[dysoco]

I too live in a fishing town, yes, it's nice being a small town without any traffic or people on the street (except in Summer when we get tourists) but honestly I can't wait to move out.

I can't get fast internet, power/internet goes down when it gets a bit windy or starts raining; and it rains quite a lot, making you really unproductive. Let's not talk about 3G/4G, we are lucky to have 3G on a good day.

If I wanted to go to some conference or meetup I'd have to drive at least 4-5 hours since there's nothing here, and we don't have train or anything.

Talking about leisure time, I like surfing, but that's only viable during the Summer, there's not much else to do here other than hanging out with other people; we are lucky to have a cinema, but some movies don't even make it here (I'm still waiting to watch Interstellar).

This would be the perfect place for a lonely writer working on a novel, but definitely not for people like us, who need to be always connected and making the best use of technology possible.

Disclaimer: I've never lived in a city, maybe I'll end up hating it, who knows?

[agentultra]

You could be surrounded by thousands of people at any moment who all have headphones on and keep their gaze at a 45 degree angle towards the ground. You too can walk past homeless panhandlers asking for money and ignore them. You can hang out at hip dive-bars and pretend to be cool until the neighborhood gentrifies and you have to commute farther out to the next spot. You can sit next to the schizophrenic on the bus that went off of their meds and everyone does their best to pretend e is the hallucination and not a real person. You can go to events where every clique but your own is present. You can rub shoulders with everyone who wouldn't give a damn if they stepped on you for their next big opportunity.

You can find loneliness anywhere.

Being "always connected," I'm beginning to realize, is not always the optimal state. You lose the ability to focus, to consider the future, and form thoughts of your own. As Douglas Rushkoff suggests: we all live in the present.

For better or worse this is the way things work... but I think it's rather amazing that we have the option to work on a terrace in a medina in some North African city if we want to. And yet so few of us, at the forefront of the technology that enables this lifestyle, take advantage of it -- even for temporary periods. There's something to be said about taking a few months away from the Valley to think for a while.

[dysoco]

As I said, it depends. Right now I'm young and eager to go work at a big company or a startup. Maybe 30 years from now I'll just want to come back and rest, who knows?

[agentultra]

We humans are terrible at imagining the future. Might as well seize the day and find out. You might like the city! I know I did when I was young. I still do and couldn't imagine living in a remote, rural town. However I've learned to appreciate remote, rural living more and like to visit it for periods of time.

[mr_luc]

Just wanted to say that I lived in a small ecuadorean fishing village for 7 years, and my experience was the opposite ... but I'm not starting a startup!

My internet was even more limited (EDGE), power went out sometimes (two power bricks were enough for my mac air, though, and the cell towers never went out, so I could make it through even a multi-day outage without losing internet!), and comfy fast wifi in a coffee shop was 40 minutes away (I'd schedule voice or video meetings on days I liked to go into town to buy things or eat at good restaurants).

And surfing fast, big, tropical beach and point breaks ... well.

I bought a house down there; I'm back in the states right now, because I came back and got married to a girl from my hometown. But we're heading to Ecuador again as soon as we can. :)

But a startup? Hmm.

I think I'd have been a good startup employee, but contracting was a better fit anyway since I really appreciated multi-month blocks without work.

[mr_luc]

Just wanted to say that I lived in a small ecuadorean fishing village for 7 years, and my experience was the opposite ... but I'm not starting a startup!

My internet was even more limited (EDGE), power went out sometimes (two power bricks were enough for my mac air, though, and the cell towers never went out, so I could make it through even a multi-day outage without losing internet!), and comfy fast wifi in a coffee shop was 40 minutes away (I'd schedule voice or video meetings on days I liked to go into town to buy things or eat at good restaurants).

And surfing fast, big, tropical beach and point breaks ... well. It was rainy during nearly half of the year, but I didn't even need a wetsuit, and during the good season, it put a smil

I bought a house down there; I'm back in the states right now, because I came back and got married to a girl from my hometown. But we're heading to Ecuador again as soon as we can. :)

But a startup? Hmm.

I think I'd have been a good startup employee, but contracting was a better fit anyway since I really appreciated multi-month blocks without work.

[scourge]

Do you contract for a few months at a time in $first_world_country?

I'm asking because I've been contracting in London for a couple years and I'm considering doing half the year here, then half the year something like what you describe. But I'd have to move the wife and (soon) kid twice a year. She says she's fine with that.

[mr_luc]

Congratulations, I noticed a lot more Commonwealth types than Americans doing that sort of thing as still-working professionals (but a heck of a lot of Americans doing things as investors).

Yes, you've probably done the math and know that it would work, and can lead to a great work-life balance, to take a few projects for a few months, and then be almost completely off the radar for your clients during the other months.

I did that at first. Now I'm 100% remote with my best clients -- not that I wouldn't be able to make a certain amount of face time if it was necessary any more. But it was slapping us in the face just how unnecessary my physical presence is; it feels almost unflattering, in fact. For a while I was making it a point of coming into their offices during a busy or critical week, but after the first couple of years of our relationship, it just seemed absurd to us; I'd walk into a physical meeting and say "hey," and they'd say "hey," and we'd laugh at how silly it was that I was physically in Minneapolis over just a few minutes or hours of face time a week. My 'home base' in the US is several hours away from their offices, all of our meetings could be done over the phone, and the most interesting conversations between engineers to me seem to happen better over chat anyway.

So I'm just always remote; sometimes I'm in South America, sometimes I'm on the west coast or the midwest visiting family. I change location a lot, and it never makes the slightest bit of difference for clients; I just always call in to meetings instead of physically walk into the room.