This Is Your Life in the Midwest

> ...you dream about what your life would have been like if you left the Midwest after college and moved to Silicon Valley or Seattle. You think about how much money they make out there. Then you remember that money doesn’t buy happiness and you’re content with settling down and having a family...

You try out cost of living calculations and they say you'd need to make 250% your current salary on the west coast. Annoyed at the seemingly impossible move, you tell yourself they'll be rioting over water shortages soon anyways. After all, do you even want to be near the coast when the oceans rise?

I think I must miss the point of articles like this. Is this author trying to warn us of downward spirals he's seen? Impart his priorities upon us?

There are a lot of articles here that try to isolate and analyze pivotal traits or habits. This is the opposite, throwing everything you can imagine into one big, confused soup of "what caused what?".

It could also be that this is a common mindset, but I just haven't met these people.

I just wish the suburban experiment would die already: it's quite a hellish existence to have to endure, just because you didn't take the time to learn about all the odd artificial incentives that push people toward that unproductive and isolating pattern of life.

To take this a step further, you don't even have to be in a substantial city to get the walkable atmosphere. Granted you'll suffer a smaller variety of restaurants, but there are towns of just 10k or 20k that manage to get things right, and some of them are really cool places.

It's really all about suburbia. It's isolating, expensive, and unproductive. The places that come to grips with this fact soon (or already) will face a much less painful contraction in the future. And they won't find themselves with a bunch of impoverished people stuck out in suburbs that no one else will live in.

Having felt the way the author expresses in this article, I can honestly say the sentiment expressed here has nothing to do with the suburbs, the Midwest, or having a corporate job. It has everything to do with settling and accepting the status quo. I could list a number of things the person here could do, but seriously, this reads like someone who is not happy with his current situation but does not want to put the effort into changing it.

Having read the inspiration article, I chuckled at the seemingly satiristic tone.

Then I read this one and cried. There's a lot of truth here (I live in WI).

>You try out cost of living calculations and they say you'd need to make 250% your current salary on the west coast. Annoyed at the seemingly impossible move, you tell yourself they'll be rioting over water shortages soon anyways. After all, do you even want to be near the coast when the oceans rise?

And this. This is so true.