Unless you grew up in the area from which you work remotely, in which case you can be more social because connecting with old friends and family is much easier than making new friends at 30+.
> If I earned a London salary in my hometown I'd be ostracising myself completely from those around me [...] I don't see how that benefits anyone.
I don't see the problem with having more money than most of your neighbors - instead of buying new cars, you could spend it on your neighborhood and lift it up. Seems healthier than what is happening instead - non-techies being forced out of their homes because they can't keep up with techie rents.
Perhaps you don't see the problem because you're theorizing about it rather than having lived experience. As I think most people do.
Imagine that essentially everyone you meet in your age group is far poorer than you are. Not most people but everyone. You need some sort of 'app' to find people to speak to who are on your level.
Your specific example means you're making yourself some sort of local pariah/celebrity/whatever. It's very nice and kind, but what about your peer group? Do they just exist through a webcam?
It's like the FIRE folks. Everyone thinks they want to retire at 30 unless they're in that situation, and then they realise it's deathly boring and everyone else is at work. (Sure, FU money is great).
On reflection, I think maybe you're talking about the small arbs where like, you move from somewhere with 500K homes to somewhere with 250K homes or whatever; i.e. from somewhere with jobs, to somewhere with jobs (that pay a bit less). If you're doing the big arb of moving to an economically depressed area then you have to actually live there.
The limiting example would be like those people that move to Vietnam or whatever and have servants. Maybe it works for them? But even if you're just moving to a poor area in the same country it's still a massive difference.
There is a fundamental difference between having a bit more money and deleting worldly concerns. The FIRE/low CoL idea forgets the idea that if you make yourself 'special' you are now indeed special and weird and not like those around you.
1) unless you move to a very small town, there are still plenty of people in your economic demographic. In the US, roughly 5% of households earn more than $200k. In a town of 70k, you’d expect there to be roughly 27k households and therefore 1300 households earning more than $200k. If you are currently making more then $500k you might be a little more out there, but then you really have no reason to move, do you? (Your techie peers at other companies don’t make that sort of money).
2) “Friends from work” don’t go away when working remotely. We still have “water cooler” conversations and members of my team have occasionally visited each other’s cities outside of work. We also do a ton of socializing when we are physically together for work.
That being said, it does reduce that aspect of social life. What fills it? Other activities- family/children, hobbies, causes, clubs, etc. I’ve lived in major tech hubs before- it did take longer to establish a social network while working remotely in my smaller city, but once established it has been much more fulfilling.
3) I apologize for criticizing, but your concern about not being able to socialize with the middle class sounds bizarre. Some of our dearest friends in this city are solidly middle class- 911 dispatchers, teachers, carpenters, nurses, and sales people. We met through sports, children’s school, and volunteering. We specifically chose to live well below our means (FIREing before the term existed I guess) so our neighbors are a varied lot, and we like them. We can’t invite them to join us vacationing in Europe, but other than that it’s there is little awkwardness.
This assumes uniform distribution of household incomes across cities of different sizes, which I suspect is a shaky assumption. More likely, the high earning households are concentrated in a short list of major population centers.
There are well off people throughout the United State, not only in the top 20 metros.
These are your words, not mine!
If you're working remotely as a software developer then you're pretty much middle class by definition.
1. https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/average-income-in...
If you want to be the one-eyed man amongst the blind, go for it, but not everyone wants that.
Socioeconomic groupings exist in the metro areas too. Senior management hanging out with the workers is relatively rare. Because it's just a pain in the arse to guard yourself in every conversation and not seem like a twat lacking empathy when you talk about some benign thing you did last week.
If you have never experienced or observed stratification, then you may simply not get around much (in terms of social circles). It's not that strange, I cannot afford it either, I just made some chance acquintances, mostly through my socially far more capabele partner.
Class had become the most useful criterion to distinguish groups to me. It's not about guarding oneself explicitly, or avoiding interaction, but more in happening to frequent different kinds of sports/events, having different types of interest and being able to afford those types of hobbies. You won't see a working class person drive up to the club in his jaguar old timer for a game of golf and going for a Michelin star afterwards with friends, talking over a new investment opportunity. You see what I mean?
People from richer social classes, on the other hand, typically either dislike poorer classes for a variety of more or less obvious prejudices, or they dislike them because they project their own antagonisms, and thus feel disliked, then become disliked because they act 'guarded'.
My general basis for friendship is common interests and interpersonal chemistry. I think if people assume they have no common interests with people from different backgrounds, or they sabotage interpersonal chemistry by acting guarded, then they're cheating themselves.
Michelin star food is generally not all that much better than other food, golf is no different to mini-golf (aside from being less eco-friendly and less fun), and a jaguar old timer is just a particularly unreliable, unsafe and low mile-per-gallon Honda. Personally, I don't have much in common with people who define themselves by their career success, whether that's shown by fancy sneakers, or fancy cars.
Friends are peers that have similar life experiences and values (and humor). Sometimes people like that are hard to find.
This is an pretty narrow definition of friendship.
anybody instead of peers
some shared experiences or some shared values and forget about humour.
FWIW, I'm probably not qualified as I probably have more activity partners, or context friends, than true friends but your definition seemed incredibly limiting.
We end up saving amazing amounts of money, relatively speaking, but our social life has been difficult to fill in. College vibe helps, but there are vast benefits to large cities and I'm certainly missing those.
In a remote job, you could be travelling and be more social, engaging with different people every month. A digital nomad.
That's exactly what I'm railing against. Most people who have done this eventually recognise that it does not make them happy.
It certainly did for me. Permanent connections with imperfect people are better than some sort of forever quest.
I am only pointing out that you are restricting yourself by not choosing remote work. Some people can't self restrict or enact behaviours required for it to work. I can still choose to settle on one place forever.
British slang for poor, has no money, I just learned.
edit Not to mention the target of every drug user and petty criminal.
The amount of ego in this thread is impressive!
I fail to see what this has to do with ego - it's not an assertion of superiority, it's just a factual statement. It's nothing to do with technology - working as a lawyer for remote clients would be the same.
If anything it's the opposite I would think. Ego would be rocking up and flashing the cash.
Absolutely hilarious.
You're clearly not a camper or a bow hunter, and you clearly have no particular attraction to pickup trucks.
Point being, your generalization is actually pretty specific to your set of interests. Other folks couldn't imagine not owning a car, getting rid of their dogs, or having to plan a special trip to go fishing.
I don’t really prefer to make all of my friends within the tech/academic bubble that I work in. I would feel weird if I didn’t see my coworkers, but I’ve made a point of finding activities that bring me into contact with a range of different people, and I think that makes my social life more interesting.
I was lucky enough to choose a career (medical physics) that takes place everywhere, but I could see remote work being effective for people in other fields.
Prince Harry isn't seriously going to go down the pub for regular meet ups with his friends from the ex mining town. They might get on if they have a chat, but that's not the point.
I'm specifically referring to the big CoL arbs, not the situation in which someone just lives like, further out from a major metro because they don't have to commute.
I moved from the Bay Area where my 1300sqft rental house would have cost me $1.2M, to work remote from a high-income community in Michigan where my 5000sqft house cost me $700k.
My neighbors are not poor, the schools are great, people are in a wide variety of professional and educational backgrounds (not just tech), and best of all, I live minutes away from my family and several of my best childhood friends, who I see every week.
You don’t need to move to the middle of nowhere for remote work to be a good idea, just anywhere even slightly more sane than the Bay Area. There’s loads of places all over the country that can strike a good balance here.
I'm talking about working remotely to escape a locally depressed job market which is very different (because in that situation you are relatively unique).
More employers should embrace tools that let their workers work fully remote. It's started creeping in with more work from home days at most white-collar employers. But you'll have to start judging people by their productivity, not presence in the office. Video chat on demand is just as good (arguably more communication imo, as people no longer have to get up and walk to talk to you).
Remote work doesn't mean home office. You can rent part of a shared office and still have colleagues for lunch.
You don't need to move to a place where you will be 'the rich guy'. It's your choice. Even with your big tech salary you won't be better off than the local business owners in a place with around 20k inhabitants.
Exactly! But you're not a local business owner.
Because no-one wants to live in a depressed town.
You can live in a commuter town and not commute, sure, then you're not arbitraging CoL (it won't be much cheaper).
If you live somewhere where there are no jobs then you have to deal with all of the issues I've stated.
They don't tend to live in villages or towns, and they don't socialise with "townies", and they certainly won't share any interests with some nouveau-rich tech worker who thinks they're wealthy
You seem to have this idea that everyone here thinks they're uber wealthy or whatever. It's just relative to the locale. If you move to a depressed northern town with the idea that it's going to be some utopian bliss in your massive house then you are in for a shock. That's what is being discussed.
Obviously there are nice places outside of metro areas. They have a price tag to match, or not, the land isn't for sale.
You're also illustrating the other side of it - it's not easy to slot into a different social class (upwards or downwards).
Social class in the UK is all about where you were educated, it has nothing to do with your income (same for Australia, but apparently not the USA, though I think that's changing). Your accent, your manners, whether you call it "dinner" or "tea", whether you go to the toilet, the lavatory or the bathroom. If you actually care about social class, these are the things that matter. Income doesn't.
But attitude is the big one. You can fit in and make friends anywhere with an open attitude. People are people. Friendships can easily overcome class and income differences if there's mutual respect, empathy, and a desire to be friends.
The US Midwest and South have a dozen relatively cheap cities to live in where it isn’t depressed.
Housing supply/demand balance is a prime contributor to CoL, and the south/Midwest generally doesn’t have the draconian housing restrictions that the coastal cities have.
And in a fair number of these places, there's the same hostility to people moving in as the bay area.
The point of remote work is that you don't need to move to Silicon Valley to get a good job. And unless you are living in the middle of no-where, small communities still have very wealthy people who are probably wealthier than you'll ever become. Why didn't they move? Because they have roots there.
Living in relatively poor/clean community is and co-working is still a good thing. You can then afford to have a family, something most people don't and you'll be able to buy more services. Then, you are helping the locals out there and reducing inequality.
Putting London money into a poorer economy that really needs it, rather than back into London, which doesn't?
It benefits parasitic rentiers.
I think that a lot of people banging on about remote work just haven't tried it for an extended period. It works for some, and for those - great.
To me, it's just another step down the 'technification' of everything in which people don't speak to the people around them (because they've been 'removed' from their lives) but spend all of their time in front of screens.
I don't want to live in the middle of nowhere and earn 10x what the average local does. I want the people around me to be roughly on my level and share my interests. That's something that's easy to do in a city.
That's how businesses end up centering in hubs anyway. Who wants to be a startup founder living in the country alone? I'm sure this person exists, but they're the exception not the rule.
I mean, right now, you can look at a place like London and see hyperlocal clustering of wealth, one street will be the 'nice street' and the next one rough. People really care about this.
If you earned a London salary in my hometown you'd be ostracising yourself completely from those around you by virtue of just having none of the same concerns. Yeah, you own the home outright, you can buy a brand new car every 6 months, the price tags in the supermarket may as well be blank, etc. Oh yeah, and you have working hours whenever you want, booking a holiday is telling your boss "I won't be in Friday, guv". Wait until your neighbour tells you again how they're struggling to pay the bills or they've just been sanctioned by the benefits office.
I don't see how that benefits anyone.