For part of my childhood, my family lived in a fairly remote area right at the start of the Appalachian mountains. The nearest "restaurant" was a gas station 30 minutes away by highway.
I've never quite cottoned on to why we moved there, but it seems to have been a combination of my parents desire to buy a home and, not making much money, headed away from the nearest city until the real estate prices became affordable. This combined with a strong sort of (what I'll call) anti-social tendencies on the part of my father (who'd probably describe it more as a desire to be a self-made person with lots of individual freedoms and not having to deal with all the negotiations of living near other people). The people who lived near us seemed to be a mix of people like my parents who just wanted lots of personal space and privacy and were willing to deal with all the time and money wastes that come with that lifestyle, and generational locals who were often very poor (several of my neighbors didn't even have running water in their homes, still had outhouses and often hunted for the majority of their protein and family calories).
I personally hated it and ran into the city as I could afford as quickly as I could. But not that I'm getting older I'm also starting to want to remove the hassle of dealing with neighbors and am thinking of looking for a new place to live with more privacy. One difference, I'm much more affluent than my parents and am instead trying to find the lifestyle I want using raw monetary power to live closer in to the local urban centers.
I've never quite cottoned on to why we moved there, but it seems to have been a combination of my parents desire to buy a home and, not making much money, headed away from the nearest city until the real estate prices became affordable. This combined with a strong sort of (what I'll call) anti-social tendencies on the part of my father (who'd probably describe it more as a desire to be a self-made person with lots of individual freedoms and not having to deal with all the negotiations of living near other people). The people who lived near us seemed to be a mix of people like my parents who just wanted lots of personal space and privacy and were willing to deal with all the time and money wastes that come with that lifestyle, and generational locals who were often very poor (several of my neighbors didn't even have running water in their homes, still had outhouses and often hunted for the majority of their protein and family calories).
I personally hated it and ran into the city as I could afford as quickly as I could. But not that I'm getting older I'm also starting to want to remove the hassle of dealing with neighbors and am thinking of looking for a new place to live with more privacy. One difference, I'm much more affluent than my parents and am instead trying to find the lifestyle I want using raw monetary power to live closer in to the local urban centers.