How many posters here have lived in rural areas? How was life there?

How many posters here have lived in rural areas? How was life there?

I'm curious about life in rural North America, and want to hear from anyone who's spent time there.

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youtube.com/watch?v=CvhchxHUCA0
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I lived for about 20 years in the middle of a forest.

What was it like? Please go into details.

I've lived in rural northern Ontario for 19 years, what would you like to know?

-Do you have internet?
-Do you get lonely?
-Do you like it more than urban life?
-What are your interactions with wildlife like?
-What do you do for a living?

Boring but comfy. My old house was a lot like the one in the OP. My bedroom window had a view of a huge forest.

I lived in rural Texas and rural Wisconsin. It fucking blows. There's nothing to do, the only jobs are at Walmart and everyone who has ny sense wants to move. My father worked remotely and dragged us to these places for god knows what reason. Every day is tedious, the communities are close knit and do not accept outsiders and you are disconnected from the real world. I now live and work in DC and for as many problems a metropolitan area may have it is loads better than rural Texas I can assure you. God forbid you're gay and living in a rural part of the south (I'm straight but come le see the problems those people go thru.

How hard is it to live like that in Canada? (Not the expensive house, just in general)
Does this documentary feel like small-town America to you?
youtube.com/watch?v=CvhchxHUCA0
In the south, it's just chain stores and depressing land with poor infrastructure as far as the eye can see. I was hoping for something a bit prettier in the West, but I don't know if there's still any places left untouched.

Yes, but we had dial up till like 2011 and still have shitty satellite internet.
Yes, it can be difficult as a teenager especially if you don't have a car, but you find other things to do. I had a close, large family though which was nice we did lots of things together.
Yes, I have to go back to the "big city" of 100,000 in a few days to go back to school and I hate it there. Luckily I have only one more semester. Too much noise, light, and traffic, I can never get a good sleep. Also I don't like leaving my friends and family, and there's nothing to do here, at least the things I like to do like campfires, go on quiet peaceful walks in nature, fishing, snowmobiling whenever you want, etc. Though it is nice not having to split wood for the fire and being able to walk to the store.
We had lots of animals around our place. Deer, moose, raccoons, porcupines, snapping turtles, foxes, bullfrogs, bats, owls, eagles, blue jays, moose, fishers, Canada geese, regular ducks, also we had a beaver family in the river in our backyard (pic related though you can barely see it).
I work in a grocery store.

That sounds really nice. Do you ever think about living somewhere else?

>I now live and work in DC and for as many problems a metropolitan area may have it is loads better than rural Texas I can assure you.

I'm from rural Ohio (I graduated with 91 people in my class) and now live in the 14th largest city in the US and will never go back.

Some parts of the south are ok. But I would not call them untouched. If that's what you really want - an untouched land as opposed to rural culture - parts of Montana, Wyoming or maybe some distant parts of Colorado or Nevada might work. By rural I thought you meant agrarian and southern - something akin to Arkansas or northeast Texas which I regard as hell on earth.

I guess I wouldn't mind living closer to the city I'm studying in but I'd have to live in a rural area on the outskirts. But I really like being around where I grew up, being near my family, and running into people I've known forever. There's something to be said for that small town community aspect, but I understand it's not for everyone.

I'm curious about both isolated living and rural communities. From what I gather, everyone hates the latter, so I'm curious why past the obvious like lack of job opportunities.
Good for you, man. Sounds like you lucked out.

Why not just buy a keep wrangler or 4tunner and drive route 50 all the way to California? I think you'll get a good sense of the country from that.

Driving is scary desu.

Then you're not going to like rural or isolated areas. How exactly do you think people get around? By horse?

Do you go fishing?

Not as if it's anything more than a distant fantasy. I just wanted to learn more about your lives.

> Do you have internet?

used to download season six of game of thrones with 2G in grandma's village
took 4 hours to download new episodes in 480p

beside this, it's super comfy

I live in rural Indiana, about 20 miles from the nearest good-sized town. I get internet by tethering my phone, so LTE speeds (not too bad, lightyears better than the old dial-up we had until a few years back). I'm not lonely in the slightest as I life with my wife of 15 years, and I much prefer living out here than living in a city. As for wildlife, there's tons around here. Maximum comfy.

Was it hard to obtain that lifestyle? How close are your neighbors?

Rural areas have closed communities you are not welcome to join.

Rural areas can be comfy if you know enjoy your own company and dont expect to get entertained by someone else. If you want to have human interaction and a career then dont move to a rural area.

It could feel dangerous live in a rural area. If something happens to you there might not be any help available. If you dont have any medical condition and you are in a healthy size then it's alright

Not too hard. I went to college, as did my wife, and I work for a soulless multi-billion dollar multinational corporation.

One more bump

I lived in patagonia. I don't know if you care though.

Sure, tell me about it.

My neighbors have a bunch of animals that spread fleas and ticks everywhere, and you can smell their pigs' shit. We still live real close to the town

It's nice enough, people still leave their doors unlocked at night and the whole region is negligected by the centralized government in Buenos Aires, so nothing ever happens here.
Nice place to work and raise kids, terrible for teenages and young adults since it's boring as fuck.

*neglected
*teenagers

phoneposting is the worst

What do you do for a living?

My reserve is in the forests of northern alberta. Grew up half city have bush

I moved to Buenos Aires (largest city in the country) to attend university. But I visit my parents every summer break though it's a 1500 miles long ass trip.

canada is pretty great for rural life. if you avoid the prairies then you'll probably be somewhere with lots of different terrain: lakes, mountains, beaches, woods, etc.

bonus is that you can still be completely isolated from everything still have a decent sized town less than half an hour away if you want. so you're not totally screwed in the winter if it's real stormy.

i grew up in a town of about 1,000 people. almost everyone was a farmer or a fisherman. it was actualy pretty nice though compared to living in the city. actually had a sense of community. my neighbours were always dropping by to give us huge buckets of lobster and crab in the summer. people always made awesome skating rinks in their backyards in the winter. one guy rigged his lawnmower into a zamboni and we could actually ride around and clean the ice.

forgot to include shitty pic

I come from a small alpine village with barely 1000 people. Now I'm studying in Vienna which has like 2 million people.

I'm counting the days until I'm done with university and can leave this place again. I think people who were born in a city don't know how comfy life can be without all the concrete, the noise, the crime and the scum.

I think many have an idea of it. It's just quite difficult to give it a try.

cree?

You people should join Manitoba or something. I'm sick of tax dollars bleeding from the GTA to pay for welfare checks and unnecessary infrastructure in the north.

What does rural mean to you?
I got the feeling ti means something entirely different for you than what it means in Germany (or England and the Netherlands)

It can be "rural" only relative to the rest of your country, that's fine.

Okay, so when I was growing up and realized that I am living in a shitty small town and not the whole world is exactly the same, I wanted to move to Berlin and started daydreaming about my awesome life in a big city. I also got on the internet and searched for friends in bigger cities so I could visit them.
Learning that my family lived in bumfuck nowhere for no apparent reason played also a big part in realizing that my parents are stupid and don't really cared about my emotional well-being by refusing to move to one of the many cities to choose from and letting me starve intellectually and socially

Surely rural life in Germany has some advantages, no?

There were no foreigners except those who adapted to the local way of life and had to be decent people since they had no community.

it took me only 5 minutes by foot to school, but others had to take a 30 minute bus ride

There were many lakes, woods and bike paths which were easily accessible

really not much, I disliked the local culture since it revolved about being the German equivalent to a hick or a try-hard highschool jock and there is hardly any possibility to change your social standing once you are labelled a weirdo

Shit im a meme

Why do you care about what it'd be like being gay if you're not gay? Are you gonna hate on an ethnostate like lithuania cause "imagine what it'd be like to be a negro!"? You're just not cut out for the country boi.

>There were no foreigners
You meet one, you meet them all. Curious why are you interested in meeting one since where I live there are mexicans, guatemalans, indians, chinese, vietnamese, korean, portuguese, poles, russians, etc.

>it took me only 5 minutes by foot to school
use a bike?

If you don't care about having a real exciting life, it's great. If you're a bored kid you're going to hate it. Seriously the kids complain constantly, except for those who are mysteriously fine with it.

If you have no family around there - if you just move into the area - everyone will silently wonder what the hell is wrong with you. If you do have family then you have a reason to be there, and everyone's curiosity will be immediately sated. If you (as in my unfortunate case) have a family with drug, arson, instrument fraud, resisting arrest, etc felony rap sheets that go back decades, then it won't be a good situation even then. Everyone will know why you're there - but your family will be a constant problem one way or another. Either they'll like you or hate you, and those are both dangerous.

If you don't like mudding and target shooting then I don't know what the hell you'll do all day. Video games, I guess, but c'mon. There's all those empty roads to drive down.

Small town gossip is a real problem. If you live "in town" then that'll still only be a few people, and once a bad story gets going someone's going to get into shit with someone. It might be you. If you truly live outside even the nearest small town, then you will absolutely have no one around. Buying milk will have to be a once a week thing.

If the local police or sherrifs think you have money then they will shake you down incessantly, especially if you're an out of towner. IME they'll leave you alone otherwise, but the next county over the idiots will ticket you every time you drive through. No matter how little money you have. No matter what your driving is really like. It's gotten so bad that state governments are trying to get them to stop doing that, stop making all their municipal money off of tickets, and it just isn't working. You might actually be able to scare them off if you make a stink about it for a few years, but in the meantime you'll be out the money and the hours driving to court.

Rice farming and small business, nothing much elsewhere.