deprioritised under the public systems, and private insurance or families pick up the tab on those kinds of things.
The hospital will have to take you in if you need emergency treatment, provided you make it that far, however they only guarantee the minimum treatment to "stabilize" you, and at that point they are going to expect either an insurance policy be given to them, or your agreement to take on additional medical debt beyond what you already incurred to receive additional treatment. Like if you have a heart attack, they will take you in, give you some nitroglycerin, and try to get it so that they aren't worried about you keeling over within the next 2 hours, but if your heart is still in a lower level of afib and you can't afford treatment? They will give you the boot and tell you to go see a doctor but it ain't an absolute emergency any more.
Or say you crash your car and your leg is crushed. They will stabilize you, but then you or someone else will have to make a financial decision for you or give your insurance. Will you be able to afford the costs of multiple surgeries to pin your shattered leg bones back together and all the rehabilitation? Sure they can do that. Can you already not afford the costs you incurred and certainly can't afford all the additional surgeries and rehabilitation later? Well they will "save" you from all those costs you can't afford by chopping off your leg, knowing that without those other surgeries they will end up cutting it off 6 months later anyway.
Massena Hospital is a 25-bed hospital. Might have to go to Canton or Ogdensburg for a family doctor (45 minutes by car). Most things serious get referred to Syracuse or Burlington (3 hours away by car).
AFAIK, Cost[1] is "theoretically" nothing if annual income is less than the federal poverty line ($15,650 for an individuality). And might as well be free for an income up to $39,125.
Not even great grandfathers. My wife’s dad grew up in a 600-700 square foot modular home with three siblings. Mom was a waitress, step-dad never had a W2 job (hunted, did handyman work, etc).
The authors point resinates for me, and I've seen a different but related model by friends - A couple (Dentist and small business owner) living in semi-rural Kansas (city pop ~40K). Their contention was that normal people in a normal week eat some food, go to work, do kid stuff (school, practices, etc), workout, watch some TV, and sleep a bunch... And theres really nothing about that that is needs to be in a major metro, so they moved to a place where college educated adults from the coasts dare not go- Kansas. The recognize the useful stuff from the metros are the food, culture, etc... and what they did was take a trip one a month to live like kings...
Can you imagine how much more fun you can have with ~400K of disposable income (after living expenses)? Seeing the trips they've taken and the adventures they were able to afford because their 7 bedroom 5 bath house cost ~400K (movie theater and all)... was mind boggling to me. It was all for the small cost of not being able to get access to the metros during the week. Seems worth it to me...
Probably most importantly, a thriving job market
Access to healthcare is also a serious problem. Also the people may be hostile to anyone who is “a liberal” or “woke”. I wouldn’t recommend being openly transgender in one of these places.
What would you judge them for even if you were here for that?
You also have money in the bank so if you feel the need to burn a few thousand on something you can. It will shorten the vacation but who needs 6 years seriously?
> Internet: Use library
Ok, funny joke. As if it's actually _reasonable_ to live without a smartphone or the internet in 2025 (or 2015 for that matter). Can you do it? Sure, I guess, why would you? I'm not on TikTok/IG/<insert social network here other than HN>, that's not what I'm talking about here, but it seems almost criminal to not have access to the internet, it would be akin to parents refusing to take a kid to the doctor. Why would you proudly be ignorant and cut yourself from such a valuable resource?
>often enough, the “boomers” are the scapegoat; the ones who lived their American Dreams and, as the allegations go, pulled up the ladder behind them as they tasted their successes.
>They’d merely need to content themselves with a manner of living that would be more in line with that of their own great-grandfathers
The problem isn't that we can affordably live like our great-grandparents. It's that we can't affordably live like our parents and grandparents did.
That kind of thing isn't in the American DNA. You'd have people demand a lawn and a fence after a month.
For me, one of the biggest issues with living out in a small rural town like this is the culture. From my experience, the majority of rural areas in the United States are now extremely politically conservative. Going anywhere outside of the Puget Sound metroplex always reminds me of this reality... lots of MAGA and confederate flags, billboards promoting the latest ultra right wing candidate, etc.
Can some folks live more frugally, for sure, but this is unrealistic.
I've often heard the criticism that Boomers lived unsustainably and then pulled the ladder up behind them, making life harder for future generations. But what I don't often hear is a breakdown of the specific policy decisions that led to this. What were they?
(Also, living that far from urban centers when you're not a farmer is a burden on society. You require much more road, water pipes and power line maintenance than someone that lives in the city.)
This kind of thing might sound nice from the outside, but if poor rural community living was as nice and cheap as claimed, these kind of areas wouldn't be so cheap or abandoned. These kind of articles always seem like a "grass is greener" type escapist fantasies. Yeah sure there are a handful of unusually better spots, maybe this place is one of them, but 95% of poor rural areas are just... poor rural areas with little to offer. Hope you don't have kids because the schools will be garbage. Hope you don't like going to bars or being super social because 90% of the clientele are the same handful of drunks you see every time.
Just because you can eek out a few cheap years in a place like this in your 20s or 30s doesn't mean it is a great place to actually live. Say you work a decent amount to "save" money for 10 or 15 years, what will you walk away from there financially? You weren't saving city wages that will afford you to move wherever you want, you saved poor rural wages which will afford you.... another slightly less poor rural area or maybe living like a 20 year old in a more prosperous place for a year, your house might be worth less later than what you paid for it, your job might just disappear one day without warning and no viable replacement except for a desperation job at just a bit above minimum wage.
Ive lived in rural areas, mostly poorer areas, my whole life. And yeah sure there are some hippies around surviving, some Amish dudes surviving, a few people are doing a bit better with long-distance traveling jobs like truckers or seasonal work farther away. But 90% of people are just barely surviving, watching their health slowly fail away faster and faster because they can't afford the care to maintain it. Hopefully you can live until you are 60+ without any health problems, but that is a big gamble. If you get sick a single hospital visit can wipe out a decade or more of careful savings. Break an arm or an ankle? There is an entire year's savings or more. You get to watch those few still around you struggling day after day living in shacks or 30 year old decaying mobile homes. Poor rural areas are not some hidden grove of wonder and peace, if it was these places wouldn't have been abandoned to start with.
Some anecdotes from that time:
I had a $30/mo phone plan that got me 100 minutes, and 5GB of data at HSPA+ speeds. I basically never worked from home, even if that had been an option, because one too many `npm install`s or video conferences would've set me over the edge. I brought my personal laptop to the office to install OS updates, and took downloads back home on a flash drive. And if I had an unexpected call to a 1-800 support hotline - one that I knew would take an hour - I'd literally go find a payphone, where you could call it for free (although it's a much higher charge to the recipient).
I developed a strong love of free-to-me media and entertainment. I was a voracious reader of library books, got my news off broadcast TV, listened to FM radio for music (to be fair, I'd always - and still - done that), and so on. I was attending one or two tech meetups a week.
I didn't have a car. Being a 15-minute walk from a train station helped drastically, but I wasn't as close to the city as most of my colleagues were (maybe 20min over others' average). Visiting my parents took 115 minutes (30 minutes by car) and I did it every other week. Twice a week, I'd take a commuter rail train south of the city, then walk 20 minutes to get where I was going. Most of the time I'd bum a ride back to the station with someone else there. All said, it was probably two extra hours of commuting whenever I did this. There were even times where I'd carry odd things home from Home Depot on the train.
And then, as we got older, many of my friends started to move far out of the city, to places unserved by our transit system. I was totally dependent on my friends still in the city to carpool, even though I was almost certainly making more than they were. I wish - truly I wish - that I could say that this was the straw that broke the camel's back, what made me snap out of it.
Sadly, that honor went mostly to both my work changing (much more teleconferencing / Zoom), and my family situation changing (needing to commute out to the burbs regularly, sometimes with little notice).
I still remember some of the jibes I'd get while doing this - "why do you make life so hard on yourself?" and "you don't know how to have money".
I look back on that time and do think it was an interesting experiment, and to an extent, I'm glad I did it for the perspective. But really, I was naive. I wasn't doing something that somehow made me more independent, or less wasteful. I was dependent on much of other's output, and really only wasting my own ability to be productive.
Loved the Massena example, but I went to school near there (Clarkson) and the winters are pretty rough. Summer / fall is beautiful though!
The next day a friend called, who I hadn’t seen since we got shipwrecked in the gulf of Panama, and told me he had been building out a “fancy instagram School bus” for the last year and between his wife and his pot farm in CA he realized he’d have no time for it.
“I figure you were the guy to buy it from me.”
I said yes and bought a 1 way ticket to Santa Cruz.
I sublet my place in park slope for $3,600 a month furnished which was $1k more a month than the base rent.
I thought I’d spend a few months driving around, go on Phish Tour, and flip the bus for $50k.
That was about 4 years ago.
The bus cost me $36k and within 10 months paid for itself.
I let the place in nyc go entirely after that and for one months rent could drive back and forth across the US.
A $89 parks pass gets me into all the national parks and I can stay on BLM land in the most beautiful places for free.
I soon realized many people have at least 1 home and love having a self contained guest for a week or two. I visited friends, family and clients (I still maintain a high end high performance coaching business working with founders of companies like Asana, Bombas and other interesting folks).
I also run a remote AI research lab for the last 4 years.
I shop at farmers markets or wholefoods.
I love ultimate frisbee and am pretty good, having been a former world games invitee, and any city usually has a game and within an afternoon I can make a dozen or so new friends and be invited to all sorts of things. (pickupultimate.com).
Last year on the eclipse I met a woman in hot springs, Arkansas and fell in love - and she lives in Kansas City so I’ve spent a lot of time here with her the last year.
The creative freedom of having a bus and living in beautiful spaces is unmatched. And knowing if I lose all money, I can buy a 50lb bag of rice and beans, fill up on water, and use my cell phone and solar for a month to figure out the next move, is very comforting.
Of course there have been problems like breakdowns, a friend filling my diesel tank with reg gas, a break in in nyc, and getting hassled for parking legally by house dwellers in Santa Monica, but it’s been a great investment.
So much of “middle class lifestyle” is a trap marketed to you people by the upper classes to get you to opt in to being a modern day share cropper. Taking a couple vacations a year, retiring out of shape and unable to really enjoy life and nature, and coping with pills and drugs and tv and consumption that are primarily part of the problem.
Ps we host an ai / philosophy / founder meetup every Wednesday, come as my vip! Http://earthpilot.ai/play
This reminds me of a hunting cabin in Alaska you could rent for 100 bucks a month. One room. Wood fire stove. Outhouse. Only an hour outside of Fort Wainwright. Good luck is all I have to say.
I see a few technical trends that would enable me to live quite far away from Berlin mid term that could be a lot more affordable.
- Starlink provides good enough internet pretty much anywhere. Rural Germany is famous for its lack of connectivity. I could live anywhere in Germany and have a decent connectivity and be able to work remotely. Complete science fiction until recently. But now feasible. I expect there will be competitors in a few years.
- Improved modes of transport to remote locations via autonomous driving electrical cars, mini buses, drones etc. could unlock rural destinations. Electrical means cost per mile/km is expressed in kwh. About 2-4 km/kwh. Autonomous means there is no driver to pay or tiring driving to do. Even at Germany's high-ish grid prices, a 50 km commute becomes quite affordable (a cup of coffee worth of energy). And you can take a nap, relax, or work while you move and be quite comfortable while being moved. There are a lot of affordable housing options starting from about 10km away from where I currently live. 50km, we are talking rural Brandenburg which has depopulated significantly since the fall of the wall. Ghost villages, lack of employment, etc. I know several people that moved to the edge of Berlin or beyond and have a great standard of living there.
- Tiny/prefab housing means the current cost of constructing houses is increasingly complete bullshit. I don't need a artisanally crafted house at great expense. I just need a small amount of space that is comfortable. That shouldn't cost me north of half a million and put me in debt for decades. And modern materials means such a place could be well insulated and relatively cheap to heat.
- Low cost, renewable energy is starting to dominate. Germany has really high energy prices. But it's investing to fix that. Those investments might pay off in a few decades and lower the cost of energy. That's good news if I'm heating with a heatpump, and am being moved around electrically.
So, I need some land reasonably close to where the action is (Berlin in my case) but not in the middle of it. An affordable & comfortable way to get to Berlin when I need to. And some housing that won't break the bank. I think all of those are well in reach for well below 100K and next to nothing in monthly cost. All I need is some kwh of power and water. And the usual insurances, taxes, and what not. And food, which I might even grow some myself if I had enough room for a garden. And being far away from all the hipster areas in Berlin, probably means local shops are going to be relatively cheap.
Of course this being Germany, the obstacle to this is going to be immense bureaucratic inertia. You can't just plonk down a tiny house anywhere you want. There are rules! Designed to frustrate anything entirely reasonable like that.
But I imagine similar things are going to be true everywhere and there is going to be fierce competition between depopulated regions to attract people and their money. And when push comes to shove, I'm not German and could be persuaded to move elsewhere. Also, if you extrapolate to autonomous RVs, you could just live in those and let them drive you to some remote parking space at night and to charging and water points for access to the essentials. Be in nature when you want to be, drive up to a city when you need to. Move south in the winter, north in the summer, etc.