The Simple Life in the City

Contra the American Fantasy of "Moving to the Country"

This piece arose as a response to this note that came up on my feed recently. My response quickly became unreasonably long, and I decided that along that fuzzy line between long note and short piece, I’d rather post more short pieces.

I want to acknowledge upfront that Emily never uses the phrase “the simple life,” in her note, and I don’t want to be construed as putting words in her mouth or arguing with something she’s not saying—I’m just musing aloud on a tangent, with her note as a jumping off point.

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Sometimes I think I yearn for a more agrarian life simply because it would mean not having to go places and drive all of the time… I feel like when the days are broken up into pick up here, errand there, trip here, meeting there….nothing really gets done and it contributes to a sense of purposelessness. 

Alternatively, a day spent at home, focused, determined, not pulled in every direction both metaphorically and geographically….much gets done and my sense of purpose is renewed.

A lot of people are yearning for more of the simple life. And for some reason, in the American mind, simplicity is overwhelmingly equated with rural / agrarian. I really wholeheartedly relate to this desire for simplicity. I love Emily’s phrasing of not wanting to be “pulled in every direction both metaphorically and geographically…” But that’s precisely why I choose to live in the city¹.

A Day You Don’t Have to Leave the House™️ might be more luxurious in a bigger home. But on most days, there will still be meetings and errands. Rural life means all those destinations you need to access on a regular basis are further away and less convenient. When I have somewhere to be in the city, on the other hand, the destination is close at hand. A walk helps clear my head, and connects me to my neighborhood on a human scale.²

The simple pleasures of walking in the city

In a human-scale neighborhood where errands can be accomplished on foot, a full day of errands can feel like a day at home, because the whole neighborhood is home. There’s no frazzled hopping in and out of the car to five different destinations, it’s just a peaceful stroll with a few stops along the way. The world is at your doorstep, instead of every interaction with the outside world being mediated through the automobile. That friction of “really, getting in the car again?” never sat right with me in the suburbs.³

I’m sure to many, part of the appeal of the rural fantasy is getting away from the “hustle and bustle” of the city—to that I have two possible interpretations of what people are actually trying to escape. Addison Del Mastro has written about the perception of places being crowded being driven much more by cars than by people. Driving in traffic is stressful in a way walking in a crowd isn’t. Driving on a high speed, multi-lane road is genuinely one of the most dangerous things Americans do on a regular basis, and even a minor fender bender can require expensive repairs or the hassle of dealing with the insurance company. Having to drive in traffic or squeeze through a busy parking lot leaves a lingering feeling of stress—the kind of hustle and bustle you yearn to escape from. The hustle and bustle of a busy farmer’s market, on the other hand, is perfectly pleasant.

The other “hustle and bustle” I believe many want to escape from is actually much more psychological and cultural—they want to escape from workaholism, keeping up with the Joneses, gossip, envy, consumerism. Well, for that I just have this to say: “wherever you go, there you are.” If you want to escape from these problems, you have to look within. Comparison is a natural part of human social psychology. At some point you have to choose contentment and gratitude. Living your values is worth the occasional sting of feeling like your career is less prestigious or your vacations are less cool than someone else’s.

Some may feel the attraction to rural living on the basis of being closer to nature or more in touch with our forebears living on a farm⁴. But if you want to stake out that argument, I’d argue that cities are just as “natural” of human environments as farms. The original condition of humanity is to be nomadic hunter-gatherers. Under those conditions, the entire idea of a “Day You Don’t Have to Leave the House™️” doesn’t exist. Farming was necessary for humans to settle down, and in the central node of regions we settled, we naturally built cities to facilitate trade, administration, the transmission of knowledge, and so many of the other things that make us human. To my mind, the city is to the human as the hive is to the bee—it truly makes us who we are as a species. Agriculture and urbanization co-evolved. Without farms, the city couldn’t sustain itself, but without the city, there was no reason for the farm to arise.

If we really want to commit to the “appeal to nature” argument though, countless generations of human evolution went into giving us the ability to walk basically all day—this is baked into our hunter-gatherer DNA. Walking for transportation in daily life is good for physical health, mood regulation, and thinking. I also found that walking around in busy public places was excellent low-pressure exposure therapy back when I was more socially anxious, and it’s great to run into people I know while out and about and be able to easily stop and chat—that can’t really happen when you hurtle past someone you know at 40mph in the car.

One embodiment of the fantasy of the simple life in Anglosphere pop culture is the Shire. But it’s worth noting, Frodo and Sam live in the village, not out on isolated farms. The differences between a village, town, and city are differences of degree, not of kind. A city like San Francisco is a mosaic of neighborhoods, where each neighborhood is an urban village in itself.

I don’t have any illusions of convincing people to not want what they want. I personally don’t think the simple life is to be found on a big property far away from the stores, amenities, and community you need. If you acknowledge the true tradeoffs of rural living and still yearn for the countryside, more power to you. I just think it’s worth distinguishing between wanting the real thing, and wanting the marketing pitch.

1. “City” in this whole piece is fully interchangeable with “walkable small town,” so please make that substitution if you’re viscerally repulsed by cities. I’m generally referring to the traditional development pattern, as opposed to the post-war “suburban experiment.”

2. Not to mention that not having to worry about car maintenance, insurance, registration, etc. is a whole bunch of errands and mental overhead that I simply don’t have to worry about. Simplicity.

3. Of course, most of the years I lived in the suburbs, I was a child and couldn’t drive. But in the limited times where I’ve lived in suburban settings as an adult and had access to a car, that friction of having to get in the car tended to make me far more of a homebody.

4. Or, let’s be real, the simulacrum of a farm. Most people with this fantasy don’t want to run a commercial farm for a living or live a truly subsistence life style. They just want to have a big garden and be far away from their neighbors, while still living funding a rich lifestyle with remote work or investment income. No shade against that, I just want to be real that the fantasy rural life is dependent on money pouring in from the economic productivity of cities.