[roarcher]

I have a similar situation--I live in a small town 45 minutes from a large city, surrounded by farmland. Aside from the farmers, most of the people here work either remotely or in the city, and choose to live here because it's quiet and not full of, ironically, drug addicts like the city.

But we're not looking down our noses from high rise Silicon Valley condos, so I guess we're all a bunch of unwashed degenerates.

[defrost]

I live (mostly) a good hour and a half away from the capital city in a state three times larger than Texas, the state pop. is a bit above 2 million and the urban population (one capital city with extensive sprawl, several very large towns) is also a bit under 2 million.

The very few hundred thousand or so that have the bulk of the space to ourselves are extremely happy to keep it "undeveloped", outside of agriculture, forest work, and mining sites with most (and all new ones) having strict controls about rehabilition .. in keeping with traditional land holders with some 70K years of history invested here.

[roarcher]

Sounds like a dream. It took me nearly ten years to find stable enough remote work to escape the city, but damn was it ever worth it.

[defrost]

I've heard of cities - I did my STEM degrees in "the most remote city in the world" (according to some early US astronauts astounded to see light in the darkness) and went on to write a few million SLOC in earth mapping and signal processing while doing geophysical field work (and WGS84 "ground truthing") across ~ two thirds of the 190+ countries across the globe - but rarely ever in cities.

It's odd to realise we've transitioned (as a species) from < %50 living in urban environments to > %50 within the past 40 or so years.