Sleeping areas

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Areas are called sleeping areas! People come there only to sleep, and leave to pay for apartments in these residential areas. They sleep because they are tired of working, but they work to pay for the place where they sleep …

Sleeping areas are a world of singles. In them, every day is similar to the previous one. You wake up early in the morning, walk to the subway or car, and go to work. The journey takes an hour or an hour and a half. In your free time at work, you chat with colleagues and read the news, and after eight hours you come back, stopping by on the way to the nearest supermarket. On weekends, you can party in the city center or drive to the mega mall on the outskirts. Or maybe you just stay at home: why go out somewhere if you can watch your favorite TV shows thanks to broadband internet? After eight hours of sleep, you go back to work, and the circle is complete.

This is the case in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk and Yekaterinburg. In the last couple of years, it has become a commonplace to criticize the urban environment in Russia. Russian megacities are boring, unsettled and uncomfortable, and squalid neighborhoods only suppress a person. Here most of the year it is either too dirty or too cold, nothing happens. High-rise buildings are ugly piled here, there are too many traffic jams, it is too expensive to live for such a low standard of living. Here people do not communicate with each other: according to statistics, only 10% of Muscovites know their neighbors in the yard by sight, and only 20% know at least the slightest details of the life of their neighbors in the stairwell. And almost two-thirds of the townspeople are completely sure that only close relatives and friends can be trusted, and they, most likely, should not be.

It may seem like you can live in dormitory areas. Yes, it is inconvenient, difficult, expensive, but it is possible. But this is actually a lie. In dormitory areas, you do not lead your personal life - in your apartments you sleep in between work. You do not lead city life either, but only move from point A to point B and back. You don't live, you just exist. This is probably why the average Russian wants so much to isolate himself from the hostile environment, to isolate himself, to close himself in a cocoon. Trust no one, know no one - and put up as many fences as possible. And on vacation, go somewhere in Europe, where greengrocers and bakers on the street know the locals and are not afraid to sell on credit.

Jane Jacobs, in her book "The Life and Death of Big American Cities", which turned the development of urbanism in the 20th century, bluntly pointed out that social interaction is not the main thing in a city, but not houses or highways, but social interaction. Modern cities are made for communication. Only thanks to him life becomes diverse, interesting and safe. But the paradox is that Russian megacities are invented for anything but communication. As a legacy of the Soviet era, we have only "ours" and "no one's", which ends behind the doors of an apartment and a house, and public spaces have not appeared. True urban self-government is impossible without good neighborly relations and urban communities. And without it, the entire surrounding space will remain wretched and unsettled, and our life is not life, but existence.

Confrontation options:

Children

The child should take a break from contact with many people, from city air, from chlorinated water and household chemicals. In the overwhelming majority of cases, rest "on the seas" has nothing to do with the recovery of a frequently ill child, since most of the harmful factors remain, plus public catering is added and, as a rule, the living conditions are worse in comparison with home conditions.

The ideal rest for a frequently ill child looks like this (every word matters):

• summer in the village;

• inflatable pool with well water, next to a pile of sand;

• uniform - underpants, barefoot;

• restriction on the use of soap;

• feed only when he shouts: "Mom, I'll eat you!".

A dirty naked child who jumps from water to sand, begs for food, breathes fresh air and does not come into contact with many people for 3-4 weeks restores immunity damaged by city life.

You cannot move to a more natural place of residence - at least give the children the opportunity to take a break from the metropolis.

What is the move? what to live in an endangered village?

Anyone who, sitting in an office, dreams of leaving for the countryside, is faced with the question: where to get money there.

On the one hand, life in the countryside is much cheaper. Simply because there are no temptations. When the nearest store is four kilometers away, the nearest kiosk burned down two years ago, and you have to go to a restaurant in the city, money flies away at a slower rate. And on another. On the other hand, you can't live without money at all.

The main item of expenses of a city dweller who has moved to the village is repairs. It's forever. We bought a house, stripped the wallpaper from the fifties - it's time to glue and paint. Completed the renovation - we need to build a veranda. There is a veranda - the soul asks for a bathhouse. The bathhouse was erected - now a greenhouse is needed. The beauty is that renovation and construction in the village is not a disaster, but a hobby that you can do slowly and with pleasure, as money comes in.

Where do they come from?

There is a myth that there is no earnings in the village, which is why the more or less able-bodied population flees to the cities.

In fact, now everything is a little different. Today I will tell you how and where different people who come from the city get money, and where the rural aborigines get their money.

Villagers raise gobies for meat. For three hundred years they have been doing it with success. In the spring, a pretty calf is put out to graze on the grass, in the fall, a young bull is handed over to dealers, and a plasma TV is bought for the proceeds. Five bulls are quite capable of growing to the price of a domestic car. The second way to get money is to grow and impose brooms (also a centuries-old craft here), grow onions or potatoes, and hand them over to the same dealers. The earth feeds.

Some former townspeople also feed from the land. One of my neighbors keeps an apiary, another family along the same street enthusiastically breeds varietal poultry - from pheasants to turkeys. Four years ago, these city guys were well acquainted only with cats and dogs, and now they have ecologically clean living creatures breeding and multiplying at a terrible speed. And the plans are generally to create a family mini-farm. For chickens and guinea fowls, people come from Orel and Kursk. Some more settlers from the city took up milk: they buy it from the population and process it into cottage cheese, butter, and cheese. All this is sold in the city in its own pavilion. Another option for peasant labor requires some initial investment: you can buy a tractor with mowers, plows and harrows. Then all year round there will be no end to those who want you to come and plow-mow-transport. Tractor drivers are respected people here.

The second way to make money in the countryside is through construction. I have already mentioned that everyone here is doing repairs and building. Therefore, any finisher, tiler, welder or bricklayer will always be with orders and money. Local peasants are usually lazy, and therefore it is difficult to put together a vigorous, non-drinking brigade of them. But those who are not lazy earn as well as city people. A good friend of mine, a father with many children from a neighboring village, also a former office citizen, built himself a carpentry workshop and makes furniture. There is enough money for a horde of kids, for construction, and for renewing the family's vehicle fleet, and for a passion for thoroughbred horses. The furniture business is going so well that every second of those who moved in that village is doing carpentry. Others have come together and bend iron fences from a rod. Still others have bought a vibrating machine and are gradually making paving slabs and building blocks.

Some of the townspeople who have moved to the village are trying to keep their city jobs. One neighbor, a veterinarian, rebuilt his schedule for a day after three, and has been running back and forth along the “village-Voronezh” route for several years. It takes an hour to get to his work: he spent the same amount to get there from the Left Bank via traffic jams.

But to travel to the city so often is not an amateur's entertainment. Too different states are necessary for life here and there. Nevertheless, this is quite a way to feed the family.

Finally, praise the Internet, you can do virtual work in the village. Write articles and books, compose advertising texts, sculpt programs and cheat accounting. The further you go, the less important the physical location of the freelancer is. Some of the editors I write for have never seen me in their lives. This does not prevent us from fruitful cooperation, and I regularly receive my royalties.

One of my neighbors makes beautiful handmade jewelery and sells them all over the world through a website. Another knits funny hats - and they go well too.

And besides everything else, there is work in the village, which you can go to five days a week, as in the city. If you have the appropriate education, you can get a place in a hospital or paramedic center, collective farm management, at a school or at the post office.

The moral of my current column is simple: if there is a desire to earn money and the ability to learn something, no one sits in a village without money.

But in the village the very meaning of money is changing. And some of those who have moved experience such relief from the oppressive values of the consumer society that at some stage they go into asceticism. They support the hut with logs, heat it with wood, eat from the garden, pick mushrooms in the neighboring forest and work just enough to buy bread, milk and sunflower oil. And only when the food ran out. There is always one-time part-time work in a lively village: for someone to dig a drain hole, for someone to saw down dry trees in the garden. In the city, such a way of life would be almost marginal and would suggest thoughts of everyday alcoholism. And you can't have a vegetable garden there. In the village, the owners of such a lifestyle are quite respectable people who are in no hurry, do not depend on anything (perhaps only a little on the power grid), and have an amazing luxury that is almost inaccessible to the townspeople: free time and peace.