> It is a great place to visit and a great place to be from. Not so much a great place to actually be.

I'll definitely echo this. I grew up on a farm / nature refuge in Australia. It's beautiful to go back to, but I could not live there again. My family hovers around the poverty line, work long, hard hours, and are completely at the mercy of the climate and other difficult to control external factors for their lively hood.

Combine this with the isolation, poor (or non-existent) community and education resources, complete void of cultural events and niche activities that require higher population densities. It's nowhere near as idyllic as most people make out.

I now live inner city. When it's nice weather I can drive an hour, go hiking, rock climbing or exploring. During day-to-day life I have everything I need within walking distance. I can live spontaneously. Myself and my partner are talking about children and I'm looking forward to raising them in a city where they can access whatever interests they like.

Once thing I will agree on though is: modern suburban life is a dystopic hellscape. It literally combines the worst of both lifestyles.

Good points, but I totally disagree about the suburbs. We live on a quiet cul de sac in a very suburban neighborhood. We’re 20 minutes from mountains, trails, beach, schools, stores, and work. It’s safe and friendly and our kids play with other kids in the street every day. Seems like a pretty sweet compromise to me, but YMMV.

To each his own. To me, the utter dependence on automobiles, the blatantly wasteful lifestyle and the oppression of HOAs feels claustrophobic, dissonant and excessive. I feel depressed when I have to battle traffic to get access to nature.

Something I never considered when I was younger was how much these things are a spectrum and that there is no bright dividing line between many of these choices.

As an example: I'm living in what's definitely the suburbs (VA Beach), but within easy walking distance of the local coffee shop, groceries, my kids school, etc.

We don't have an HOA, but know a lot of our neighbors. I have a car, but don't use it much b/c of both location and that I work from home.

What is HOA?

I believe in this context it means Home Owners Association[1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association

It can vary a lot, town planning goes from meticulously fine tuned for successful community, to max number of houses and fewer services for property developer profit.

hay buddy, which suburb you live ?

Meh, still better than the tourism based places. At least with a farm you're busy all year. With tourism you're under employed half the year and shooting up something to kill the time.

"shooting up something to kill the time."

I like FPS games to. ;-)