The other side of the village idyll. Afterword

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

The final part of the critical cycle about village life. On the advantages of the village in comparison with the city, and final statistics and conclusions.

Part 13 - "the advantages of the village versus the city"

It makes sense to say a few words about why the mood is born in general, “but if I leave everything and go to the village, it will be better there”. Fortunately, a certain selection of statements can be made.

There were quite indicative comments in the style - “and here I live in the village, it takes me only half an hour to get to the city to work, and my friend is in the very center of the city and it takes two hours to get there”. The situation seems to be quite true - but there are several nuances. As already noted, a village, from where you can get to the city in half an hour, is a suburb, and it is very doubtful that in terms of ecology there were fundamental differences. Not even life, when you drive every day in traffic jams (or choke on trains) to the city - how is such a life so fundamentally different from the city? You spend most of your time in the city anyway.

Much more revealing is the example of a friend from this statement who drives a few hours before work, although he declares that he lives in the city. Let's think - why is this happening? Actually, there are not many options. One of the options - a person lives in a remote area of the city or in an area with poor transport accessibility. Another option is that the person did not find a closer job. Most likely, both options are true.

Once I had a chance to talk with the head of one office, which was located quite remotely, outside the city. And then the person said: “When we are hired, we immediately ask where the person lives. If he lives far away, we often don't even talk further. Because there is experience with such employees, they quit quickly. Therefore, we take those who live nearby. Actually, this is the simple wisdom - in a big city you can and should look for a job that will be close (it is often impossible to find close, but close is quite realistic). Banality - but judging by the comments, this banality does not reach people.

And exactly the same with remote areas with poor accessibility. More than once or twice the author had a chance to talk with people who sadly remarked: “Here, they bought, they promised that a metro would be built here (a monorail, a minibus would be allowed) - but they didn’t do anything, so we get there every day painfully”. Sometimes this kind of waiting for the metro continues for decades. Here you just need to maintain a sobriety of thinking. And choose for yourself - to buy an apartment more expensive / worse with good transport accessibility, or better / cheaper, but the devil is on the horns with the expectation that then, literally tomorrow it will not be near the devil, but the new center of the world. Perhaps it will, but most likely not. To believe the developers in this case will be a complete analogue of believing the words of townhouse sellers about life in the countryside (and for the sake of refutation of which this cycle began).

Again banality - and again this banality is surprisingly incomprehensible to people. Because there are a lot of reviews with such or similar claims. For example, “the author advises to walk in the city park, but there are no parks in the city, it’s at least an hour to get to the nearest one, the author is lying!”. The author is not lying - it is the commentator who bought housing as far away from the park as possible, and instead of blaming himself for this decision, he scolds the city and dreams of the village.

Or a wonderful comment - "in the city the work is monotonous, but in the countryside it is varied." It is not a monotonous job in the city, dear commentator, it was you personally who chose a monotonous job for yourself, so hateful that even digging potatoes in the ground seems to you better.

And there are many comments about crowded cities. There is truth here - the sealing building before everyone's eyes. Sometimes this building takes on absolutely hellish forms. Here it is only worth advising not to buy in microdistricts under construction (excellent at the construction stage, they can be further compacted twice easily), not to buy where it is possible to stick a turret between the houses. But in general, it is a growing pain. And this, in any case, is preferable to abandoned houses and abandoned villages, which the author has seen in considerable numbers.

They also write that the ghetto is in the city. Well, from the news - “A Petersburg resident burned down a village in the Leningrad region, suspecting there a“gang of mujahideen”. Using a mixture of gasoline and oil, he destroyed 9 out of 11 houses, and also lit fires under the buildings on stilts, rammed a fire engine and escaped, making a blockage on the road with a chainsaw.” An extreme case, yes, but by no means rare. Although the cottage sellers will sing to you about the return to land and family homesteads. There is much more order in the city.

Well, then I will try to summarize.

Part 14 - "statistics and conclusions"

And a small summary on a small series of articles. The topic turned out to be highly controversial, so I will try to draw conclusions as carefully as possible. That is, not my own conclusions - I will rely more on statistics. And yes, gentlemen, if you don’t like these conclusions, you don’t need to write in the style of a third-grader “you’re lying !!!”. If you have something to refute - bring your statistics, well, or write an angry letter to (sportloto) to the statistics committee that you are unhappy with their data.

Where is it better to live - in the city or in the countryside? There is no unequivocal answer here, for someone in the city, for someone in the village. But if you put the question a little differently - where is it better for the majority to live, then the answer will be more obvious. In the town. At the beginning of the 19th century, there were 4% of the townspeople in Russia - and now it is around 74%. The migration flow from village to city is so obvious that only very stubborn citizens will dispute it. Millions of people go to the city from the countryside (from the Russian village, from the Caucasian, from the Central Asian - and in other countries, exactly the same). Downshifters, sectarians, and quite a few other people go from town to village. There is also, as it is called, “dacha de-urbanization”, when people go to their dacha or live in the suburbs and work in the city. Economically, such people are associated with the city and are part of it. And they work for the development of the city, but not the village. Sometimes they write about deurbanization as a property of the post-industrial economy - from what I personally saw, I got a slightly different impression - in the Western countries I saw, the city center is degrading, life becomes uncomfortable (well, housing is expensive), and middle-class people are moving to the suburbs. This is not de-urbanization - this is the growth of the city, the transformation of the city into an agglomeration.

Exactly the same can be answered to the sacramental question - "where is it better for children, in the city or in the countryside?" A simple answer - if the children are good in the village, why would they leave for the city exactly at the moment when they acquired, albeit conditional, but economic independence. The fish is looking for where it is deeper, and the person is looking for where it is better. And the direction of migration gives us an answer to the question “where is better”. Well, or you can put forward an alternative explanation - all the fools and victims of mass zombies, their village happiness do not understand and fly into the city like moths on fire. It remains only to note that this hypothetical zombification, apparently, is very widespread, in all countries and in all languages of mankind.

There is a lot of controversy about rural ecology. There is a lot of controversy because ecology is being elevated into a kind of fetish and independent value. We will take a more pragmatic look. We need ecology for a healthy and long life. Where do they live longer? Statistics give us the answer - in the city.

The tablet shows that they have lived in the city much longer for at least the last 40 years, and the villagers have never lived much longer. Hence a simple and unpleasant conclusion for individual citizens - the city's ecosystem is more favorable for humans. This is due to more developed medicine, and more comfortable living conditions, well, culture in the form of theaters and shopping centers - apparently prolongs life. If you do not agree that urban people live longer - write to statistics.

And adherents of returning people to villages are very active in their fantasies. Actually, there are only two options for the mass return of people to the village. The first one is to convince people that the “cherry tree garden” is a national idea and a dream of all progressive mankind. And there is a second way - to drive everyone into the village without asking their opinion. We are now observing the first path in Ukraine. It turns out badly - the population is leaving the country not only from the countryside. The second path was implemented in Cambodia (Kampuchea) by Paul Pot. All were expelled to the village and the cities were closed. It turned out very badly too.

Yes, but in the village the food is better and the potatoes are their own? Let's turn to the statistics data here too. Unfortunately, I have not seen data for our country, but recently they came out in the United States, where statistics say that for the first time there are more people who prefer to eat in restaurants and cafes than those who prefer to eat at home. There has been a century-long trend - the number of catering consumers has been growing for a hundred years in a row. Once again, it's not that people don't want to grow food at home with their own hands - they don't even want to cook from the store. And if you say that the United States is not quite an indicator, then exactly the same thing was observed even in the poor countries of Asia. They eat in street food, poor people, but they also have access to it. What does this mean - at least that all these delights of digging in the garden and eating environmentally friendly potatoes are needed and important for a fairly small number of people. If people even cook less and less at home, then even more so few people will grow. There are amateurs - but they are more often people of the older generation. Or some small, but aggressive and noisy minority. Don't believe me? count the number of pizzerias, bars, canteens and shawarma outlets in your area. It's not about whether it's useful or not. It's about a trend in human behavior.

Well, a simple conclusion - when someone begins to sing in your ears about the need to return to the village to the roots and origins and ancestral estates - do not be lazy, and at least take a look at the wiki on the Cambodian-Cambodian experience in this matter. Or from the experience of Johnstown. Very sobering, you know. And as for the personal choice of the place of residence - it's up to everyone to decide. Just realize one simple thing for yourself - if you yourself did not live in the village, then you should not listen to numerous (and mostly false, as we see) songs about ecology and family estates. Rent a house in the wilderness, live half a year with your farm and your labor, and you will understand a lot for yourself. Most importantly, do not rush to sell a city apartment, no matter how the singers of cottage construction persuade you. Life in the countryside is not easy and is very different from pastorals, it is not a fact that you will like it, and even more so your children.