[CPops]

Quality of life depends on what you value.

If you value living space, you'll be happiest out of NYC.

But if you value meeting a lot of cool people, great things to see and do, great mass transit, etc then NYC is great even at a lesser overall level of purchasing power.

[tibbon]

Agreed, I recently moved to Columbus, Ohio from Boston. Kept my (decent) salary from Boston. I have 3x the space I had prior, super low expenses and I'm in the top 10% of income here by household.

Am I as happy as I was in Boston? No. There's some perks (garage to park my motorcycle and a room for my office) but that's about it. Oh, and things are just easy here. No traffic, the DMV's 'bad' waits are 30 minutes, not 4 hours. That type of thing.

Meeting cool people happens much less frequently here, and the culture (even around OSU) is simply as not as academically focuses as hanging around Cambridge.

Purchasing power way up. Quality of life? A draw at best, probably a loss. If I had my way, I'd be back in Boston tomorrow.

[petercooper]

Purchasing power way up. Quality of life? A draw at best, probably a loss. If I had my way, I'd be back in Boston tomorrow.

Just taking a rude guess here (sorry if I'm wrong) but it sounds like you might be making a sacrifice for your family or partner? If so, you need to factor in how much they mean to you into your quality of life score for Columbus vs living alone in Boston. (I'm not judging you - a lot of us are in a similar situation!)

[tibbon]

Yep. Girlfriend working on her PhD at OSU. It's a difficult debate. In the long term its probably shooting my career in the foot being here, and the big-fish, small-pond thing hasn't proven to be useful at all. The problem is that the pond here is filled with even fewer interesting consumer facing web 2.0 companies than Boston. Programming for insurance and medical companies might pay the bills, but it surely isn't sexy.