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There's a subset of Mottizens that if transported to a rural setting, working remotely in fairly lucrative jobs, would have a good time at the bar/coffee shop. A big heuristic is if you can already pull that off. An issue is that reaping the benefits of rural living requires quite a bit of less productive labor, and it's hard to resist the incentive of working your more productive skill sets harder.
I am very sympathetic, I’ve always dreamed about going off and living in the woods. Unlike many I’ve grown up rural adjacent. On the list of effort posts I’ll never make is how expensive it is to switch from urban/suburban to rural. Being well off and rural is a lot of fun, but maybe not that fun as Critical Access doctors are hard to come by, unless that’s just because lefty docs don’t want to live around righty plebs.
Over roughly 70 years annual growth of 3% will double that of 2% growth.
Subsistence living sucks, it sucks hard, as evidenced by all of history people moving into really (by our standards) crappy urban life because of just how much subsistence living sucks.
Incentives matter, there’s a reason rural life is in the decline, and if you’re not very cognizant of what the issues are you’re going to get bit hard.
I'd pay good American greenbacks for that effortpost! (Not really, but I still encourage you to write it)
In your mind, what are the things people miss when thinking specifically about the "full remote white collar work, live rural" fantasy. I've had a number of friends who've done this but only to the fringes of exurbs or small cities (10k - 50k population). I don't yet know someone who is literally living the rural J.D. Salinger life way off in remote West Virginia, Montana, West Texas.
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