Moving from the BIG CITY to the country

[Zork]

I did it today. I was quite relaxed and looking forward to it but now that we are actually here I'm becoming kinda nervous. What's your experience? We lived the past 25 years in really big cities, now a small town of 2600 souls.

[Seance]

People are different. And so require different things.

Also, people change over time, and therefore what they "require" or can accommodate changes over time too.

Some artists/writers need the bustle of crowd noise and the presence of lots of people to be creative. For them crowds are like the well that they dip their creative bucket into. Or for some the sounds of crowds is like a white noise machine that helps them focus their thoughts.

Others need space and quiet in order to help them nurture and tap into that small, fragile creative voice that, for them, can easily get lost in the mayhem of too many people in too close proximity around them without any respite. Some people are sensitive to noise or the presence of other humans to such a degree that they feel like other people are "living all over" them.


There are both personal and cultural factors that determine how comfortable a person is with varying levels of social contact.
If you grow up in a highly populated area with very little "open space" then your expectations are set by your experience and
by cultural expectations. The below diagram would look quite different for someone who grew up in India or China versus some
one who grew up living at the North Pole or in the Australian outback or Greenland.



When I was twelve I lived for a year on the outskirts of a city with a population of 30 million people.

As an adult I lived in a city with a population of nearly 741,000 and moved to a city with a population of 8 million people.
While that "city never slept" and there were always cool things happening, most of those things took money and "getting
away from it all" required money and on top of that I seldom wanted to expose myself to such things because I felt like
doing so squashed down and drowned out my own creative pursuits and aspirations—I felt contaminated by other people's shit.
This was an icky feeling for me.

So then I moved to a city with a population of 3 million that was much more affordable, had more trees and open spaces
but also had far less going on and "getting away from it all" was still too expensive and everybody else tried to "get away"
at the same time and used the same ring of freeway systems so that the whole thing felt gross, unhealthy and besides that,
the city felt a bit provincial with pockets of cool things/neighborhoods and way too busy and not nearly busy enough all at
the same time.

So I moved again.

I tried making a go of it in a city not too far from where I grew up that had (at the time) a population of roughly 396,000
but the place and I had changed. It had become exorbitantly expensive, the air was as polluted as I remember the air in
LA being in the 1980s and "getting away from it all" was an expensive luxury reserved mostly for the wealthy. The level of
sacrifice I'd have to make with my time and the amount of debt I'd have to shoulder just to afford to live there felt like
a devil's bargain that I couldn't live with so I moved again.

I currently live in a rural area with a population of about 4,600. Locally, the greater area around where I live has a
full-time population of just over 25,000 that (during the summer months) has to accommodate about a quarter of a million tourists.
The tourists are quickly destroying what made this place what it was. But I live in a small pocket within the greater area
and so the impact (while regrettable) isn't as bad right around me as it is in the region.

I've been far more productive creatively where I live now than I've been anywhere else I've lived. It isn't perfect, but the world
today is far from perfect and much of it makes absolutely no sense.

[dubkitty]

i grew up in Chicago, but spent most of my adult life in the Bay Area in places ranging from SF to a town of 200, and now live in Charlottesville, VA, a smaller city. for me the biggest thing is access to cultural events especially music shows. i have to drive to Richmond, DC, Philly, or NYC for most of my shows…there’s actually 2 shows here this year i want to see. it’s pretty sleepy here, though Bob Mould is here later in the year. since i live alone i have a lot of freedom of action, though age and health are fucking with me recently. i would like somewhere more culturally vital, but that would mean moving somewhere more expensive and farther from work. when i lived in CA there was always SF/Oakland even when i lived in wee, out-of-the-way places.

[Blackened Soul]

https://youtu.be/rm--inJtnc4?si=aSNqNLU-VnZKlOzb

[dubkitty]

https://youtu.be/DrbPAt1_vc4?si=omEdJQ5VgyAmq6nB

[Blackened Soul]

I’ve played gigs in that world… lot of stages that were flatbed trailers… one party they welded a chain to a car hood and had a bonfire on the car hood so it could be moved around the giant lawn… and as the night went along the drunken redneck womans start dragging it back and forth faster and faster and falling over each other and laughing

[dubkitty]

that sounds totally West Virginia.

[Zork]

That sounds completely different from how that world is in Germany...

[Blackened Soul]

that sounds totally West Virginia.

Once you get into the boonies in western Washington it is pretty hillbilly… did hurt that we sounded like a combination of the electric teeth and the muppet jug band…
https://on.soundcloud.com/9xje5djLPhI7YPPm18

Yeah I’m sure it’s a huge difference between a small town in Germany and in the us.. although I’m sure if you go east towards Russia… you’d find that vibe…

[dubkitty]

if you think that’s redneck try Eastern Washington. i spent a terrible year in Spokane (that would be 1980) and saw and worked with some real winners like the guy who said he and his brother would drive around to the bars on Saturday night going “we could take those two” and go start a fight. as you might imagine someone with my aesthetic couldn’t find anybody worth playing with but i somehow wound up playing a NYE party anyway. it wasn’t good. very little about there was other than the interesting terrain and geology. and the not-entirely-polyphonic carillon in the former railroad station clock tower in the big park where they had a World’s Fair in the 70s…since it didn’t have all the notes at the far ends of its range some songs had to be transposed into minor keys to fit on the keyboard. it was an experience worthy of Charles Ives hearing “The Star-Spangled Banner” or “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” in a minor key. nobody seemed to notice but me. but that was more “strange” than “good.” i wonder if it’s still like that today.

[Blackened Soul]

I haven’t been over there since I was 12…. I don’t remember liking having to go there for summer visits… but no.. you go out in the backwoods between Aberdeen and Ramon and those folks are there…

[dubkitty]

i too have been to the Olympic Peninsula.

[dubkitty]

my dystopic take on the Inland Empire may be colored by the fact that my first wife and i split while i was there. but it was objectively fucked up there. that part of Washington had a significantly higher rate of developmental disabilities which led to many picturesque encounters on the streets and buses when the residents of the facility in Mineral Lake went to town for enrichment activities. i got pretty good at talking to the residents, and it taught me a lot about how they experience the world. but it was hella weird compared to previous experience, especially when going to work the midnight shift on the bus.

[dubkitty]

but we’re way off topic. in my experience the biggest question about downsizing your environment is “what can you get along without?” which comes in many versions. you might need a decent guitar shop that isn’t 100 miles away, or particular retail items (or medical supplies, or craft supplies, etc.) that aren’t stocked in smaller places. or a decent gym, or someone to run with. or a road that’s safe to run on…when i lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains the road to town was totally unsafe for cyclists with loads of twisty blind curves weaving between the redwoods. i thought i would ride a lot because i lived on my bike in SF, but it gathered dust for a decade. and it can be hard to know what you’re going to miss until it’s gone. it was awful for me being that isolated. in retrospect one of the worst moves i ever made.

[D.o.S.]

Big city is relative, of course, but put plainly: every time I moved to a smaller community it became more clear how poorly it suited me.*

For all the benefits (and there are plenty) none of them really outweighed the fact that I need good, consistent access to the culture I want to consume and the anonymity of being left alone that only happens at a certain population size (also the salaries are often better, which is equal parts banal and significant).

So now I live very happily in an all-caps megalopolis and would have a very, very hard time somewhere smaller unless/until I can flee to a beach and work on my sealion impersonation for the rest of my days.

*We went to a small seaside town with a reputation for creativity shortly after lockdown lifted, and the visceral feeling of 'the sun has gone down and there's fuck all to do' hit so hard I have difficulties fully articulating it. Suffice it to say that I've spent enough of my life making my own fun in creatively desolate surroundings, thanks. Give me millions of other people all around me and the freedom to know exactly as few of them as I'd like any day.