6 ms·

I looked through those numbers, and immediately thought to myself - hope you don't need to see a doctor for anything serious, or go to a dentist for that mater.

I looked through those numbers, and immediately thought to myself - hope you don't need to see a doctor for anything serious, or go to a dentist for that mater. FWIW, I grew up in rural nowhere (population 150, nearest town 45 miles away) - and I honestly don't know how anyone can live out in the boonies without a car. Taking the bus that goes 3 times a day is one thing, needing to move stuff is another thing. I mean, obviously there are plenty of people that do manage - but sooner or later you'll become completely dependent on others for certain types of transportation. Also, there's clothes, house maintenance, and lots of other things.

Loughla 1y ago
What small town even has a bus? The closest bus line to me is in the closest large town (40k) about an hour away. Are there bus lines in the middle of nowhere?
- wombat-man 1y ago
  If you’re around or on the way to a popular hike I’ve seen buses run out to some more remote spots. But probably really depends on the county.
- cozzyd 1y ago
  Rural transit exists in some places but certainly is not common in the US like it is in e.g. eastern Europe
- II2II 1y ago
  Granted, this was 20 years ago, but I remember taking the Greyhound and people were getting on or off the bus in the middle of nowhere. By nowhere, I mean the nowhere in the literal sense: at the intersection of two highways in the northern Ontario with no other development in sight. Of course, they also serviced the other types of nowhere: the lone gas station or the tiny village. The author is being somewhat misleading in the sense that this is not the type of bus service that one would use for your weekly commute to that 10 hour shift at the gas station, never mind the three or four times per week that you would need to cover the bills. It may be fine doing errands in town, where the arrival time and departure time don't much matter. It may also be fine for spending a day or two in the city, assuming you have the budget to stay over night. I'm not saying that the type of lifestyle alluded to is impossible, but it is not going to be the type of lifestyle accessible to young people. Then there is the question about whether they are equipped to live that type of lifestyle.
  - xp84 1y ago
    I agree that the bus in the scenario is implausible for most. But in real life, most rural people would simply own a car. The author describes car ownership's costs hyperbolically, but unless you're doing long-distance commuting, driving a $5000 car wouldn't add more than $200 to his monthly budget, which wouldn't change the math dramatically, while I'd argue it would improve quality of life tremendously, especially because rural America of 2025 most definitely assumes car ownership in a way that it didn't 100 years ago.
    - prmoustache 1y ago
      What about cycling? If amishes are fine leaving there with horse carts as vehicles, there is no reason you can't manage using a bicycle. Even Ottawa is not out of reach at only 80miles.
      - II2II 1y ago
        That would depend upon the roads and, given that winter was mentioned as a feature, maintenance during the winter months. I've done some riding on rural roads with no shoulders, and it can be as scary as heck. At least on winding roads in wooded areas. That's from the perspective of someone who is fine riding on fast and busy urban roads during all seasons. Winter maintenance is also a huge issue if you are riding to work. If you're doing seasonal work, that's fine. You just wait until everything is plowed for winter forays. If you're working all seasons, you cannot maintain a job when you cannot reliably reach the job site.
        prmoustache 1y ago
        My experience when I was commuting by bicycle all year in Switzerland, is that drivers had a more complicated time than I had when it was snowing and roads were icy. I had a dedicated bicycle for these kind of situation with studded tires. More often than not people are put off cycling by weather conditions not because it is that hard, but because they haven't put enough thoughts and preparation. Most people ride bicycle with subpar or no lightning, fenders, and more often than not have the wrong tires and protective gears for the job. This require a wee bit of investment but totally negligible compared to the money that is usually spent on a car.
- stevenwoo 1y ago
  Some times, Boulder Creek is in the mountains between Santa Cruz and San Jose (it’s more remote than it sounds I think)and it gets regular bus service on winding two lane roads and there’s a stop at Big Basin State Park where there’s no cell service in wide swaths of valleys and mountain sides.
- maxerickson 1y ago
  A lot of smaller counties have a publicly operated demand response service that includes small buses, or at least some vehicle that is able to transport someone in a wheelchair. So not a regular service schedule, but you can call and schedule a ride and it won't cost a lot.
- projektfu 1y ago
  St. Lawrence County does offer several shuttles that run only 1-4 times per day in each direction. It is probably better to add a bike or e-bike to the list. I think when people write these articles, they should have lived the life instead of just totaling a few expenses. It is very hard to live without at least a few unforeseen expenses above the base budget. The life proposed here is like a 19th century life, waiting for the stagecoach to take you to where you can pay your property taxes, and then spending the day in town because the next stagecoach out doesn't come for hours.
skyyler 1y ago
The lack of a budget for heating in an article that uses the term "American Siberia" is so hilariously out of touch that it makes the rest of the article farcical.
- rconti 1y ago
  Apparently it's "free Amish wood" or "a little extra in electricity"... which, as someone who lives in a temperate area, is a stunningly low price to imagine for electric heat in somewhere cold.
  - garciasn 1y ago
    It’s a 600 ft home with electricity at 0.04kWh. As someone who owns a 400 sq ft uninsulated cabin in MN, with rates closer to 4x that, I can tell you it’s about $100/month to heat it with electricity. I guess, if the math holds, you would be paying around $50/month to heat it in the winter months. E: changed kW/h to kWh per the nice commenter who suggested as much below.
    - jaapz 1y ago
      Fyi it's kWh not kW/h
- tomcar288 1y ago
  you could get a wood burning stove heater. as long as you have enough trees to be sustainable, burning firewood is a great way to go. and with the clean burning filters they have now a days, you'll much much better off than from the days when they used to burn fires inside a house with no container/stove/filters or even a chiminey at all! (just a hole in the roof if you were lucky.)
  - lostlogin 1y ago
    You can get by with a woodburner without buying wood in a fairly large city if you collected the odd car load during the year. That said, it might be a better use of time to work, then get the wood delivered.
dangus 1y ago
I will say, at this income level you're on Medicaid. It would be more than nothing but very basic, and if you're using government assistance than you aren't really "escaping" modernity, you're actually living off of the economic surplus of all the people working hard in the rat race. (Don't misinterpret me as saying that social safety nets are bad, I am all for them, but I'm just saying - if the author of this article gets cancer I bet they'll want to visit a hospital where doctors are working 12 hour shifts grinding out the era of "overabundance.") But it is extremely important to point out that the American "rat race" cities subsidize areas like this. There would be no road in front of this house without those subsidies. These areas are net negative economic contributors that depend on federal and state funding to exist, including that bus transit that this person is relying on (not to mention the American factory workers who grind out their shifts in urban centers to make those buses). The author claims to be living the life of great-grandparents, but it’s not like he’s a subsistence farmer or something. As a metaphor it’s kind of like claiming you’re a wild animal living out in the wilderness living a simple life of virtue when in reality this existence is more similar to a raccoon living out of the dumpster of modern society’s surplus. Why bother building a self-sufficient community like the Amish where they build their own homes and grow their own food and build their own buggies, clothes, furniture, and breed their own horses when you can survive in a cheap depreciated house someone else built, use the library and transportation that other working people pay for, and the roads that were built by the workers who actually work some significant hours? I am sure it works on some level but it doesn’t seem to me to be a very positive alternative to a lot of other lifestyles. Apart from all that, there are so many flaws with this article. The budget didn't include mortgage/housing cost, I guess it's just assuming you're paying cash? How does a person with this kind of lack of gainful employment come up with $29k? Water is $0? Even well water requires some level of upkeep and potentially replacement and re-drilling. Most rural towns in the US absolutely do not have this transit available. You'll need a working maintained car plus insurance almost everywhere that looks like this. Internet, use library - again, with what car? Aren’t a lot of the methods available to make income dependent on internet access? The heat budget is just blank which makes no sense, heat in upstate new york is not cheap as you need a lot of it. Education for your kids? How is that going to look out there? Are they going to be trapped here? Will they even have the option to opt out of this lifestyle? How easy will it be to do homework at home with no internet? You’ll rely on a rural bus schedule and use the library during open hours only? I might also point out that a lot of modern society lifestyles that aren’t so far on this side of extreme of frugality are really easy and comfortable lives. Not all of them, a lot of people live difficult modern lives, but at the same time the “most people” who left the farm to get a job in the city did so for a reason. I guess you could say that the extremes of society can make for some interesting reading.
fullStackOasis 1y ago
> hope you don't need to see a doctor for anything serious, or go to a dentist for that mater. That's the first thing I thought about. His budget of $432/mo doesn't include health insurance. But $5K/y probably gets him Medicaid eligibility. Let's assume he's on Medicaid, then. In NY state, that covers quite a lot of dental care, if you believe this: https://www.health.ny.gov/health_care/medicaid/program/dental/member/index.htm https://www.health.ny.gov/health_care/medicaid/program/denta... Not saying it's a good option, but it's there. > Taking the bus that goes 3 times a day is one thing, needing to move stuff is another thing. What kind of things do you think he might be moving? He probably has just about no possessions with that budget (and a 600 sq ft house). In a pinch, perhaps he can rent a truck from Home Depot. Apparently, there is a Home Depot in Massena, NY, so maybe it's not quite so far out in the boonies as it seems. Personally, I wouldn't do it - the lack of choice would get very unpleasant very fast. But it could work for some.
- 8bitsrule 1y ago
  Yep, it could work for some. And I think that's his point. Depending on how much meatspace socializing / culture one wants/needs. Library internet, meh ... but working 3 more hours at Stewart's would take care of that ... and access to a hyuge amount of entertainment, news, online spaces. Readers, writers, painters, DIYers. At $0.04 per kWh, keeping a small room warm in the winter is trivial ... could be worse!
  - fifilura 1y ago
    > but working 3 more hours at Stewart's And working 5 more hours would get him a some better garden tools, and 20 more he could support a family of 3 And if he just got a higher paying job, he could even get a car!
    - fifilura 1y ago
      (This was obviously a image of the slippery-slope most of us fall into)
- sandworm101 1y ago
s09dfhks 1y ago
In the comments on the article, the author says “we treat what we can at home, otherwise we go to Mexico and pay cash” Oy vey
- antisthenes 1y ago
  That says a lot more about the dysfunctional US healthcare system than it does about the author.
RajT88 1y ago
You read articles like this every so often, sure. Maybe ~13 years back I read about an indie game dev who lived in a carbon neutral home in the middle of nowhere Arizona or something. Beautiful house, hand built. Talked about how you really don't need all that much money to live - they were living on less than 20k a year from his game sales. Him and his wife were also in their 20's, and their kids I think were already a few years old when they moved to the boonies. All healthy. It's an extreme example, but this is a good read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lykov_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lykov_family
- gyomu 1y ago
  For anyone curious, the game dev is Jason Rohrer: https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/simpleLife.html https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/simpleLife.h... Things have changed since: "In October of 2011, we moved from Las Cruces, NM to Davis, CA. Along with all the good things listed below about Las Cruces came bad things. Vicious dogs loose on the streets (one bit my wife while biking) and in parks (I came close to getting myself shot during a confrontation with a dog owner). Crime (the little old lady next door got burgled twice in one year, once at 3 in the afternoon through her front door). After living in extremely cheap places for 8 years, I came to realize that these places are extremely cheap for a reason (because people don't want to live there if they can avoid it)."
  - decimalenough 1y ago
    Zillow says the average house in Davis costs $890k. Looks like they've pretty much given up on the "life cheaply" thing.
    - gyomu 1y ago
      The main page of his website now says New Hampshire https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/ https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/
  - npodbielski 1y ago
    [flagged]
noisy_boy 1y ago
These are "young people" things. The older you get, the more dependent you are on the society and it's benefits.
- Barrin92 1y ago
  Not close from my parents home is a small farm collective of mostly ex hippies who have been living there communally for decades with people well into their 80s now. It was so successful that the city, taking that as inspiration, ran trials of creating more autonomous senior communities that are largely self supervised, including even people with dementia. From what I heard it works extremely well, not the least because it's more dignified and keeps people engaged, active, and self reliant. The modern notion of the drooling, dependent nursing home patient is a product of our (artificially!) atomized system.
jader201 1y ago
> I honestly don't know how anyone can live out in the boonies without a car. Why would you want to live out in the boonies without owning a car? Just get a car. They’re not that expensive, you can get a used beater for not much more than an iPhone. If you don’t want a beater, you can probably afford to spend a little more with the money you save from living out in the boonies. Most people who live in the boonies owns a car.

Loughla 1y ago

What small town even has a bus? The closest bus line to me is in the closest large town (40k) about an hour away. Are there bus lines in the middle of nowhere?

wombat-man 1y ago
If you’re around or on the way to a popular hike I’ve seen buses run out to some more remote spots. But probably really depends on the county.
cozzyd 1y ago
Rural transit exists in some places but certainly is not common in the US like it is in e.g. eastern Europe
II2II 1y ago
Granted, this was 20 years ago, but I remember taking the Greyhound and people were getting on or off the bus in the middle of nowhere. By nowhere, I mean the nowhere in the literal sense: at the intersection of two highways in the northern Ontario with no other development in sight. Of course, they also serviced the other types of nowhere: the lone gas station or the tiny village. The author is being somewhat misleading in the sense that this is not the type of bus service that one would use for your weekly commute to that 10 hour shift at the gas station, never mind the three or four times per week that you would need to cover the bills. It may be fine doing errands in town, where the arrival time and departure time don't much matter. It may also be fine for spending a day or two in the city, assuming you have the budget to stay over night. I'm not saying that the type of lifestyle alluded to is impossible, but it is not going to be the type of lifestyle accessible to young people. Then there is the question about whether they are equipped to live that type of lifestyle.
- xp84 1y ago
  I agree that the bus in the scenario is implausible for most. But in real life, most rural people would simply own a car. The author describes car ownership's costs hyperbolically, but unless you're doing long-distance commuting, driving a $5000 car wouldn't add more than $200 to his monthly budget, which wouldn't change the math dramatically, while I'd argue it would improve quality of life tremendously, especially because rural America of 2025 most definitely assumes car ownership in a way that it didn't 100 years ago.
  - prmoustache 1y ago
    What about cycling? If amishes are fine leaving there with horse carts as vehicles, there is no reason you can't manage using a bicycle. Even Ottawa is not out of reach at only 80miles.
    - II2II 1y ago
      That would depend upon the roads and, given that winter was mentioned as a feature, maintenance during the winter months. I've done some riding on rural roads with no shoulders, and it can be as scary as heck. At least on winding roads in wooded areas. That's from the perspective of someone who is fine riding on fast and busy urban roads during all seasons. Winter maintenance is also a huge issue if you are riding to work. If you're doing seasonal work, that's fine. You just wait until everything is plowed for winter forays. If you're working all seasons, you cannot maintain a job when you cannot reliably reach the job site.
      - prmoustache 1y ago
        My experience when I was commuting by bicycle all year in Switzerland, is that drivers had a more complicated time than I had when it was snowing and roads were icy. I had a dedicated bicycle for these kind of situation with studded tires. More often than not people are put off cycling by weather conditions not because it is that hard, but because they haven't put enough thoughts and preparation. Most people ride bicycle with subpar or no lightning, fenders, and more often than not have the wrong tires and protective gears for the job. This require a wee bit of investment but totally negligible compared to the money that is usually spent on a car.
stevenwoo 1y ago
Some times, Boulder Creek is in the mountains between Santa Cruz and San Jose (it’s more remote than it sounds I think)and it gets regular bus service on winding two lane roads and there’s a stop at Big Basin State Park where there’s no cell service in wide swaths of valleys and mountain sides.
maxerickson 1y ago
A lot of smaller counties have a publicly operated demand response service that includes small buses, or at least some vehicle that is able to transport someone in a wheelchair. So not a regular service schedule, but you can call and schedule a ride and it won't cost a lot.
projektfu 1y ago
St. Lawrence County does offer several shuttles that run only 1-4 times per day in each direction. It is probably better to add a bike or e-bike to the list. I think when people write these articles, they should have lived the life instead of just totaling a few expenses. It is very hard to live without at least a few unforeseen expenses above the base budget. The life proposed here is like a 19th century life, waiting for the stagecoach to take you to where you can pay your property taxes, and then spending the day in town because the next stagecoach out doesn't come for hours.

skyyler 1y ago

The lack of a budget for heating in an article that uses the term "American Siberia" is so hilariously out of touch that it makes the rest of the article farcical.

rconti 1y ago
Apparently it's "free Amish wood" or "a little extra in electricity"... which, as someone who lives in a temperate area, is a stunningly low price to imagine for electric heat in somewhere cold.
- garciasn 1y ago
  It’s a 600 ft home with electricity at 0.04kWh. As someone who owns a 400 sq ft uninsulated cabin in MN, with rates closer to 4x that, I can tell you it’s about $100/month to heat it with electricity. I guess, if the math holds, you would be paying around $50/month to heat it in the winter months. E: changed kW/h to kWh per the nice commenter who suggested as much below.
  - jaapz 1y ago
    Fyi it's kWh not kW/h
tomcar288 1y ago
you could get a wood burning stove heater. as long as you have enough trees to be sustainable, burning firewood is a great way to go. and with the clean burning filters they have now a days, you'll much much better off than from the days when they used to burn fires inside a house with no container/stove/filters or even a chiminey at all! (just a hole in the roof if you were lucky.)
- lostlogin 1y ago
  You can get by with a woodburner without buying wood in a fairly large city if you collected the odd car load during the year. That said, it might be a better use of time to work, then get the wood delivered.

dangus 1y ago

I will say, at this income level you're on Medicaid. It would be more than nothing but very basic, and if you're using government assistance than you aren't really "escaping" modernity, you're actually living off of the economic surplus of all the people working hard in the rat race. (Don't misinterpret me as saying that social safety nets are bad, I am all for them, but I'm just saying - if the author of this article gets cancer I bet they'll want to visit a hospital where doctors are working 12 hour shifts grinding out the era of "overabundance.") But it is extremely important to point out that the American "rat race" cities subsidize areas like this. There would be no road in front of this house without those subsidies. These areas are net negative economic contributors that depend on federal and state funding to exist, including that bus transit that this person is relying on (not to mention the American factory workers who grind out their shifts in urban centers to make those buses). The author claims to be living the life of great-grandparents, but it’s not like he’s a subsistence farmer or something. As a metaphor it’s kind of like claiming you’re a wild animal living out in the wilderness living a simple life of virtue when in reality this existence is more similar to a raccoon living out of the dumpster of modern society’s surplus. Why bother building a self-sufficient community like the Amish where they build their own homes and grow their own food and build their own buggies, clothes, furniture, and breed their own horses when you can survive in a cheap depreciated house someone else built, use the library and transportation that other working people pay for, and the roads that were built by the workers who actually work some significant hours? I am sure it works on some level but it doesn’t seem to me to be a very positive alternative to a lot of other lifestyles. Apart from all that, there are so many flaws with this article. The budget didn't include mortgage/housing cost, I guess it's just assuming you're paying cash? How does a person with this kind of lack of gainful employment come up with $29k? Water is $0? Even well water requires some level of upkeep and potentially replacement and re-drilling. Most rural towns in the US absolutely do not have this transit available. You'll need a working maintained car plus insurance almost everywhere that looks like this. Internet, use library - again, with what car? Aren’t a lot of the methods available to make income dependent on internet access? The heat budget is just blank which makes no sense, heat in upstate new york is not cheap as you need a lot of it. Education for your kids? How is that going to look out there? Are they going to be trapped here? Will they even have the option to opt out of this lifestyle? How easy will it be to do homework at home with no internet? You’ll rely on a rural bus schedule and use the library during open hours only? I might also point out that a lot of modern society lifestyles that aren’t so far on this side of extreme of frugality are really easy and comfortable lives. Not all of them, a lot of people live difficult modern lives, but at the same time the “most people” who left the farm to get a job in the city did so for a reason. I guess you could say that the extremes of society can make for some interesting reading.

fullStackOasis 1y ago

> hope you don't need to see a doctor for anything serious, or go to a dentist for that mater. That's the first thing I thought about. His budget of $432/mo doesn't include health insurance. But $5K/y probably gets him Medicaid eligibility. Let's assume he's on Medicaid, then. In NY state, that covers quite a lot of dental care, if you believe this: https://www.health.ny.gov/health_care/medicaid/program/dental/member/index.htm https://www.health.ny.gov/health_care/medicaid/program/denta... Not saying it's a good option, but it's there. > Taking the bus that goes 3 times a day is one thing, needing to move stuff is another thing. What kind of things do you think he might be moving? He probably has just about no possessions with that budget (and a 600 sq ft house). In a pinch, perhaps he can rent a truck from Home Depot. Apparently, there is a Home Depot in Massena, NY, so maybe it's not quite so far out in the boonies as it seems. Personally, I wouldn't do it - the lack of choice would get very unpleasant very fast. But it could work for some.

8bitsrule 1y ago
Yep, it could work for some. And I think that's his point. Depending on how much meatspace socializing / culture one wants/needs. Library internet, meh ... but working 3 more hours at Stewart's would take care of that ... and access to a hyuge amount of entertainment, news, online spaces. Readers, writers, painters, DIYers. At $0.04 per kWh, keeping a small room warm in the winter is trivial ... could be worse!
- fifilura 1y ago
  > but working 3 more hours at Stewart's And working 5 more hours would get him a some better garden tools, and 20 more he could support a family of 3 And if he just got a higher paying job, he could even get a car!
  - fifilura 1y ago
    (This was obviously a image of the slippery-slope most of us fall into)
sandworm101 1y ago

s09dfhks 1y ago

In the comments on the article, the author says “we treat what we can at home, otherwise we go to Mexico and pay cash” Oy vey

antisthenes 1y ago
That says a lot more about the dysfunctional US healthcare system than it does about the author.

RajT88 1y ago

You read articles like this every so often, sure. Maybe ~13 years back I read about an indie game dev who lived in a carbon neutral home in the middle of nowhere Arizona or something. Beautiful house, hand built. Talked about how you really don't need all that much money to live - they were living on less than 20k a year from his game sales. Him and his wife were also in their 20's, and their kids I think were already a few years old when they moved to the boonies. All healthy. It's an extreme example, but this is a good read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lykov_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lykov_family

gyomu 1y ago
For anyone curious, the game dev is Jason Rohrer: https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/simpleLife.html https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/simpleLife.h... Things have changed since: "In October of 2011, we moved from Las Cruces, NM to Davis, CA. Along with all the good things listed below about Las Cruces came bad things. Vicious dogs loose on the streets (one bit my wife while biking) and in parks (I came close to getting myself shot during a confrontation with a dog owner). Crime (the little old lady next door got burgled twice in one year, once at 3 in the afternoon through her front door). After living in extremely cheap places for 8 years, I came to realize that these places are extremely cheap for a reason (because people don't want to live there if they can avoid it)."
- decimalenough 1y ago
  Zillow says the average house in Davis costs $890k. Looks like they've pretty much given up on the "life cheaply" thing.
  - gyomu 1y ago
    The main page of his website now says New Hampshire https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/ https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/
- npodbielski 1y ago
  [flagged]

noisy_boy 1y ago

These are "young people" things. The older you get, the more dependent you are on the society and it's benefits.

Barrin92 1y ago
Not close from my parents home is a small farm collective of mostly ex hippies who have been living there communally for decades with people well into their 80s now. It was so successful that the city, taking that as inspiration, ran trials of creating more autonomous senior communities that are largely self supervised, including even people with dementia. From what I heard it works extremely well, not the least because it's more dignified and keeps people engaged, active, and self reliant. The modern notion of the drooling, dependent nursing home patient is a product of our (artificially!) atomized system.

jader201 1y ago

> I honestly don't know how anyone can live out in the boonies without a car. Why would you want to live out in the boonies without owning a car? Just get a car. They’re not that expensive, you can get a used beater for not much more than an iPhone. If you don’t want a beater, you can probably afford to spend a little more with the money you save from living out in the boonies. Most people who live in the boonies owns a car.