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I'm disappointed, if not surprised, that it took 15 hours for this comment to appear. The blatant attempt at pathologising anyone who doesn't live a straight-and-narrow life is frustrating and I think inaccurate. There has always been a place in society for transients; in premodern times they would have been your merchants and traders and nomads, and the notion that nobody's psychology could be suited for that and it has to be motivated by some kind of deep spiritual brokenness is impressively provincial. Hell, Diogenes was a semi-revered figure in ancient Greece, and all the way on the other end of the world there was a prominent and respected hermit tradition in ancient China (which actually continues to this day), vagabondism has held sway for a long time.
I think there is a good point hidden somewhere in that post about the vaunting of alternative lifestyles that in practice won't be suitable for the majority of the population and the demonisation of lifestyles that do work for the majority of the population such as the supposedly "conformist" life so lambasted by the counterculture of the 70s (who were just reflexively in favour of anything hoe-scaring), and if the post had just made that argument I would consider that a fair enough point. But it loses the plot once OP tries to imply that nobody could ever be happy living transiently, using the case study of Anthony Bourdain as if it's necessarily the norm for people who do choose to live that way. It's very possible that some of the people who do so are trying to run from something, and it's also very possible that many of the people who do this just possess outlier levels of openness to experience and aren't "broken" in any meaningful sense except being weird. So much of the argument appears to almost be a definitional one - if you are not doing Normal Things then you are not normal and that indicates something wrong with you.
Also to add to the list of TheMotte cliches that this post appears to be attempting to speedrun through, there's that one obligatory throwaway line about the Third World. I have to say that my experiences in many third world countries in Asia have led me to conclude that much of the "third world" is badly miscategorised; it's a sloppy category error to lump them in with places mired in a horrific, almost Hobbesian state-of-nature, which I think represents a far smaller proportion of the world than most here appear to believe.
I'm starting to notice that a lot of online discourse is just p-hacking.
First time?
It would be really fascinating to know what actually happened. What's the largest or most recent city in Eurasia to be completely abandoned like that?
Many good examples in Southeast Asia. One of the examples that comes to mind for me is the Khmer capital of Angkor, which at its height in the 13th century boasted a population of approximately 900,000 people (London at that time had a population of approx 80,000; Angkor's population was over 11 times larger). It's likely to have been the most populous city in the world during its heyday. There isn't consensus about the causes of the empire's decline and the city's eventual abandonment; some explanations I've seen relate to increasing competition by neighbouring kingdoms such as Sukhothai and Ayutthaya who would regularly conduct raids and incursions onto Khmer territory, others stress the effect of environmental shifts that resulted in poor harvests and clogging of the canals that irrigated the city, causing out-migration from the area. Certain other hypotheses suggest that elites freely moved elsewhere to take advantage of burgeoning trade networks accessible from the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers. The coup de grace that spelled the end for Angkor was when the Thai sacked and burned the city in the 15th century, at which point the remnants of the Khmer court moved south to Phnom Penh.
Funnily enough this would later happen to the Thai as well in an act of historical karma - the city of Ayutthaya eventually ended up amassing a population totalling 1,000,000 around 1700 (one of the world's largest cities at the time) but they were then sieged by the Burmese Konbaung dynasty in 1767 and destroyed. It's a less compelling candidate than Angkor though, since the city was not fully abandoned and is still a provincial capital.
It depends on the region, I think. In East and (most of) Southeast Asia I'm generally comfortable with the idea of living in the bigger cities; as overwhelming as they can sometimes be there's a lower baseline level of dysfunction, lower crime rates, less urban decay and a much lower chance of having run-ins with junkies, fent zombies and other such unsavoury characters. To be quite honest if I was fully capable of freely moving elsewhere without having to incur extra costs, I would go somewhere in Asia (I currently live in Australia as well, and while I like Sydney enough there are a couple reasons why I would not stay here long term).
In most Western countries I would definitely prefer not to live in most of the cities; granted it depends on the country but the level of dysfunction in many of the urban cores is hard to stomach. The smaller cities and towns are consistently much nicer.
You’re going to receive a pretty large barrage of responses filled with hair-splitting that supposedly illustrates the notion of American exceptionalism. Highly patriotic Americans view themselves as distinct from and superior to pretty much every other country on Earth, they view themselves as uniquely meritocratic, uniquely free, uniquely honest and uniquely stable as a society.
However, as someone who has lived in and travelled to a dizzying number of places you can put me in as one of those people who has no desire ever to live in America, and you would have to pay me to go. As far as I am concerned if they want their country to themselves, they can have it (nor is it their obligation to take in any immigrants). But the idea that America isn’t already subject to “endless subsidies, bureaucratic bloating and clientelism” is a fantasy, and has been for a long time.
To be quite honest this is maximally uncharitable salacious conjecture about the motives of a dead man who can't defend himself. I was never some great fan of Anthony Bourdain, but to trash his suicide as a "narcissistic act" done out of spite in a thread where he is already being dogpiled is impressively distasteful.
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