[delegate]

When I was a child, I was spending my summers at my grandparents. They had a cozy house in the village. They worked the land, they had a few animals. They grew their food. They sold some wine and fruit at the market.

They had a big house, land, clean air, clean water and they were healthy. They celebrated the holidays, had many friends, went to church, weddings, funerals, etc. Villagers always greeted them and stopped for a quick chat when they met on the street.

Now compare with life in a big modern city.

I design complicated distributed systems using AI in order to provide shelter and food for myself. Those are tools which other people use to achieve their goal of providing shelter and food for themselves.

Tons of cars, the air is polluted, constant noise, fake bling, restaurants selling food at 20x price, stressed, depressed, lonely people. Each in their own digital rabbit hole on their phones all the time. Smiles for money only.

I'm really struggling to understand what we've grown into and why this rat race is considered 'better' than what people have had for millennia without destroying nature in the process.

[enoch_r]

For millenia, about 50% of children died before reaching adulthood.

https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past

We work less than our counterparts 150 years ago:

https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever

Air pollution has decreased over the past few decades (probably much further, just don't have data).

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/emissions-of-air-pollutan...

We're obviously richer, too. Your grandparents had a cozy house - did they have good fresh food all winter when growing up? Could they keep food from going bad in the summer? What about indoor plumbing? These things are so ubiquitous now it's hard to even remember that they aren't just part of the basic fabric of reality.

It's easy to look back with nostalgia (and literal survivor bias - "my ancestors all survived") at the past. But if you actually look at history you will see that "what people have had for millenia" was ... pretty awful. It's an AMAZING time to be alive.

[keybored]

1870 is not a great span of time when OP is comparing to some idyllic village life unencumbered by urbanism. Late 19th century had many people in a “rat race” in the city, like work twelve hour days six or seven days a week in a factory type of dead-end race.

But there was something that happened later:

> For those countries with long-run data in this chart, we can see three distinct periods: From 1870 to 1913 there was a relatively slow decline; then from 1913 to 1938 the decline in hours steepened in the midst of the powerful sociopolitical, technological, and economic changes that took shape with World War I, the Great Depression, and the lead-up to World War II; and then after an uptick in hours during and just after World War II, the decline in hours continued for many countries, albeit at a slower pace and with large differences between countries.

The god knows what “sociopolitical changes” could have been about.

[ponector]

While there was a rat race in the city, typical farmlife was more brutal: work from early childhood and then from dawn to dusk. City dwellers had at least one day off per week, while working with animals is a job without holidays.

[keybored]

That was not what ourworldindata chose (or had the data for) to showcase.

[modeless]

The lifestyle you describe is very cheap and you can certainly afford it, if you wanted. There are plenty of rural small towns you could choose from. Why not do it if it's what you think you want?

[delegate]

You can't escape the rat race even if you hide in a cave these days. Life like that is no longer possible, at least not in Europe.

I didn't write that to shame anyone. I happen to like my life in the city with all the negatives.

But sometimes I think about this - is all this 'comfort' worth the destruction of nature ?

[lucianbr]

> I'm really struggling to understand what we've grown into and why this rat race is considered 'better'

> I happen to like my life in the city

Ahh... you struggle to understand why a life you like is considered better than a life you like less, or dislike?

People probably consider it better for the same reasons you like it. It should be obvious.

[modeless]

> Life like that is no longer possible

Completely false. In fact it wasn't easier back in the day. It was much harder. People back then just had hard lives.

[lo_zamoyski]

What are these "rat races"? What makes you think you're doing something worthless? Do you really believe everything is worthless? That's preposterous and nihilistic. If what you are doing is worthless, do something that isn't.

Grandiosity and pride may make you feel unsatisfied, but that's a problem with ego. Our culture is big on empty posturing and hollow spectacle. You don't need to buy into it. Humanity is how it is; perpetually flawed and immature. The main thing you need to escape are your own vices. Your vices are what give foolishness and evil their power over you.

While the secondary purpose of a job is the good it produces, the primary purpose is your growth as a human being. The job, like all other aspects of life, is an occasion to work out your virtue and your humanity in the concrete. Measure your existence according to the objective good of the inner life, not against external things.

Do not try to "immanentize the eschaton". Do not try to locate transcendence in the immanent. That's a major source of much misery. People have an intrinsic yearning for transcendence. When it is misdirected, it results in the hedonistic and ultimately fatal and fruitless hunt for the transcendental within the immanent, of "vertical divinity" within "horizontal creation". Some try to simulate transcendence within the immanent with all sorts of silly gimmicks, but predictably, this always fails. One must locate the transcendence where it actually is; everything is death and superstition. Your job is not the right place to look for it.

[tokai]

There's even places in Spain or Italy where they will give you the house for free, and possibly even cash to move in. Still with these benefits they are not reversing the decline of the country side.

[myrmidon]

I'd say that is nowadays almost completely just a direct consequence of general population decline, and not some more specific effect; this just hits rural communities harder because attracting new people is already difficult there (=> most job opportunities are elsewhere), and it is much easier to fall below "viability thresholds" (i.e. too small to sustain a general store) than it is for cities.

I'd argue that the "real" urbanization mostly finished in the 1980s or so, and the "urbanization" we see now is mostly incidental (and happens at lower rates, too).

[bovermyer]

Leading a slower existence in harmony with nature and community has its trade-offs.

There are so many things to consider. It's a fascinating topic. For example, if you give up access to restaurants in order to live simply, how does that impact your approach to food in general?

How about losing access to a hospital? What changes do you make to prepare for, or respond to, health crises?

The questions I ask above are from one direction, and only a sample. I think they're demonstrative of the kind of wide context a decision like this has, though.

[thewebguyd]

> if you give up access to restaurants in order to live simply, how does that impact your approach to food in general?

I think many people would develop a much healthier relationship with food. We live so disconnected from the reality of all the resources and labor it actually takes to bring food to your plate that we've lost appreciation for the interconnected nature of how we live.

Oddly enough, it's the individualist style of home cooking for ourself/only our immediate family that's a departure from the more community-focused lifestyle humans once lived, where cooking and eating involved the entire tribe/community. It was a shared experience.

When people in this thread are nostalgic for a more rural lifestyle or debating rural vs urban, I think that's missing the forest for the trees. What we are really longing for is a sense of community and connection that has been lost. And that community and connection can happen no matter what the actual setting is (urban vs rural). "Where ever you go, there you are."

[bovermyer]

For me, this is exactly what I'm missing: the community.

If I got stuck in the snow on the farm, I knew there were at least half a dozen people I could call who would come get me out.

[Tade0]

> I'm really struggling to understand what we've grown into

A population of eight billion, at least three of which live in industrialized regions.

My currently 99yo grandpa was born when there were approximately two billion people. He spent a huge chunk of his childhood running around barefoot.

Whenever he talks about that time I can't help but think this world doesn't exist any more and hasn't for a long time now.

[leonidasrup]

Running barefoot can feel nice, but in Africa wearing shoes could eliminate significant source of tropical diseases. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/nov/17/h...

[ComposedPattern]

Living in a big city is usually better for the environment than living in a rural area. City-dwellers live in smaller spaces closer together, so they consume fewer resources and emit less carbon.

[t-3]

That's assuming that city people do the same things as rural people, and the only difference is whether they own a car and a house. City people earn much more money which they spend more freely and use to do more things, which require orders of magnitude more resources, even if they may be slightly more efficient when traveling within city limits (just think about the multiple flights per year every urbanite I know takes, versus the one or two per decade everyone else takes).

[MisterTea]

I keep hearing this repeated but I have yet to read any proof of it. Might as well be a thoughtless meme.

[chocochunks]

Detached single family homes use more energy than apartments per resident[1]. You need more sewer pipe, more road, more wiring to service the same number of people living in detached single family homes.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2015/c&e/pd... (See site energy consumption per household member by housing type on page 2).

[bluescrn]

It's absolutely the worst place to be in any sort of crisis though, whether it's war, pandemic, rioting, natural disaster.

So many people, potentially desparate people, concentrated in one place, utterly dependent on supplies being shipped in from elsewhere.

And we can't have everyone living ever-smaller lives in ever-more-dense cities anyway, as you need all the food production, manufacturing, energy production, and resource extraction to keep those cities alive. And for now, that still requires a lot of human labour (far too much of it overseas, given increasing geopolitical instability)

[ericmcer]

The only justification would be that we are in some liminal space and are living in the confusing period leading up to some tech utopia.

You also can still live in the way your grandparents did. In the rural USA 10+ acres is going to cost less than a condo in the city. We are just terrified of uncertainty nowadays. Maybe all the technology and distractions keep us from hitting that tipping point of despair/discomfort that would drive us to take risky actions.

[thewebguyd]

> In the rural USA 10+ acres is going to cost less than a condo in the city

Cheap land is cheap for a reason, even in the middle of nowhere. We aren't in the old days of homesteading. Good chance that cheap land has no utility access and it will cost 10s of thousands to bring it in. Another really good chance you don't own the rights to the water beneath it, and spending $30k+ to dig a well that may not even hit a viable aquifer. The land could be cheap because its rocky, acidic, or maybe its prone to flooding.

What OP is also probably missing is that it's extremely difficult to grow enough calories to sustain a human life for a year. Most "homesteaders" actually still buy most of their calories at the store. Fine so long as your new farm (assuming you even can farm on the cheap land) can turn a profit for you, but now you've just traded one rat race for another.

Point being, the rat race is survival, and there is no escaping it. Happiness has to come from within, moving to the middle of nowhere and starting a farm isn't going to magically make your life better. It will probably actually make it worse.

[SilverElfin]

You’re right. Ignore the other comments not recognizing that happiness and health can be had without a constant competition with everyone else. The modern way of life is broken. The old way of lives in many older civilizations are better. We need to stop glorifying our western order and look east.

[jeffbee]

Depending on how old you are, I might suggest that you were simply not aware of the details of your grandparents' lives at that time. And it just sounds like you have surrounded yourself with assholes in adulthood.

[gzread]

I think the city is cool because of the amount of stuff around, even as there's less free space. I think both options should be available.

[adrian_b]

What you describe also matches exactly my grandparents.

Moreover, I also encounter the same problems in the big city where I work and live.

Hard to be optimistic.

[keybored]

There’s two hundreds years of social science and experience reports to answer that question.

[greygoo222]

Your problem is that you were happy as a child and unhappy as an adult. That's a personal problem, and has little to do with rural or urban living. As other commenters have pointed out, you can most likely afford to buy a farm if you really want that lifestyle. I suspect you don't, because it sucks major ass to have to do manual labor all day, to eat almost entirely the same things and see the same people for decades on end, and to choke off your access to most of the joy and beauty in the world.

[delegate]

The comment was for the article 'Obsession with growth is destroying nature'. Read it. It's not about me personally. In fact, I live a very comfortable life in a beautiful city.

But this comfort has a price, described in the article. It's huge. It's also not static, it's growing and accelerating. Our children will have to pay these bills in one way or another.

What I do with my life (or you with yours) has zero consequence on this, the process can't be stopped. But it will one day, because math.

[antisthenes]

> it sucks major ass to have to do manual labor all day, to eat almost entirely the same things and see the same people for decades on end, and to choke off your access to most of the joy and beauty in the world.

2 of these aren't bad things.

1 is a complete non-sequitur

1 is a good recipe for staying active/healthy and non-obese if done in moderation. Farming equipment is an option - you don't have to till 2-3 acres just by hand.

The one thing you neglected to mention (that is a pretty important blocker) is that with farming/country-side living it's pretty hard to leave your kids a legacy outside of leaving them the farm itself, and locking them into the same lifestyle.

Also, hugely increased risks in the 21st century due to global warming.

[pibaker]

> you can most likely afford to buy a farm if you really want that lifestyle

Revealed preference wins all the time.

See also the massive rural to urban migration in literally every country since 18th century Britain to present day Asia.

[gib444]

People from the countryside were forced into cities in Britain as a result of the Enclosure acts, reduced demand for agricultural workers, population rises etc

Revealed preference could just show it was the least bad option in that period

[api]

The answer is that most people did not live like what you remember.

For most of the last many thousands of years most people worked very hard for very little and died young of disease and war. If you got injured or sick there was no real health care. Women had a high chance of dying in childbirth. Your kids had a high chance of dying before 10.

That stressful city life is better than how most people in history have lived.

Of course we could make it quite a bit better still. We are nowhere near an optimum. A lot of our wounds are self inflicted: addiction to constant doom scrolling, hedonic treadmill for bling, real estate hyperinflation because we refuse to build enough housing.

But that description of the past is very sugar coated and selective.

[therealwhytry]

simple, boomer brain rot subsidized for the last 50 years via currency debasement that leads our "leaders" to feel it is the only path forward.

that is probably an easy path forward in their mind, as they are on death's door holding the ladder they pulled up behind them.

[trgn]

boomers didnt want to let go of the welfare state their parents and grandparents had introduced, at the same time they live longer, work less, not nearly had as many kids, and did not effectuate the required productivity growth to offset that.

they will go down in history as the worst generation in modern history, 100% certain of that.

[emchammer]

What welfare state? Do you mean the universal healthcare that they claw away at any cost, like Mitch McConnell onto the podium?

[trgn]

social security, medicare

[fasterik]

This is a completely nostalgic, one-sided view of the urban vs. rural divide. It's also ignorant of the data on the impact of cities on nature.

Cities have a lower carbon footprint per capita, lower land use per capita, people own fewer cars, use public transportation more often. If everyone lived in a city, nature would be better off.

People live in cities because they are vibrant, they have culture, the arts, intellectuals, innovation, etc. Yes there are areas with high traffic and noise, but there are also quiet neighborhoods where everyone walks everywhere, you can pop into a bar or a cafe on every corner, eat 20 different types of cuisine, go to a book store, go see a show on any night of the week.

Your picture of the friendly villagers might be true in your experience, but in reality a lot of those people are nasty when they encounter any kind of cultural diversity or difference.

[jeffbee]

Yeah, but unfortunately false nostalgia for subsistence farming is widespread and has traction in the discourse. I guess it's probably because every American who ever suffered from that lifestyle is dead, in other words the same reason that it is now increasingly popular to die from measles.

In reality, the laser-leveled, fully-automated, county-scale factory farm is the only reason anyone on this forum has ever experienced the phenomenon known as "free time".

[bovermyer]

Farming is harder than people who haven't done it think, and surviving on the production of only your family's property is really, really hard. Source: I grew up in very rural areas, and I've seen what it entails. My grandparents lived through the Great Depression in a farming community on a homestead.

However, I don't think that's the ask, here. You don't have to choose MEGASUPERTROPOLIS or remote solo farm. There's a huge gradient between the two.

It's possible to put a little effort into gardening, share with your community, and massively reduce the overall cost of food while still having free time.

[interiorchurch]

> However, I don't think that's the ask, here. You don't have to choose MEGASUPERTROPOLIS or remote solo farm. There's a huge gradient between the two.

The gradient is where you start to consume a lot of carbon unnecessarily.

[api]

It’s an extremely privileged kind of nostalgia. Only the wealthy can romanticize poverty.

The solution to nostalgia for farming is for people to try it.

I used to live in Asheville NC years ago. There were a lot of hippie back to the land types that came there to find themselves. It’s that kind of place. Sometimes they’d decide to become farmers. This usually lasted at best one year. Sometimes it lasted weeks.

[jeffbee]

There's a book about being the child of back-to-the-land hippies called "Against the Country" that I enjoyed and recommend to all who might be tempted.

[api]

Some of the groups around Asheville were "eco villages" that could get rather culty, including the kinds of high control abuses that occur in cults. All groups weren't like this but I recall hearing some crazy stories involving shaming people into giving money to the group (while the higher ups are "more equal" than everyone else) and sexual exploitation.

There was one case where the group leader/organizer ran away with a bunch of cash, and one or two people tried to sue but they'd set up some kind of shell company structure and had conned people into signing things that made it hard to sue or press criminal charges. I think they also left the other members on the hook for a property lease, since the things they'd been conned into signing did that too. It looked a lot like an explicit long con targeting the hippie trust fund kids that would come around. Sex abuse too apparently.

I heard more than one story that mentioned members of the Hells Angels, at least allegedly.

This is another aspect of small insular communities in the good old days that the trads and anarcho-primitivists (left-trads) don't talk about. It still happens in small communities today, but a lot less due to the presence of larger scale nation states with laws and law enforcement. If the sheriff in your tiny rural town rapes you, you could try to bring charges at the state level or at least sue. Worst case you can move, and with a global money system you can sell your home and take the cash with you. Without that larger context, there is no recourse. If your local tribal chief, town sheriff, or cult leader wants to take your stuff, pressure you into polygamy, or rape your kids, there's nothing you can do about it. Back to nature!

[epolanski]

+1, I think you're spot on.

Albeit I feel like OP was right on something else: his grandparents weren't heavy consumers, but that transcends city vs rural debates.

I see us modern people, except very old folks being extremely heavy consumers.

Sometime I pay attention to my friends and relatives and how much do they consume.

E.g. I spent 5 days with my mother in December at my grandmas and I've noticed that she just bought stuff non-stop, but her metric is money, not "stuff".

So, e.g., she bought a new pillow for my grandma even though my grandma didn't need/want one (she doesn't use it), bought plenty of plastic toys for her own dog, bought a set of new dishes just because the old ones were old, changed her worn phone leather case for a new one, bought plenty of Christmas lights because she didn't want to dig for the old ones she couldn't quickly find, bought some kind of table hook for purses for herself and her friends, etc, etc.

At the end of the week she didn't even spend 250 euros (her metric), so she doesn't realizes, yet, the amount of borderline useless stuff she bought was major and her ecological impact quite huge, especially for how little to none the payoff or utility is.

I had colleagues in my office, back when I was in the office, that just had Amazon packages coming every single day...And here's a smartphone holder, here's some gadget that keeps your mouse cord, here's a yet a new pedal for the drums, here's a set of pens, here's a rubber duck to talk to when debugging, etc, etc.

I mean, I have even a difficult time pointing out that there's something wrong with any of those items per se in isolation, but when it's a lifestyle of non-stop consistent consumerism I think the trend is worrying.

There's so many things that are so cheap nowadays that it's hard to say "why not?", yet they feed into this endless life style that's toxic for the planet but feeds this neverending more more and more.

[joquarky]

Chuck Palahniuk has a few words on this.

[627467]

> Your picture of the friendly villagers might be true in your experience, but in reality a lot of those people are nasty when they encounter any kind of cultural diversity or difference.

Cities are all the things you describe, including the myopic perspective and the inflexibility on display in this quote.

And thats why city states - which is what effectively those you describe are - eventually collapse into "dark ages" and future generation of people can't understand why

[casey2]

That's only because cities outsource their carbon intensive activities. There is no "divide" here. It's one planet and focusing on the wrong categories has destroyed your ability to reason.

[fasterik]

That's simply not true. The per capita emissions account for things that are produced outside of cities like food. The primary sources of emissions from individual human activities are food, energy production, and transportation. High density areas are more efficient at providing people's heating and transportation needs. As far as I know, people in cities don't eat more food than people in other areas, if you control for income/standard of living.

[chocochunks]

It's not only because cities outsource carbon intensive activities. Sure, there's some of that with farming, mining, etc. that must be done elsewhere. But there's also lots of savings from things like residents walking/biking/using public transit instead of driving, living in more efficient apartments, etc. The suburbs are pretty wasteful, they don't generate anything unique and they just waste more resources.

[t-3]

Suburbs are still mostly urban, it's right there in the name. Rural != suburban.

[gib444]

> but in reality a lot of those people are nasty when they encounter any kind of cultural diversity or difference.

This is so so true

Many villages in England it takes min 2 generations to begin being accepted as a proper local

[tigerlily]

> eat 20 different types of cuisine

The city I live in, this can be 20 different variations on onions and garlic, and cabbage passes as salad.

[delegate]

But you do realize that all the positives are mostly hedonistic ?

Yeah, there are more places to enjoy yourself and have fun, more entertainment.

I'm passionate about going out to clubs, electronic music events, concerts, restaurants, flying around on a plane or driving my car on the endless roads.

All of this is great, but according to TFA and my own experience, we're absolutely shitting on the natural world to have our nice drink or exotic food which will be gone from our system in 12h.

We've 'borrowed' from the future generations to have our fun and I'm not sure it's all worth the price.

[bryanlarsen]

Sure, the positives for urban life are hedonistic. The point is that the positives for rural life are also hedonistic, just less recognizably so.

[jeffbee]

Don't project the emptiness of your existence on the rest of us. Cities are the only reason we have orchestras and ballets, vibrant sports leagues, and other things central to family life. I do not want my kids to have to live in a "village" too small to field a brass quintet.

[ghurtado]

> Don't project the emptiness of your existence

The irony of such an unnecessarily hostile opening line is ... Absolute cinema

(It's ok if you don't get it, Jeff. This comment is for other people)

[greygoo222]

As someone who is sensitive to noise, rural areas bother me far more than urban ones. Traffic is low-frequency and only rarely annoying, but the few times I have lived in rural areas or gone camping, I have been woken up repeatedly by the horrific screeching of birds. Louder, shriller, less predictable than any city noise.

There are birds in cities too, and they are annoying, but they are thankfully drowned out by the cars.

[lich_king]

[flagged]

[ghurtado]

> If we didn't have cities, we also wouldn't have eight billion people in the world.

Could you break down the logic that leads you to this conclusion?

Im sure it's deeper than "if cities disappeared right now, a lot of people would disappear with them"

[lich_king]

Because the habitable surface of the planet is less than 100 million square kilometers and only a fraction of that is suitable for subsistence farming. The only reason we can accommodate 8 billion is that the majority of them live in high-density settlements and that food is grown on an industrial scale elsewhere.

[izzydata]

This is obviously not a reversible trend. People having close proximity to one another, creating economies of scale where everyone does what they are best at instead of everyone doing everything for themselves is what allows big cities to be possible.

I'm sure all of this was inevitable as there likely hasn't ever been a time where humans were not getting together to form communities when it was beneficial to do so.

[t0bia_s]

So what's the solution here? Do we forcibly sterilize people? Lock them up if they have children? What's the anti-growth strategy we're actually advocating for?

You don't need to. Fertility rate per woman in wealthy countries decreases every year.

Growth is natural, overconsumption is not.

[ishouldstayaway]

> Do we forcibly sterilize people? Lock them up if they have children?

Oh give me a break. Developed countries have had below-replacement fertility rates for decades.

If your goal is to reduce birth rates, we do the things that we already know do that naturally: comprehensive, fact-based sex ed; cheap and easy access to contraceptives; social safety nets and support; etc etc etc.

It's not a mystery and it's not even difficult. You don't need to jump to straight to abhorrent crimes against humanity.