This when young the city was fun but when older than mattered less thing does not match with my own experience at all. Having an extended family and running a service business I have known quite a few people getting old and aging into their final years. Having people around and things to do can be critical for maintaining quality of life. It is really common for older people in rural locations to become isolated an unable to access the things that once brought joy to their lives. Seems like a potentially interesting contrast to call out.
My mother is losing her sight and can no longer drive. I’m so glad she lives within close walking distance of downtown with a supermarket so she can maintain her independence.
Yeah I also find this odd. Especially at my age with children at home, why would I take them away from all the opportunities a city offers? When they are very young and not social you might want them to have a place to just crawl around and taste dirt, but as soon as they are social you need people around, and in later childhood the opportunities in sports, music, dance, and other arts call for at least a fairly large town. I can imagine myself leaving the city after my kids are independent but even so, dispersed living seems to offer little except manual labor. I'd want a town of a least a few thousand so I stand a chance of meeting some new friends of my own age.
A humorous book on the topic of the fact that rural life is mostly just a lot of work, see "Against The Country".
> There are life experiences that are impossible for kids in the city ever have and are more valuable than any sport, dance, or academic activity.
These being?
I grew up in a lot of different places but the impression I get from my own experiences is that the valuable life lessons of being alone in the woods can be acquired part-time. You don't have to relocate there. And since living totally alone in the middle of nowhere, rather than in a small town surrounded by fields, farms, and forests, is a lifestyle that only recently became possible, I doubt the value of extended isolation. Throughout human history people have gathered into settlements of at least the size of a village. Living alone is totally new.
Well, if you're discussing post-agriculture yes. The equation and density changes a lot pre-agriculture.
But regardless, rural != isolated. Children still go to school. This guy lives 10 miles (aka 10 minutes) from a "town", and that town is indeed where people get together.
That's the thing about actual rural living. There are no stoplight (which takes 2 to 4 minutes to cycle) which slows down miles-driven. There are no traffic jams. Everyone is typically doing 60mph. 1 mile per minute. 10 miles is 10 minutes.
I know people that take buses to "do city things", and it takes them > 1 hour to get anywhere. I know others that walk (20+ minutes) or drive (20+ minutes to get a mile away, or to get a few city blocks due to traffic).
"Having houses apart" doesn't mean isolated from other humans. At all. Heck someone with a "few hundred acres" is often within a mile of another house. As a kid, I used to bicycle 10+ miles to see friends in the summer (when there was no school), and why not? And in the winter, you see your friends daily at school.
You're not "living alone" because you're on a 200 acre parcel of land.
A person would need millions of acres to even feel as if they're living alone.
> I know people that take buses to "do city things", and it takes them > 1 hour to get anywhere. I know others that walk (20+ minutes) or drive (20+ minutes to get a mile away, or to get a few city blocks due to traffic).
I grew up in a rural area, 3 miles from the grocery store & post office, a 40 minute drive to the "big" town (20k). My parents end up driving to the "big" town a couple times a week. I always thought this was nuts and looked forward to living in a city where that wasn't necessary.
Now I live on the SF peninsula... and everybody regularly drives 40+ minutes to do things. Just to get dinner, go to Ikea, or take the dog for a walk in a nicer park. It's a 10 minute drive to BART or to Caltrain, too. Unless you truly dedicate yourself to hardcore SF living, your average middle-class Bay Area resident is driving just as much as my rural parents did.
> But regardless, rural != isolated. Children still go to school. This guy lives 10 miles (aka 10 minutes) from a "town"
10 minutes for the grown-ups, who can drive whenever they feel like it.
For the 14 year old who can't drive, and whose parents can't drop everything to play chauffeur? That's 40 minutes each way on a bicycle - along single-lane roads with drivers doing 60mph.
Sounds like a recipe for your kid to spend all day behind a screen, to me.
Source: Direct, firsthand experience. The social isolation and countless screen hours did turn me into a great programmer though, so I've got that going for me.
10 miles isn't much if you're 14 and live in the country, there's horses, dirt-bikes, hitch-hiking (local traffic), riding a push bike (traffic is rarely an issue and there are usually not-road paths to bike on.
Some 14 years olds drive a paddock-basher (unlicensed car) on not-public farm roads.
Source: Did all of that at 14 well deep in the country ( a good 1,000 km away from anything close to a city )
I didn't have a farmers license, but I was definitely driving our little S10 up to the supermarket for groceries or gas at 14. Never had a issue. I wasn't a menace on the road until I was officially licensed ;)
In Oklahoma my adolescence was marked largely by the constant undercurrent of people killing themselves with cars. I think this is integral with the rural or semi-rural lifestyle because Wyoming, S. Dakota, and Montana are #1, 2 and 3 for fatal transport accidents among teens. The more a place relies on cars to overcome isolation, the more of their young people they lose to car crashes. Descriptions about how this system works fine come from literal survivor bias.
I can roll off a litany of young farm deaths and injuries over 40 years .. in total at a rate that rivals urban youth deaths from hit by traffic | escalating 'gang' fights | jumping roofs, etc.
Teens take risks and there's a known "acturial hump" for increased risk of death in young adult years.
I grew up in rural farmland of Michigan. Guess what. I rode a bicycle or walked. To and from school (I lived _just_ inside city limits which meant the buses were off-limits to me). To my friends house. To my friends house a township away (15 miles). Chauffeur? LOL. Sure. Sometimes my parents drove me, and yes I did spend time behind a screen (I was on many local BBS's). But I also spent hours each day outside.
Did this change in the winter? Nope. I still often rode my bicycle to school. On days where there was too much snow I'd have to leave earlier to deal with the hike. Sometimes a friend might notice me and pick me up.
I was definitely the weirdo in school (not a out transgender kid in the 1990's no way), but I still had friends. I wasn't isolated in any way.
Source: Direct, firsthand experience. Guess what. In life, your mileage may vary. Just because you experienced something one way doesn't mean everybody else experiences it the same way.
It’s actually pretty interesting that I had the opposite adjustment moving into a huge city.
Miles became meaningless - nearly everything I go to is within 5 miles. What matters is total travel time since two locations both 2 miles away from me might be 10 minutes or 90 depending on time of day.
I still see the single digit miles on google maps and “go oh that’s close!” a few times a year just out of habit though.
As a kid, you biked alongside cars doing 60mph on 2-lane unseparated highways? Certainly no one I knew growing up was allowed to do that, which limited us to the the hundred or so homes we could reach on slower roads (and zero businesses)
Yes. As a teenager when I worked at the local Burger King I used to ride my bicycle ~8 miles down farm roads and then up to the highway exit area where the BK was. Often I'd leave work at closing time (after 11pm) and ride home in the _dark_. Guess what. Bicycle lights exist and can be seen for miles on a country road.
Yes. I did. As did other kids. We had gravel shoulders wide enough for cars to pull fully off, that's where we rode.
We also rode facing traffic. That way you could see a car coming although you can hear one coming for miles. The purpose of seeing was two fold, to see what type of car, and to see of they saw you.
Every kid knew to get over further when a car came, and get over further for wider vehicles.
Yeah, people saying their kid would be isolated just doesn't ring true with me. There are very few rural areas that are literally an hour+ from anything with nobody else around. Most rural areas have little towns dispersed around them. They may not be big, but locals still gather there and visit there, and there is almost always a public school available. And like you said, the travel distance may be farther but time wise it isn't all that much more.
As an example I grew up riding horses every day, and grew to know and understand them very well. That’s not something you’ll experience in the city unless you’re very wealthy.
Granted that horses take a lot of space, but I think the weakness of arcbyte's statement lies in the "more valuable than any sport, dance, or academic activity" part.
