[valianteffort]

Greatest decision I ever made was getting a remote gig, leaving the big city, and moving to a small town. There is enough going on here to keep busy, and everyone knows eachother.

Would never dream of raising my kids somewhere like SF. If you want community, go somewhere it's valued. Everyone in the big city is a transient, only there to make money and find love before it's time to head for the suburbs.

[flatline]

I live in a mid-sized US city and it’s hell. Seven years in, my friend group is small - but present - and there are very few activities I enjoy. It is a sleepy kind of place. Community here forms in small pockets of people who have known each other their entire lives and are not welcoming to newcomers. I have eyed a move to SF and when I last traveled there my Airbnb host commented, “this is where you come to find community.”

If a smaller town works for you then great, but for most people it’s quite the opposite, or people would not have consistently migrated to cities over the last century. There are real drawbacks to the population density but it affords so many more opportunities for…everything.

[t-3]

There's a big difference between a medium city and a small town, like an order of magnitude or three.

[bradlys]

The biggest issue is that community doesn’t always find you wherever you are. You can be outgoing, well liked, and so forth but sometimes wherever you live just isn’t going to work. We have a finite lifespan - so we can’t try every sized city and multiples of each.

My experience of living in small towns (100-20,000) was miserable. Extremely racist, homophobic, xenophobic, conservative, and so forth. Could I find a small town where that’s not an issue? Maybe but they tend to be this way. If you’re already someone who doesn’t fit into most crowds - you’re not always gonna find a welcoming scene in a small town.

My experience of big cities has also not been perfect either and I’ve lived in a few. (500k-8m) But the drawbacks of small towns are mostly gone. They’re replaced with other issues like insane competition on every front. (You’re always competing for someone’s attention and time - regardless of who they are) Cities segregate heavily even if they act like melting pots. The truth is - very little intermixing happens relative to how it should theoretically be. The upside of cities though is that there are likely more pockets of people to find a community to belong to. The downside is that it brings a lot of tribalism and exclusionary behavior. (Thus the segregation)

Overall, the USA sucks. It lacks community because we’ve decided to embrace late stage capitalism and the American identity is centered around getting fucked by the feds and capitalists. It’s no surprise that rich slave owners were writing the original rules the country would be founded on - when viewing how things are now.

[jltsiren]

Cities have traditionally been about two things: opportunities and freedom. For many the freedom is more important of the two. It means the freedom to be anonymous, the freedom to choose your own community, and the freedom to live your own life.

Small towns come with a default community, because everyone knows everyone. It's great if you fit in, and terrible if you don't. Many people move to cities primarily to escape that community.

[kitsunesoba]

And to some extent that freedom and opportunity scales with the size of the city.

I don't think I've ever felt as liberated as I did while living in Tokyo, where everybody is a number and if you want to check out for a bit and steer clear of your usual circles, it's easy to do so. At the same time though, for practically anything I could possibly imagine wanting to do, there were people I could seek out to do it with.

[taurath]

This works unless you can't find a large enough group of people that share your goals, values, etc. Those are the people that end up staying in cities regardless, and there are plenty of active communities for those folks.

[BizarreByte]

Those small towns are good if you conform and don't stick out, but it can be really, really hard if you do.

[marssaxman]

Experiences certainly differ! My family recently moved away from a small town, back to the heart of a big coastal city, in part because we were all lonely there; everyone in town may know each other, but the culture there was uncomfortably different from ours, and it was difficult to make friends. We fit in much better in a big cosmopolitan city, and there's so much more to do here - both for us and for our eleven-year old - that it's easier to find ways of spending time with people.

[supportengineer]

Wow - I moved to SF, found love, and moved to the suburbs… but I’m still working on that money part :)

[nocoiner]

LOL, support group anyone???

[lubujackson]

Counterpoint: grew up in a small town and now have kids in SF. Moved to the small town before kindergarten and always felt like an outsider there - other kids knew each other because their parents went to school together and my parents invested 0 in socializing me when I was little.

In SF, if you seek it there is a strong parent community that feels like the other side of the fence to me - welcoming and inclusive. Everyone has different styles of parenting but we converge on keeping kids safe and supporting their play. The groups are far more diverse ethnically, economically and even politically here and I think that is healthy exposure for kids.

Yes, a few families move out each year but my son has a group of kids he has hung out with since he was 3 (8 now). The kids all go to different schools but as I have learned from people who grew up in SF, kids tend to make cross school connections and friendships pollinate across schools so high school parties can turn into big group hangs.

All this may be easier and more stable in the burbs, but the community/village mindset does exist in SF if you seek it. It's not that there isn't crime and some troubled kids here, but there are some incredible benefits to the city as well.

This may be specific to SF as we have an insanely low kid % in SF (like 5% vs. 14% most other cities).

[graedus]

> Everyone in the big city is a transient, only there to make money and find love before it's time to head for the suburbs.

I might be taking this bit of hyperbole(?) too literally, but while this might be a common trajectory for young professionals, it obviously doesn't cover everyone.

[granshaw]

> Everyone in the big city is a transient, only there to make money and find love before it's time to head for the suburbs.

Definitely stealing this!