In Defense of the Midwest

When I think of the Midwest these days, I think of St Louis/Ferguson.

I think of the price for housing and how it reflects demand.

I live in Seattle, so my viewpoint is slightly different, but, eh. I used to live in a rural place, and I don't plan to go back, for a long time, if ever.

Let me pick apart this article a bit, and demonstrate how skew these high points are from things I care about.

* Housing cost. That's where the pay difference comes in. And my $800/mo in student loans doesn't change if I live on the coast or in the middle of nowhere. So it's actually better for me, because the proportional cost of fixed payments goes way down.

* Broadway shows, okay. But wouldn't you rather be in a vibrant place where creation happens, than be the "second hand"?

* Same for music. Do you want to be in the place where creation happens, or a pit stop on the tour?

* Sportsball. Meh.

* Foodwise, my mind was blown by the quality difference between St. Louis and Seattle/SF when I visited recently. Maybe I hit the wrong joints, but STL had terrible food. Absolutely shockingly worse. I'll have to shake down some people for more reccs next time.

* Seattle is incredibly friendly and polite. Drivers in the city are probably the friendliest I've ever come across. While it retains the historical Scandinavia reserve, people are really just decent here in general. SF is famous for its collaboration between businesses.

* I don't even understand the idea of wanting to turn off work on a daily basis. I left that attitude behind me when I last worked fast food. The 9-5er attitude is "yuck".

* The author is generally ignoring the intense network effects of having zillions of nerds in the same city.

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Anyway. Not that TFA is wrong. But its priorities are very skew from mine.

I want to live in a place where technology is a significant lifestyle, where nerds are your neighbor, where programmers aren't weirdos. I want to live in a place with tons of cultures colliding and the resultant froth. I want to live in a place where there are new companies forming weekly. I want to live in a place where the optimism is in the air, where young people are flooding around the town with new ideas, new thinking, and crazy things no sane adult would do, and tech is in the heart of all that. Where the next thing is being done at 3 in the morning fuelled by coffee, math, and being young and foolish. Maybe that means I never will leave Seattle/SF/The-next-big-thing until I retire, but I'm okay with that.

I agree. I grew up in Ohio, and to me, Pittsburgh and the rest of western PA is part of the Midwest. It has the same farmland/steel-town culture that Ohio does.

Obviously Philadelphia is not, so I would argue that the dividing line is somewhere in the middle of the state.

I work remote from a small city in the Midwest and easily bring in > 200k servicing select clients from throughout the country. It could be a lot greater if I had any interest in subcontracting/hiring or growing.

While I occasionally visit SF I always get a good chuckle when my friend that lives there talks about how expensive things are and the pains of living there.

This article is particularly relevant to me. I’m originally from a suburb of Cleveland less than half an hour from where the OP works, and I’m currently an undergraduate at Harvard. There are definitely some differences between the areas, and I can’t say that I have the overwhelmingly positive vision of the Midwest that the author of this post has. My feeling is that people in the Midwest are more content with the status quo — they understand what a comfortable life is, and they seek to achieve that. Life is very safe and sheltered, especially growing up there, and I feel that my peers from elsewhere have been exposed to so much more of life than I have.

The Midwest also lacks the intellectual vibrancy that a place like Boston does. It just seems to me that there are overwhelming concentration of smart, ambitious people from the coasts compared to those from the Midwest.

Personally, I love it here in Boston, way more than I do at home. Ohio was a good, safe place to grow up, and I imagine that it’s a great place to raise a family. However, I couldn’t imagine spending any more of my life there than I already have without dying from boredom or a creeping sense of mediocrity.