I've commented (probably too much) to argue with the harshest critics of this piece, but I am surprised to not have seen much this criticism which is my main one: Supposing I've made peace with the main gist of this: Cut living expenses to a point where you can work ¼ or so of the time most of us spend working by living somewhere cheap and not being so materialistic. The missing piece here is social connections. Fami…
That's the other unspoken side of the boomer-emulation argument, too. People's access to the world when boomers were buying houses and raising families was much less. Their families and friends were already close because few, if any, of them left where they were from (except to get drafted into wars). In some of those who left, they did so to enable the rest to follow. These things just don't happen anymore. To find…
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This doesn’t apply to the U.S. or Canada, nor has it ever since their foundings, possibly excepting some natives. The American frontier was declared closed by 1890, long before the post-WW2 population surge to California. Before that, New Englanders left farmland to settle the Midwest. Later came the Great Migration of mostly Black Southerners to northern cities. Anglophone North America has never been a peasant society where families remained rooted for generations.