That's the kind of lifestyle previously reserved for people living and working downtown in major cities, but can be (and for me is) a reality in small-town America. I make more money in one year than it cost me to buy my downtown, 2000 sq ft house with a two car garage and a half acre of land. And I don't have to drive anywhere unless I want to.
That's what remote working can offer. That's what small towns should be promising today.
Right now, in the US, that means cities. That's _it_. And even then, most cities are horrible places to cycle.
But it doesn't have to be that way. I'd love to walk or cycle around Houten (NL, pop ~45,000 and built for walking and cycling from the beginning), or perhaps Rothenburg Ob Der Tauber in the old town centre (Germany, pop 10,000 for the town as a whole, smaller within the medieval walls of course).
I just can't think of any place built since the rise of the car which is not a city, and pleasant to walk in, aside from some very small communities like ecovillages (which are nice but not going to be self contained) - https://ecovillage.org/ . Even towns in the US that like to think of themselves as fitting this tend to be fantastically expensive and still very car dependent (San Luis Obispo comes to mind)
Not every town is like that, of course, which is why I picked this town to live in. The best walkable/bikable towns, I've found, don't advertise themselves as walkable or bikable. They just are.
I'll also check out Verona, another well rated suburb. Looks to be a bit more expensive in housing, but also more local food options. Again a solid bike trail into the big city. Monona might be a little too close to the big city. Sun Prairie might be a little too far away. Disclaimer, I've never lived in any of those cities, so this is all based on just 5 minutes worth of Internet research. YMMV.
We got lucky when we settled down in that we knew what state we wanted to live in and what metro area we wanted to be around. From there it was just trying to find a bedroom community with a good solid downtown. Most suburbs close to the city won't have a downtown (they're more like residential areas), so it really narrows your choices a lot. I like using Google Maps to find area bike trails and bike lanes, which helps show how seriously a town/area takes bike safety and their overall attitude towards bikers/pedestrians.
Hopefully that helps.
Hot piss, my house cost $150,000.
With a home office, you don't have to put on pants to go to work. It's always beckoning. Although, your small town might be relaxed about walking around pantless, the walk alone will help give some hysteresis between switching from work mode to home mode.
The wording on this struck me as poignant. It almost sounds like it should be part of a poem or philosophical treatise. Have you used this phrasing before?
2. you start to bump into same people - in fact you will likely have more in common than average office neighbour because you live in same school district, have chosen to telecommute etc
3. mostly telecommute does not happen because it's less convenient to manage not to do
Number 2 is highly circumstantial but it does ultimately come down to the individual to make friends. My concern is just that it becomes harder when everyone else is also locked up at home working or consuming entertainment all day. Many people are only a commute and an office away from that being their life.
I definitely prefer working from home for myself mind you, but I can see the negatives and totally understand why many peoppe would rather an office. I currently split time between office and home and they both have very diverse pros and cons.
Most of my original comment was just speculating a possible future scenario. I just see the possibility for people to fall through the cracks of society and just work and consume entertainment all day at home, and if that becomes the everyman then society will change to accommodate that.
It's just those cracks are not easily visoble. Perhaps even putting more of our lives online will make the cracks more visible - our shared pessimism may be wrong :-)
We want to be around people and have all the urban advantages in our free time, but most of us learned in past decades that we want to be around different people than we work with.. and this decade, we want to be around different people from work and inside a social media blackout.
Perhaps I am wrong about mass telecommuting isolating people. Perhaps instead it would give them more time and opportunity to be part of and support their communities.
I think philosophical explanations for our loneliness epidemic (found on both right and left) are missing more obvious practical causes: how we build, urban planning, economic systems that incentivize workaholism and anxiety, etc. Not saying other causes don't exist, but we should look at the simple ones first.
Gave you a compensatory upvote though because I am sick of ideological echo chambers. Things one disagrees with nevertheless can provoke productive discussion.
This isn’t specific to religion, that’s just an example (but I think a pretty useful one).
I know it may be a bit tropey but Ready Player One book did a great job of portraying how something like that could destroy what it is to feel part of a community in the real world. Even if you step outside of your little comms den for the day, no one else has and there is no one to talk to.
It happens now with social media. People spend all day clicking about, then they stop and take a moment to realise none of it actually happened, it's just text and daydreams, and they are alone in their house again.