A recent trend online involves social media accounts giving aimless, despairing men advice on how to find the American Dream.
What’s noteworthy about this new brand of advice is that it urges Millennial and Gen Z males to leave the cities and venture into the heartland in search of the now-elusive middle class living and sane, attractive mate. In short, men are now advised to take the small town pill.
Perhaps even more extraordinary, this seemingly benign advice has been met with massive backlash from the young men it was meant to help.
Related: The Pharmacopeia
Maybe telling young men to take a four to eight week leave of absence and wander the land like Kane from Kung Fu is open to reasonable criticism. But what of the larger point? Is hope to be found outisde America’s urban hives?
Has the time come for Millennials and Zoomers to take the small town pill?
The original poster of the screencap above detailed his own small town odyssey, summing it up as: “Insular, suspicious locals will shun you, and rural Boomers will see you as economic and romantic compettition.”
And, oh yeah, all the methheads.
Can’t forget the methheads.
This topic hit home for me because just last week, I went on a trip to a small town in the heart of Flyover Country. The week I spent there gave me quite a culture shock.
Here are the general takeaways from my small town experience:
- People were friendlier in general
- service at almost every business was far better
- ditto the food at pretty much every restaurant, including big chains
- there was much less diversity
That last point lends support to observations we’ve made here about the decline of the American mall. The next town over—which was far larger—had a mall that was thriving by the standards of my struggling local Mammon temple.
Related: The Idea of a Mall
But yes, the town that hosted a flourishing mall and restaurants was also infested with methheads. Which goes to show there’s no earthly utopia.
And being a college town, the gentrified neighborhood around campus had its share of rainbow-haired Cultists and foreign oddballs.
The gist of the milieu dawned on me when I saw that some local girl had pressed her handprints, along with her name and the date, into the sidewalk in front of the local Godfathers Pizza. My hometown once had Godfathers with cozy ambience and a respectable arcade that made it a prime teen hangout back in the day. But ill-conceived renovations done in 1997 precipitated the store’s demise.
Guess what date was written in the concrete outside that small-town Godfathers.
Related: Ground Zero
The presence of thriving businesses that had folded in my town around the turn of the millennium, the 80s rock pumped over most of their sound systems, and the fateful year 1997 etched into the landscape itself …
All of those elements combined to form a place frozen in time right at Cultural Ground Zero.
So if you want the next best thing to a time machine, hop in the car and melt into rural America for a while.
But even when you take the small town pill, it’s hard not to catch glimpses of the incoming shockwave on the horizon.
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After seeing that thread, I’m a little more weary about going small town. Make no mistake, I’m 100% going to try and do it, but at least I can be more aware of some of the pitfalls.
It’s a shame underneath the small town charm is the rot of drugs and high school mentality of “us vs them”. One of my friends was working with a religious order in the middle of no-where, LA and it was a pleasant little town. Looked like a nice place to be. One problem: sky high crime and troubled youth. Even John A. Douglas commented that in our area (we’re a stone’s throw from each other), that our locals are kind upfront, but look at our local facebook pages and you’ll see the same kind of vitriol towards others as described in TebetanBasketWeaver’s response.
Yeah, no place is perfect, but I’d think with enough work once the boomers are gone and some small towns could be revived enough to be a pleasant place to live. Though I do also question if that is a pipe dream too. In South LA, lots of old (small) towns are slowly dying off turning into ghost towns. The demographics occupying those places create high crime and drug usage, plus many of the main jobs have dried up, and the youth are moving the the cities. If you’re lucky, you’re a person who works at the highly exclusive plants in the area, but that’s it. There’s a huge disparity among the type of people down there.
I’m lucky to be in the burbs, but that is slowly starting to get overcrowded. God be willing, I can move to a good place that isn’t a city, but also not Meth Town, USA (TM).
In my experience with small towns (in the Western Virginia and Tennessee regions), I see a lack of Catholic churches, people with an average BMI over 30, and a surplus of dollar stores. It’s definitely more peaceful and friendly, and you can be in touch with nature, but it’s not a place I would settle down and raise a Catholic family. It almost seems like a place where conservatives go to die rather than fight. Hence, the Oliver Anthony “Rich Men North of Richmond” song.
Red state conservatives: “You purple-haired snowflakes can have your woke cities! You ain’t touching our country music or our guns! Let’s go Brandon! Hawk Tuah!”
Blue state technocrats: “Welp, I guess we’ll just have to make do with the Ivy League universities, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Capital Hill.”
The lack of Catholic churches is probably a regional thing. I live in the upper midwest and most small towns (I’m talking 2000 or less people for “small town”) have a Catholic church. If they do not, there will be one within a fifteen minute drive. There are more bars in small towns around here than churches, but still plenty of churches.
I don’t see true dollar stores until getting to a population of 20,000 or so, though of course there are dollar general stores in many towns. But then again, there are still locally run and owned grocery stores or corner stores in many of them as well, and I don’t see those at all in larger cities. As for fat people, sure they are there, but I don’t notice a larger percentage than when I am in places like the Twin Cities, and you see more people who are obviously fit from working farm or construction jobs.
Unfortunately COVID restrictions killed off many local businesses, especially diners, so that many towns might only have something like a Subway or McDonalds for eating options now. The restaurants that survived tend to be top notch.
I had a friend who lived in Chicago for many years visit me, and he said that the thing that was the biggest shock was the fact that people actually acknowledge the existence of others. For example if someone looks lost people will give him directions, and people will at least say “sorry, I’m not interested” when approached by someone selling goods in a mall or wherever. Living in Chicago taught him to just walk by anyone he didn’t know without a word or glance.
Unfortunately crime is becoming more and more of an issue. Some of it is drug related, some of it is spillover from large cities (especially for towns within an hour drive of a big city) and some (most?) of it is caused by importation of immigrants. Much of rural Minnesota was flooded with Somali immigrants by the government so that can be an issue.
I know a lot of Catholics in my archdiocese that wanted to move to Front Royal, VA because there was a parish that still offered the TLM there. Unfortunately the violent crime rate seems to be all over the place. It’s been below the national average the past couple of years but was way out of hand in 2020 during the summer of Floyd.
Also West Virginia is one of the top 3 obese states in America whereas Illinois is about middle of the pack. So I guess some small towns are going to be better than others. Speaking from experience, it’s pretty cooked in WV.
One thing you’ll find about most small towns is that you will never really be accepted as one of them unless your parents were born there, even if you marry in.
But this is ultimately still just more white flight, and eventually the diversity will come for your small town too. Then what? My own home regions’ towns are losing their American diners and getting mexican grills in their place.
“One thing you’ll find about most small towns is that you will never really be accepted as one of them unless your parents were born there, even if you marry in.”
Not true. I live in a small town and I married into the community. I’m not shunned or anything of the sort.
The rest of your crap is just doomer nonsense.
I would vastly prefer to live in a smalltown. But the church thing is not optional, and it is hard to find a place that has both available jobs in my husband’s specialty, and a church we can attend.
Looking at current growth rates… I think we’ll see some new parishes starting up in the next 5-10 years that will reach further into the hinterlands. But we’re not there yet. And I guess somebody’s got to be the pioneer– those churches won’t happen unless someone moves in and takes on the project of starting them.