I think the author is arguing against their own point with the illustration they chose. The very last picture can be found in the Wikipedia page for the Homestead Act and, two jumps later, one can find themselves in the Dutch version of "Sod house" [1] which has this to say:
> 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.
I looked through those numbers, and immediately thought to myself - hope you don't need to see a doctor for anything serious, or go to a dentist for that mater.
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.
skyyler · 23m ago
The lack of a budget for heating in an article that uses the term "American Siberia" is so hilariously out of touch that it makes the rest of the article farcical.
Loughla · 29m ago
What small town even has a bus? The closest bus line to me is in the closest large town (40k) about an hour away.
Are there bus lines in the middle of nowhere?
wombat-man · 4m ago
If you’re around or on the way to a popular hike I’ve seen buses run out to some more remote spots. But probably really depends on the county.
aeturnum · 52m ago
Some of the claims here are pretty intense, but I do think his closing statement is true enough:
> 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.
weard_beard · 31m ago
What I don’t understand is the authors antagonistic framing. The complaints about moving backward because of boomer greed aren’t any less valid just because caves exist, fire remains “discovered”, and we can clone wooly mammoths.
energywut · 46m ago
> any American could live an earlier iteration of the American Dream
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.
nkurz · 7m ago
Maybe you have more direct experience with this than I do, but I'm not sure I agree. I don't follow the lifestyle the author describes, but I do live in an economically and culturally comparable town in Vermont that's much smaller than Massena. The town is full of gay and lesbian couples, and it really doesn't seem to be an issue. The few racial minorities seem to be well accepted. Religion is a surprisingly small factor.
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.
dsadfjasdf · 38m ago
Data?
paulryanrogers · 7m ago
Having lived in a small town in the South East, it's true. Even being white and male may not be enough. You have to be able bodied, not too ugly, not too short, not too nerdy, the correct religion and denomination for the area. Unless you want to live like a hermet.
999900000999 · 1h ago
>Though I and my wife do not presently live in Massena, we live nearby, and we’re doing exactly this — we do not have an automobile, nor do we want one. We use the rural county transit bus, which we have found to be extremely cheap and quite reliable; and it has certainly saved us thousands and thousands of dollars by liberating us from the onerous expense of keeping a car.
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.
potato3732842 · 3m ago
Might be a slight of hand? Maybe he has a moped like the DUI people do.
bombcar · 13m ago
That’s obviously not true, if you change what you “have” to go to.
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.
fzeroracer · 47m ago
Agreed, looking at the map of Massena this seems like bullshit. I've lived without a car for my entire life across multiple states and it is incredibly onerous in even mildly dense areas.
It seems like they have a good number of routes and do route deviation within 3/4 of a mile of the bus stop.
fzeroracer · 16m ago
Frequency is often as important as the route from experience; because a route that's reasonably distant from your location can be walked to/biked to etc but a low-frequency route means it's something you need to plan your entire day around. And if you miss any bus then you're stranded (which, given that they don't have internet I'm curious how they manage...)
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.
bombcar · 11m ago
Rural bus routes used to be very common - they commute in in the morning and out in the afternoon.
You change your schedule to handle that, and they usually will drive the van (barely a bus) up to your door.
xeromal · 4h ago
I've often felt this way about some of today's complaints. I grew up in area like what was mentioned in this article and I long for the day I can go back there. I would in a heartbeat if my partner shared the same mentality as me.
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.
aaronbaugher · 3h ago
I've lived most of my life in (or outside of) small towns, and some of it in a city. I've noticed that my small-town friends who moved to the city would often talk about all the culture and food choices, but when it comes right down to it, they mostly eat at chain restaurants and go to the movies, same as they could in a smallish town. They might occasionally go to a pro baseball game or the zoo or something that's only available in the city, but country people can make a day trip to do that too.
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.
Karrot_Kream · 2h ago
> but when it comes right down to it, they mostly eat at chain restaurants and go to the movies, same as they could in a smallish town. They might occasionally go to a pro baseball game or the zoo or something that's only available in the city, but country people can make a day trip to do that too.
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.
JKCalhoun · 51m ago
Yeah, I haven't eaten fast food in — I don't know how long. Maybe it's an age thing? I ate at chains when I was younger....
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....
bobthepanda · 21m ago
there is a huge market distortion in that dense, walkable living is illegal to build in most of the country. i've seen polling that suggests walkability is in demand for about 40% of the population but there isn't 40% of available homes in such a configuration, so there are also a lot of people who get priced out of that and into suburbia.
keiferski · 3h ago
I agree with you for the most part, and think a lot of people think they need to live in NYC/LA/London/etc. because of unstated social pressure, not because they actually utilize all of the megacity’s amenities.
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.
7thaccount · 3h ago
I recently visited New York City for the first time and honestly wasn't impressed. Outside of a few neat things like visiting the cronut place, I could do nearly everything the same back home.
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.
anon7000 · 2h ago
Sure, medium cities that aren’t shitty and still have some vibrancy are a solid middle ground. Bonus points for being somewhere close to nice natural areas or outdoor recreation.
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!
ryoshu · 55m ago
Food is next level in the NYC area compare to most other places. It's not just pizza, it's Ethiopian, Afghani, Iranian, real Chinese food (Szechuan, Hunan, etc.). The music scene and clubs can't be beat outside of other major cities, if you're into that sort of thing. The museums and galleries too. It all exists if you want to find it.
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.
RHSeeger · 2h ago
With the caveat that I've only really visited a dozen or so states, and only lived in 2, my experience is pretty different than yours.
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.
keiferski · 3h ago
No one that lives in New York goes to Times Square, save for the subway station.
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.
RHSeeger · 2h ago
I always found it kind of fun to wander through Times Square in the evening, every now and again (on the order of once every few months).
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.
yupitsme123 · 2h ago
NYC lives on the fumes of its former reputation. Corporate chains have changed the city into basically a shopping mall.
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.
pempem · 34m ago
Name that town!!
--
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.
chasd00 · 2h ago
i did the same but had my wife as a guide, she dated a musician who lived there before we met and so she had been a lot of times. The different neighborhoods and just the scale of it all were pretty cool but, yeah, no desire to go back or live there. Is it required by law to play that Jay-Z/Alicia Keys "New York" song at all times everywhere there?
kjkjadksj · 39m ago
You can go bar to bar to bar to bar until 4am in nyc and then find $2 pizza by the slice that is actual pizza and not 7/11 pizza. You can’t really do that anywhere else what with how the busybodies regulate their liqour licenses and the lack of density justifying many 24hr food establishments. You can do all of this entirely on foot too within a few blocks. Nowhere else in the US is like that with such glaringly obvious economies of scale going on in your favor.
tacheiordache · 2h ago
Time Square is a tourist trap, an area I always avoided at any cost.
alexjplant · 2h ago
I've had the opposite experience. Having moved from the boonies to a downtown in a Tier 2 US city has caused a lot of my old friends and neighbors to point out that I could buy a 27-bedroom house on a 100 acre lot in the country for what I pay in rent in the city. They fail to realize that not having to drive two hours each way to have fun is worth the 35% premium in housing for me.
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.
FeloniousHam · 1h ago
> ...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.
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.
bombcar · 7m ago
A big part of it is how you want to find friends.
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.
xp84 · 1h ago
> 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.
bluefirebrand · 3h ago
> Everyone claims it's about living in a city with available services
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?
codeplea · 3h ago
This is addressed directly in the article:
>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.
dmonitor · 2h ago
I love the stupid math in this paragraph. One 10hr shift is ~30% of what you need. So multiply that by 3.3 and... oh hey you're working nearly 40hrs a week to afford your impoverished lifestyle in the middle of nowhere. Just like everyone else in this country, only now you get to own a shed. Also you have to take the bus, which runs from 5am-6pm, so you need to beg your boss to not be an opener or closer. Your coworkers will love you for that.
nkurz · 2h ago
> One 10hr shift is ~30% of what you need. So multiply that by 3.3 and... oh hey you're working nearly 40hrs a week to afford your impoverished lifestyle in the middle of nowhere.
Are you possibly confusing "per week" with "per month"?
hyperpape · 37m ago
Honestly, this is the weirdest way the author could've written that sentence.
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."
theendisney · 20m ago
It doesn't seem to be caused by his lifestyle as the posters above also cant divide by $7 per hour. Its 62 hours or 11 shifts.
I think hé means one should do all kinds of small projects.
bluefirebrand · 2h ago
One 10 hour shift is ~30% of what you need per month
40 hours per month is much less than 40 hours per week
bluefirebrand · 2h ago
And when those gas station jobs fill up but there's still empty houses around?
xp84 · 1h ago
Have you not read the article? The whole point of it is once you get your costs down to this manageable a number, you have a lot more options for "how you're going to support yourself." You could clear $5,000-10,000 a year, which I should remind you would be tax free money simply due to the standard deduction, doing any number of things either local or remote. Ideas I'm just making up:
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.
bryanlarsen · 1h ago
> 3. Mow lawns 4. Clean gutters 5. Set up a little stand and sell baked goods or tamales
Those might pay well in the city, but nobody making $17/hr is going to pay more than $10/hr for lawn mowing.
xp84 · 41m ago
That's fine, you don't need them to pay more than $10/hr. You only even need to earn say, $800 a month (I'm assuming you'd want a pickup truck to transport your mower and get around, so padding the $432 a bit) so if you worked 5 hours a week at the gas station for $340 then you need about 11 hours of $10 work per week for another $440 and you're done. If you have any savings, the current interest on $100,000 would alternatively give you $416 so you could just not work at all.
skyyler · 1h ago
>1. Buy, repair, and flip MacBooks on eBay
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.
xp84 · 52m ago
My smartphone plan is $45 (happens to be same company as article suggests, US Mobile) and supports 50GB of tethering which is plenty. This doesn't appreciably change the cost of living but yes, obviously you'd have that as an expense. Who cares? Yes, it would enable like half those work ideas. You could afford it. What's the problem.
> 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?
skyyler · 30m ago
"Just break the law, it'll be fine"
Great financial advice happening on the orangesite.
Really good stuff.
viccis · 2h ago
Well yes, it's not a brilliant observation that in the US you are given the option to work at around $15-30k a year ($17/hr part time is going to wind up around there) and use that money to fund an impoverished lifestyle.
"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?"
xp84 · 1h ago
"impoverished lifestyle"
"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.
hyperpape · 36m ago
I think you've arguably left out some interesting options in the middle.
pempem · 29m ago
YES! this is the question.
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.
kemotep · 3h ago
They suggested working part time at a gas station or seasonally somewhere else which is incredible.
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?
dmonitor · 2h ago
All of these articles need to come with an "About the Author" section that describes how the author makes their living. They claim to be living the outlined lifestyle, but I doubt they are working part time at three gas stations.
xp84 · 1h ago
With a partner, like he mentioned he had, each one could easily be doing a part-time job + some minor side hustle like Etsy, YouTube, etc. The living expenses are about the same for 1 vs 2 other than food, and his food budget was for 2.
kemotep · 2h ago
I could live in my hometown, rent a studio apartment, have an iPhone and a car, and work at the pizza place like I was 23 again.
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.
DrillShopper · 2h ago
The real trade off here is cheap rural land but no ability to ever retire.
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.
xp84 · 1h ago
What?
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.
DrillShopper · 59m ago
> unless you're 18 you should, if you're playing the game correctly, be saving for retirement already, right?
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.
xp84 · 54m ago
> suggesting that the next generation have a worse quality of life than their parents
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.
DrillShopper · 36m ago
> 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.
aaronbaugher · 2h ago
The thing about places with more jobs is that they also tend to have more job-seekers. The two tend to vary proportional to the population. It's really the ratio of jobs to job-seekers that matters.
Of course, it depends a lot on the job. Some jobs only exist in cities, while others are almost exclusively rural.
bluefirebrand · 2h ago
The type of place being talked about in this article is a place with more houses than people. It's the sort of place that children move away from as they mature because there are few opportunities to build a life there
xp84 · 1h ago
> few opportunities to build a life
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.
pavel_lishin · 2h ago
I think it goes beyond that. A city offers a lot more possibilities. If you like plays, museums, going to the movies, being able to find more than three people to play Dungeons and Dragons, or Settlers of Catan with (without driving 1.5 hours) - then being somewhere really rural is going to be unpleasant.
xeromal · 2h ago
I agree with the possibility but many people just end up staying home due to traffic, money, or being an introvert
pavel_lishin · 2h ago
That's true! And many don't!
tacheiordache · 2h ago
I agree. With no jobs in the area $432 may as well require to work a lot more for lower pay, whatever is available in the area.
rufus_foreman · 14m ago
>> With no jobs in the area $432 may as well require to work a lot more for lower pay
>> 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.
abhiyerra · 3h ago
I moved from SF to smaller towns around California. I so much more enjoy the smaller towns. When I lived in SF I ended up going to the same 5 restaurants or cafes and while it was fund in my 20s to be around a lot of people my age as I got older and now have a family having more space is nice. Plus, I still go to the same five places in the smaller town I live in and don't have to usually wait in lines.
RHSeeger · 2h ago
Living in a city (or other high COL location) also means you can save more. Sure, you're spending more, but that 5-10% of your earnings you put into saving is a lot more when you're making city money vs not. And when it comes time to retire, having saved 5% of $50-150,000/year every year adds up to a much higher amount to retire on.
nurettin · 1h ago
Also small towns attract less serial killers.
aaronbaugher · 55m ago
Don't tell people that. The common belief that small towns are some cross between Deliverance and Children of the Corn is one of the things that keeps small towns nice.
bryanlarsen · 56m ago
Murder rates are higher in rural Canada than they are in urban Canada, and Massena is basically Canada.
eugenekolo · 37m ago
Confused by his portrayal of Massena, NY. I don't live there and have never driven through, but looking on Google Maps it doesn't seem that bad or depressing as the author (and I guess commentators) make it out to be.
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.
thisisnotauser · 42m ago
Could not get past the multiple paragraphs of strawman nonsense. Here, let me summarize:
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.
egypturnash · 3h ago
they’d need to leave behind the idea that snow, overcast, wind, rain, and long winters are all that bad to contend with, because in all truth, they’re actually great.
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.
speuleralert · 10m ago
Definitely a different strokes for different folks situation. I am also from the Gulf Coast and I genuinely love the cool rainy Seattle weather. In fact, I was just lamenting having to squint to see in the “hot” (65 F) sunny day this morning in Seattle.
pavel_lishin · 2h ago
That's exactly how I feel about hot climates - the idea of moving to Texas instantly makes me flash back to being constantly sweaty (alternating, of course, with freezing anywhere indoors as people crank the AC down to somewhere in the 50s), and to the dreary winters whose palette is washed out browns and dirty greys.
Every time I visit the beach, I remember: wow, I really hate this!
Goronmon · 3h ago
I enjoy the part about "Heat? Well...I'm sure something will happen allowing me to have heat. No need for concrete plans there."
diogocp · 2h ago
You mean this part?
> 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.
Goronmon · 2h ago
Those are both vague and completely different ways to handle heating.
Also, conveniently, neither appear to have an associated cost so we don't have to worry about whether the financial math works out.
celestialcheese · 2h ago
It's because when you live rural like this, wood stoves are common, and wood is free.
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.
Karrot_Kream · 2h ago
To add to the sibling comment, collecting this wood takes time. I've collected wood the forest service takes down for use in a stove I use but processing all that wood takes time. You bring it home, cut it into small bits, keep it in a dry area to make sure the green wood dries out, and then you meticulously rotate older and newer stock to make sure you use the driest stuff for heating.
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.
hyperpape · 34m ago
The author makes a big deal out of not having a car, and the math gets a heck of a lot worse if you add a truck.
Goronmon · 2h ago
If that's what you do in this situation, why didn't the author write that instead?
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".
kemotep · 1h ago
Well water being free also means amortizing the potential maintenance costs of the pump, filters, and testing to make sure you aren’t drinking arsenic or lead.
guerrilla · 59m ago
Seems like a tongue in cheek way of implying that climate change will solve that eventually, no?
Taikonerd · 3h ago
> any American could live an earlier iteration of the American Dream — and could be living so cheaply, they’ve got their expatriate buddies down in Mexico beat.
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.
Goronmon · 3h ago
Yeah, leaving the "heat" part of the list just blank is pretty telling as far as how much thought went into this.
michpoch · 1h ago
At 4 cents per 1kWh heating will not be an issue, even with regular resistive heater. It’s almost free electricity.
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.
ruste · 3h ago
I've been following this guy for a while on X. He does live this way. This isn't a hypothetical. He lives on his writing and has plenty of free time to chop all the wood he'd ever need.
Goronmon · 2h ago
That's not what the article says.
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.
Taikonerd · 2h ago
Sure, I think a certain rare type of guy can really thrive like this. But most people don't want to live like this, for understandable reasons.
keiferski · 3h ago
Existing on the living standards of say, 1945, or even 1960, is very possible and allows you to make less money and presumably work on what you truly care about.
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.
NegativeK · 2h ago
I think the author is very comfortable fighting the Western marketing machine. I also don't think they are capable of understanding why other people have other needs.
dmonitor · 2h ago
> that means you don’t get the latest iPhone
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".
kemotep · 1h ago
Even a brand new iPhone 16 is “only” $800. Plans for unlimited internet can be had for less than $40 a month.
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?
kemotep · 2h ago
Do you forgo modern medicine?
giraffe_lady · 2h ago
You would not be able to afford any kind of property insurance or medical care with this budget. You won't be able to have a well dug or a septic system maintained either. We're going back a few decades farther than 1945 to make this work I think.
I wrote that to imply that the living standards of 1960 were normal in 1960, but wouldn’t be normal today. Don’t over-focus on the word universal and miss the point I was making.
jedimastert · 1h ago
And don't miss the point that I'm making, which is that the standards of living in 1960 for some people was built on the back of exploiting others.
keiferski · 1h ago
Sigh. Again, that has nothing to do with my comment. My point was that living standards at X point in the past were normal for the time but aren’t normal for today. 1960 was a random year I picked. The point is that if one can manage to live “behind the times” materially, life is cheaper.
No comments yet
AndrewOMartin · 3h ago
Just make sure you don't get sick.
exhilaration · 2h ago
At that income level and in a blue state, there might actually be pretty good health coverage.
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.
SoftTalker · 3h ago
Do like your great grandfather did, eat some hot chicken soup and go to bed.
mrguyorama · 26m ago
Just a couple generations back my family members were dying of preventable illness. Like I'm not joking, we have the records.
Goronmon · 3h ago
Also, you just need to continually scavenge for "free" water and heat.
Don't forget the free fishing rod/equipment.
hollerith · 2h ago
The OP says that electricity there "presently sells for just $0.04/kwh". If it were just me living there, I'd heat one room with electricity just for the sheer convenience (and lack of toxicity from combustion products) and keep the rest of the house unheated. (Yes, I'd probably have to make alterations to make sure the pipes don't freeze.)
And I'd use a heated vest.
jocaal · 2h ago
In the article he mentions there is a well at the house. Also blankets and wood fires are free heat.
Goronmon · 2h ago
In the article he mentions there is a well at the house.
Wells are not "free water" unless you never have to worry about any sort of repair or maintenance.
jeffbee · 2h ago
In what way is wood free? To heat even a tiny home purpose-built for high efficiency you'd need several acres of woods to sustainably harvest. For a falling-apart $30k hovel in upstate NY you'd probably need more like 15 acres, and you don't get a 15-acre stand of woods in the deal for that price.
justinrubek · 40m ago
Who said anything about sustainability?
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.
aaronbaugher · 2h ago
I heat my two-story, not-very-efficient house with wood. I'm not in upstate NY, but not much further south in the Midwest, where we get some sub-zero weather. For firewood, I cut dead or fallen trees that need to be removed on a neighboring farm, so they're "free" (not counting the cost of saw, chains, gas, oil...).
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.
michpoch · 1h ago
At these electricity prices bothering with wood might not be worth it. If you get some, that’s nice, but otherwise just insulate the house well and you’re golden.
kens · 2h ago
The article mentions that the Moses-Saunders International Power Dam is nearby. A bit of a tangent, but this was built by Robert Moses, who isn't as well known as he should be. Moses built a huge number of projects that reshaped New York City: the state parkway, lots of bridges including the TriBorough and Verrazzano-Narrows, multiple NYC expressways, Jones Beach, Shea Stadium, Lincoln Center, United Nations headquarters, large public housing projects, and so forth.
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.
ydlr · 3h ago
There is a little bit of a sleight of hand going on in this article by claiming the lifestyle of boomers is within reach, but then actually using boomers' parents and grand-parents as the standard. It would be more honest to say "Most of us can't have the relative wealth of our grand parents, but with some sacrifices and creativity, the lifestyle of our great-grand parents is attainable."
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.
yupitsme123 · 2h ago
The communities that they lived in were more self-sufficient and probably lived outside of the influence of large government or corporations or lobbying groups.
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.
ydlr · 1h ago
Actually, the town basically existed because of the TVA. It was a major employer and profits went to fund the schools and library.
nkurz · 35m ago
Coincidentally, there was an interesting article about the relationship between Massena and their power company here a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992032
Starting now you can also get the diseases your great-grandparents enjoyed.
joaopscaa · 1h ago
> 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.
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?
pgwhalen · 2h ago
There are a lot of specifics HN can and will nitpick in this piece, but the perspective is useful and not invalidated by these specifics. Personally I would never choose this lifestyle, but I like that OP highlights how clearly it can exist.
shusaku · 16m ago
Hold up. You don’t need a car due to a robust transportation system. You don’t work too much because of a high minimum wage. Health care is free. Retirement is handled by someone else. Education expenses are free. Child raising expenses free! You are provided free entertainment, news, etc at the library. The author forgot about how they were going to pay for clothing, etc, but there’s food stamps on the other side of the balance. Your taxes are zero, paid by richer people. The 29k payment for your house is taken from a homesteading fund.
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.
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.
silisili · 1h ago
Higher income employees would pay way more than that in taxes alone. This is why properties in low and no income tax states skyrocketed.
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.
K0balt · 52m ago
Out of pocket health insurance 1400 a month? Really? It that’s true, that is criminally ridiculous. Why do people accept that, when even in developing nations basic health care is free, and there are plenty of private choices. Decent health insurance costs about 150-300 a month the world over, except in the USA where it is ten times that for no reason whatsoever besides greed and the fact that healthcare is a basic need that puts people under duress. Get your shit together , Americans, you’re getting piped over a barrel six ways to Sunday and you just take it like it was mandatory. What gives?
silisili · 3m ago
I don't know what a healthy young person pays these days. 20 years ago I paid 80/mo for basic catastrophe coverage.
All I know is that it's gone up tremendously since then, and my family plan costs about $2100 a month.
returningfory2 · 39m ago
The main reason is that the government isn't funding it, like in other countries. I do agree the healthcare system in the US should be reformed. But the cost isn't going to go all away - it's just going to be shifted to higher taxes. Which is fine.
chasd00 · 3h ago
Living in rural areas is probably very different now with connectivity options like cell phones and Starlink. I went to HS in a small town ( pop. < 1k ), it has advantages and disadvantages just like going to HS in a big city. However, entertainment in a small town was vastly different then vs today. It's probably a lot easier to live out in the middle of nowhere now without going crazy as long as you have power and something like Starlink.
neilv · 2h ago
> Massena is one of the poorest, least-desirable places not only in New York State, but in the United States at large. [...] on the flip-side, it’s within very close distance of two major Canadian cities, [...]
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.
potato3732842 · 49m ago
If I wanted to be a jerk I could spew the same opinions the author is, but I'm not, so I'm disagreeing with him.
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.
poopsmithe · 33m ago
How do you find a property like that? Is there a Zillow for cheap rural land?
aaronbaugher · 23m ago
My cheap rural place is on Zillow, so you can probably just use that. Pull up a map, identify a couple of large cities (St. Louis and Kansas City, for instance), find a point between them, and zoom in. Repeat until you find a spot you like. It's a really, really big country and most of it isn't urban, so there are lots of places to choose from, with a wide variety of weather conditions, population densities, and other aspects.
theendisney · 28m ago
An expert told me there are places to earn and places to spend in the world. In the cheap places to spend you might want a fun job with very little pay and few hours. You for example earn 400 and spend 600 per month. In the places to earn you should try not to live at all. Ideal is to work 84 hour weeks for 15-20 bucks, rent a bunk bed with a shared kitchen and bathroom and eat whatever cheap crap you can stomach. 50 for the bed 100 for food, save something like 1400. Every week not living like that buys 6-7 MONTHS in the afordable location. Two weeks is a year. Clearly you dont actually need to live. You do 2 to 12 weeks of pure work, enough to slightly burn out. This will make the 1 to 6 year vacation all the more enjoyable.
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?
ianferrel · 22m ago
I like this article. I think it's a little unrealistic in many ways, but it's good to consider that a life does not require extravagance. However:
>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.
viccis · 2h ago
This almost seemed like it was going to be a Modest Proposal style tongue-in-cheek skewering of this "old man yells at cloud" style of curmudgeonly generational finger wagging. The breakdown of that $432 itself was almost enough to be a farce. But no, the author really does believe this. (Please correct if I'm wrong, as it still seems hard to believe such a fatuous piece could be written and submitted here)
>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?
xp84 · 59m ago
You seem really certain that the older 'way of life' is categorically bad, but you seem very unhappy and angry in the life that you reject it in favor of.
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?
xwiz · 36m ago
> 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.
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]
Okay, but we are reading this on HN. Anyone working for the past 10 years in tech should have that much saved up easily. If for the past 10 years you put just $400 a month into SPY and did nothing else, you'd have about $95,000. About 126k for QQQ. [0]
And I don't think most people can't afford to save $400 a month. Lots of people save that much.
If you're so concerned about class warfare, as I agree we ought to be, you need to get along with the people from middle America or anywhere else who consider this a perfectly respectable way of life. Many of them are equally fed up with things.
hyperpape · 26m ago
Huh? My in-laws came from industrial maintenance/construction companies in rural North Carolina. They vote for Trump, majority of them go to Southern Baptist churches. I spent two years living out there and working for one of their industrial maintenance companies.
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.
joshstrange · 2h ago
So many problems with this, including "Live like a boomer" -> "Actually, live like their parents or their grandparents" but this one:
> 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?
sandspar · 35m ago
Interesting how the author says that people tend to react bitterly when he says stuff like this. And sure enough, the HackerNews comments are mostly people reacting bitterly.
nkurz · 28m ago
Even beyond the comments, this article was immediately flagged dead despite many upvotes. Then enough people vouched for it to bring it back. I don't find it controversial or inappropriate, but many people apparently do.
If you (generic you, not parent) happen to be one of those who flagged it, maybe you could explain why?
kayodelycaon · 2h ago
You definitely have to be a certain type of person to do this. Not everyone is physically and mentally capable and has a “socially-acceptable morality” to live that kind of lifestyle.
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.
chachacharge · 11m ago
yes, Massena and Ogensburg. Plagues of flies and mosquitos. Frozen car batteries. Snow plows. Rust.
DrillShopper · 2h ago
> Taxes: $41
> 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.
qingcharles · 1h ago
He overpriced the phone. Good2Go have a 1GB data plan for $5/mo that I use. I only need data when I'm outside the house. You can buy a half-decent Android phone off eBay for $30-50. But, you still need some sort of Internet. If you can't get wired, then that means having to fork out for Starlink or Hughes.
I'm in literally the middle of nowhere in a one-horse town and it has 1Gbps wired to my house and they just put in a second company with 5Gbps the other day, which is wild.
cricketsandmops · 56m ago
Perhaps the author heats with a wood stove. You have to get wood through your labor or buying it though, so it's not truly 0$. Plus the time and effort to keep it going.
peterburkimsher · 40m ago
In many countries around the world, $432 is more than enough.
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.
kemotep · 2h ago
Trailers in trailer parks in my rural census designated micropolitan statistical area of Ohio go for 60k at the minimum so there certainly is a lot of modern amenities you would have to accept to live without in the house described in the article. And by modern amenities I mean heat and potentially running water.
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.
NegativeK · 2h ago
> Yes, startling as it could be to many “Zoomers” and “Milennials,” it just so happens that if you really want to become a member of the landed gentry, it’s really not so far out of reach just the moment you decide that you like the snow, don’t need access to the hottest clubs and the biggest cities, and can be more than happy with getting cozy in a smaller house.
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.
jeffbee · 4h ago
It makes a certain amount of sense and I myself bought a little place way out in the hinterlands of Michigan for similar economic reasons ... but I live in Berkeley because subjecting your children to life without opportunities for art, culture, education, sports, friends, etc is cruel. So if you're white, or just don't care that your ethnicity is absent, and if you have no children, and also don't mind living in a car-dependent place where the public transit to the nearest major city is a minimum of 15 hours with 3-4 transfers, then sure Massena NY is dope.
seabird · 2h ago
Is there no culture, or no "culture"?
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.
occamsrazorwit · 2h ago
How would you describe the local cultural opportunities in your area?
jeffbee · 2h ago
I admit the possibility that your idea of culture is a barren plain of consumerism. If that's the case, it's your problem and only you can fix it.
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.
rahimnathwani · 3h ago
If someone were buying a place in Michigan today (as a second home) what would be some towns (villages?) to consider?
jeffbee · 2h ago
No idea honestly. I had some family connections near the place I acquired.
fzeroracer · 42m ago
There's so many issues with this article. Ignoring the real costs of living in declining rural areas (poor health services, vanishing community), they also fail to account that you also cannot raise a family there properly. Schooling is often poor and the infrastructure poorer and you're fucking over your kids future so you can play pretend boomer while ignoring the biggest things they benefited from.
> 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.
[1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaggenhut
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hard agree. I think the article is right that most people haven't even come close to trying the lifestyle he's suggesting.
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?
>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.
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.
40 hours per month is much less than 40 hours per week
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.
"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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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 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!
> 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Universal for whom?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
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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.
Don't forget the free fishing rod/equipment.
And I'd use a heated vest.
Wells are not "free water" unless you never have to worry about any sort of repair or maintenance.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
All I know is that it's gone up tremendously since then, and my family plan costs about $2100 a month.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
>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.
[0]: https://dqydj.com/etf-return-calculator/
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.
> 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?
If you (generic you, not parent) happen to be one of those who flagged it, maybe you could explain why?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.