“Stadtliche luft macht man frei” is an old German saying. City air makes you free. Life in a small town can be stifling. That close-knit family wants you to be just like them. God forbid you want to do or see anything new. The moving-to-a-big-city trope is as old as cinema, and has strong roots in reality.
In the middle-ages in at least in what is now Estonia, if you ecaped to the city and lived there for a year and a day you would be set free from your serfdom. “Linna õhk teeb vabaks” same frase was used for that.
Mr green text has no idea what he’s talking about.
I grew up on a farm you’re telling me that was an idyllic life?
Farmwork is stupidly long days in awful weather, it’s either hot, or freezing cold, or raining, or snowing. The pay is effectively abysmal and makes you wish you worked in Starbucks on minimum wage because that would be an improvement. You have all this necessary equipment you’ve had to “buy”, which despite costing more than most houses is about as reliable as a Soviet era tank.
And that’s just growing props if you’re mad enough to also raise cattle then it’s even worse because you’ve got all them to deal with and sheep in particular are more suicidal than a depressed lemming.
But hey, you get a nice view.
Well, at least a soviet tank can be repaired with a hammer, unlike a deere
Soviet equipment is much more repairable than any of the modern crap we have nowadays which is designed to be used and tossed in a relatively short timeframe.
There’s a reason the kids aren’t taking over the farm. Not to mention that a 50 acre returned soldier lot can’t provide for a family of six anymore.
Well it isn’t subsistence farming by any stretch of the imagination it’s full on industrial farming.
Most farms these days, at least crop farms, grow only two or three different crops. Mostly dictated by what will fetch the best price and what is currently being subsidised by the government. Often times you will find that farms are not growing any food stuffs at all.
I grew up next to a farm. They stopped growing produce because the government regulations got to be crazy. They just grow soy beans and hay now.
Can they not poison the water supply anymore or were there too many strings attached to get their subsidies?
You know nothing about them.
Wait, you got paid? I just got grabbed by the neighbor whenever he needed another hand
Because those “loving family members” IRL are usually nosy dickheads, and there is no dating scene in small towns. So it’s either marry your cousin, or move to the city.
Not to mention job opportunities…
She had 275 siblings. Getting away from that farm was the smartest thing she’s ever done. She has no hope of any kind of meaningful inheritance. I’m honestly surprised a farm could support that many rabbits and still turn any kind of profit. It must have been subsidized out the wazoo. The last thing it needs is her hanging around, getting hitched to some redneck just out of high school, popping out a couple hundred hungry mouths of her own right before the inevitable foreclosure and declaration of martial law as the farmpocalypse occurs when her parents finally kick it and the tens-of-thousands of children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren raze the countryside in search of fodder. Just ask an Australian what rabbits are capable of.
I’ve lived in high urban, low urban, suburban, and rural. They all have pros and cons.
If you’re dating tho, the city is way better, but good luck finding practice space - if you’re into that sort of thing.
There are dating practise spaces?
Haha, yeah, it’s called the bar.
Eh, my friend actually did that. I assumed that she had some sort of awful family she was running from, but actually they’re nice and she visits them on holidays. She just wanted to be in the big city so much that she was willing to rent a single room in a bad neighborhood and constantly look for odd jobs rather than live out in the countryside with her parents.
I mean I can imagine the dating prospects are really terrible in the countryside, noone talked about that yet.
I understand the draw. It’s boring in the country for most young people. At least there’s always something to do or something to see in the city.
I was a city kid that ended up in the country, and it’s like a different world. It took me years to slow down to country pace. Now that I’m older I enjoy it, but it took a lot of getting used to. There’s things I miss about the city but I prefer being out here where I never have to lock things up for fear of it getting stolen, cleaner air, and all the other issues city life brings.
The biggest issue I have out here is keeping the deer out of my garden.
Another issue is that LBGT people often have to flee hostile rural towns for a city where they can be free to live. We’re currently in the middle of a refuge crisis as trans people flee red States for mostly cities (small towns in blue states can be scary too) in places like Minnesota.
Because these characters are usually young and cities are exciting. Wanting to get away from people tends to happen later in life. That said, I know plenty of people in their 40s/50s who love city living.
We already have that, it’s called the Hallmark channel and exists entirely to aggressively propagandize to rural stay at home moms to remind them that they made the good choice staying behind while everyone else went out looking for careers and how those city slickers are stupid because they can’t ride a horse, nevermind how Karen hasn’t even touched a horse, nevermind learned to ride, evaluation based on real facts is for those liberals and their critical gender theory!
Why do we accept that urban life is worse than rural life?
Cars ruin cities. There’s more we can do to make cities better but that’s the big one
I mean, do you think cars aren’t a thing in rural areas or something? You think us country bumpkins are riding our horses around?
There’s enough space out there it’s not an issue. Cars are a rural technology we bulldozed half the city to makebroom for and then complained about not enough parking and too much traffic
No, but it’s much, much easier to get rid of them in cities where they can be replaced by subways, tramways, buses, bikes, and the like.
What if you want to leave the city?
