Living in Manhattan, I sometimes go weeks without taking the subway or bus, years without taking a taxi/Uber/Lyft/etc, and I can't remember the last time I drove.
My point is face-to-face walking community. I've found no substitute.
Though the sea levels continued rising and everyone acting like other people should change factors in.
I've never been as happy as when I could walk to my local soccer teams stadium and walk to my local grocery store. Although the massive international and farmers markets are very close too, so I always have every fresh ingredient I could ever need for every dish from every culture I've wanted to try. Especially if you don't get to travel much, being in a place where travel comes to you can be very rewarding and enriching.
And no I'm not going to put on headphones. IMO my work environment should naturally be conducive to getting s* done. But that seems to have become crazy talk.
I don't personally do well with the same schedule every day, which was a constant issue when I had regular jobs. The more I tried to fit into the day the world wanted me to fit into the less happy I became. It's not the work. I honestly love the work I do, but I abhor having a "job".
I have a lot of other reasons I don't like working at an office. I'll try to list a few off the top of my head.
- I don't like having "office friends".
- I can't stand office politics
- Scheduling meeting rooms is confusing and silly
- It seems a lot of time is wasted in meetings and in between tasks
- I don't enjoy being locked to a single place in order to get things done that I can do anywhere.
- I spend a lot of time wandering around and staring in space while I try to work out a problem, and the office was never really conducive to that.
- These days with the open plan offices, forget it. The last startup I worked with was acquired by a company you've probably heard of and as much as I truly liked the people there, I couldn't get a single thing done in that place. Headphones kind of helped, but I felt like I was at a lunch table in high school. I only had to work in that office for about a week per quarter, and it was my least productive week per quarter.
So on to the pros of my situation
- I can work wherever and whenever I want; This is generally in my office at my sit-stand desk with my three monitors and fancy chair, but if I want to fire up my fire-pit and break out my laptop, as I did last night, nothing stops me - besides maybe the weather. Coffee Shops, Shared Spaces, Airports, Other Cities, Seaside Towns, Cabins in the Woods, etc are all perfectly acceptable places for me to work upon my whim.
- I generally allow my sleep schedule to change naturally, so sometimes I sleep days and work nights. I get tons more done when that happens, and without anyone to report to outside of a weekly stand-up, it's a total non-issue.
- I can do a couple hours of work and then go run errands, and then a couple more, and then have lunch with a friend, and then a couple more and make some dinner and then answer a few emails, and my day is through. I've put the same amount of work in, but I've had a full, accomplished, and social day.
- My time is rarely wasted. If I'm not able to focus for the day, I'll just leave my desk and come back to it later or the next day.
- My friends are all my actual real friends who I like to see regardless of what industry they work in. I hang out with some of the people I work with, but that's entirely by choice, when we happen to be in the same city.
- I probably set an alarm two or three times a year. I generally like to wake up whenever, take my time to make breakfast, make or go and get coffee/tea, sit on my front porch for a bit to read the news, and then kiss my wife, make my way into my office and shut the door. It's kind of like a commute, but it's just me making my way through the house "on the way to work".
Obviously my way won't work for everyone, but after 18 years like this, I'm not sure I could ever go back.
I am so glad to hear someone else does this. I sometimes feel like I'm wasting time when I get up to refresh my cup of coffee and then pause an extra four or five minutes to stare out the window and ponder what I'm working on.
I work remotely for an SF-based company from Greensboro, NC: population 300k, with a highly walkable downtown. Bought a townhouse in the heart of everything with a commercially zoned office as the first floor. I go weeks without driving and share a single car with my wife for the times we need it.
Has the prospect changed your outlook on where to live or the challenges / benefits thereof?
It hasn't changed too much. We have a house in the city, so the standing plan is to stick around for at least a few years. We both grew up in major cities (NYC, Chicago), so that preference isn't likely to change any time soon.
Things like quality of schools may change what neighborhood we prefer, but we still have some time before then. If it turns out home-schooling is the best way, then we'll go that route.
Then I moved to a city that's not very walkable but very bikeable. I miss walking sometimes, but biking is pretty awesome.
Most pollution comes from the energy used by motors to move people from one place to another, which is obviously more in a suburb environment rather than an walking environment.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
Largest sector globally is industry and heat, followed closely by agriculture.
Big cities may be superior in some respects, but they are also the symptom of a larger problem - it’s a lot more of us on this planet than were pre-industrial.
Ultimately, poking people in the eye about their consumption habits is counter-productive. Cities are efficient, but not efficient enough to prevent global warming. This problem is only going to be solved through technical innovation and government regulation.
HN today: hey you guys know you can get 2700sq ft on 2 acres for half of what your studio costs right?
I think the biggest evil of suburbs is the commute. I think part of the reason there's no social activity in suburbs is because, honestly, who wants to do anything after spending an hour in traffic after getting off your 8-5 job and knowing you need to be out the door by 6:30 the next day?
Commute fuel costs aren't remotely the biggest inneficiency with living in a diffuse suburb, though. Someone has to grade and pave all those extra miles of road. Someone has to pour all that concrete for sidewalks that no one walks on. Someone has to trench and lay piping and cable through all that unused space. Those large diffuse houses need more energy to heat and cool both because they're larger and because they're diffuse.
And even then, granting that you're not commuting to work, your kids are commuting to school on vehicles that need to travel much farther, your family is commuting to dinner and shopping over much larger distances, and everyone that needs to be at your home for any reason (to repair something, deliver something, etc...) needs to spend more fuel and time to get there.
Suburban sprawl is a bad trade. The worst of it, for you, may be the psychological impact of the daily commute. But that doesn't mean the rest of it isn't bad.
Usually people say something about externalities to explain why they deplore certain activity, but it seems to me that when you spend an incremental dollar (such as to live downtown), it rapidly diffuses into the economy and represents the average amount of carbon-intensity. So I think how much you spend is the key to focus on, rather than the "niceness" of what you spend on.
There is, in fact, social activity in the suburbs. There may be less, per capita, then in big cities, but that's because what is in the suburbs is car-dependent, and once you have that a threshhold cost, the marginal cost of leaving the suburb for activity in the nearest urban center is low, so lots of social activities partaken by suburban dwellers occur in urban centers rather than suburbs.
> who wants to do anything after spending an hour in traffic after getting off your 8-5 job
Weekday social activities are often partaken in near work prior to commuting back home, avoiding this problem and often reducing commute time by avoiding traffic.
Takes me an hour+ to get home 6 miles outside of the city (still in the City, but not downtown) on the bus. Not a great argument you have there unless you ignore everyone that isn't privileged enough to live in the city downtown proper.
Many cities are planned well and easy to get around. But this isn’t really true for most American cities. Although if you’re working in a city and living outside of it, you’re almost certainly wasting more time than anyone in it during your commute.
I just wouldn't take a job where I have to commute 2 hours. I don't think most people do that, although some may.
When I lived 10 minutes walk from work, the bus took about the same time, but waiting for its schedule meant practically speaking it was more like 30 minutes. It felt a little safer than scrambling across three highways, but after a bit, I couldn't stand the wait, so I went back to walking, and then to driving.
If I lived in a popular suburb further to the north, then I wouldn't be able to ride the bus at all (although that's too far of a commute for me by car)
So, across the whole range of commute distances, I can't see any situation where riding the bus makes sense. It either takes essentially as long as walking, or isn't available at all.
I find that hard to believe.
What is probably accurate is that there’s a lot less for a single twentysomething (though that depends on your interests). If you’re an adult with a family, there’s more than enough to do.
I don't like to suburbs either but I'm currently visiting my brother who lives in one. Their socializing is kids basketball & soccer games at the park (which suburbs are zoned for), picnics at the local greenway (also zoned for), and swimming in the community pool. All of which are walking distance.
Not to mention, you know, inviting people over to their house because it isn't a tiny 400 square foot apartment. They make dinner for friends and watch football on the porch.
I’ve lived in a few suburbs. One of them was blessed to have a dollar store within walking distance (you’d need to cross a busy highway, but you could walk). None of them so much as had sidewalks, though. Grocery stores were from 15-25 minutes by car. Entertainment (theaters, pools) were around that distance if not more.
Suburbs vary from place to place, just as towns and cities do. Some offer conveniences that make it hard to imagine living anywhere else. Some make it impossible to do absolutely anything without a car and a few gallons of gas.
I'll bet this is also the case for cities in developed east Asian countries like Japan, Taiwan & South Korea as well.
There's also three parks within 10 minutes' walk, more a short bus ride away, and multiple shops and cafes surrounding us. And we're about 15 minutes by bus from the city centre.
Just saying... the issues the US seems to have with cities seem to mostly be a result of lack of caring about them, not inherent properties of cities.
Americans also have parks, buses, shops, and cafes. All the suburbs I have lived in are about 10 minutes from a "city center".
Besides, HN is more than one person, with different views.
“Small town” and “suburb” are overlapping categories, and if it's in the former category but also lets you work in a big city (so that what you can afford on the same salary is relevant), it's almost certainly also in the latter category.
The problem with this binary division is that plenty of real communities outside of metropolitan coresñ.ñ would be a blend of “small town” and “suburb” by this description, varying on a continuum between being nearly purely “small town” in their local core (which might or might not be styled as a “downtown”) to pure “suburb” as you get further from that core.
There are not many parts of Raleigh where you can do this, and it's still more expensive than suburb living out here. But I find that I have equal or better access to the stuff I actually want and use, so I don't feel like I sacrificed much.
So it stands to reason that the pendulum now swings the other way. People are very good at sussing out the economics of a trend that used to be profitable but no longer is.
Smaller areas typically lack competitive tech positions and larger areas don't want to take a risk on you when they have a pool of warm bodies to choose from.
Remote work wouldn't be possible in general if this were true. Hiring, especially for senior level engineering talent, remains hard and expensive
Above all though I had such poor access to natural beauty and wild country, which I now realize is important to me.
a rule of thumb I hear from a financial adviser: "Why work in a huge first tier city for 10% more money when you can move to a second or third tier city where housing prices are 50% lower?"
Always fun when recruiters reach out. Many simply can’t believe someone wouldn’t want to move back to a bigger city in return for a much higher paycheck (which I politely explain is effectively less money than I make now, due to costs of living).