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Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's a technology issue. Remote work has been possible for years. Many people just don't want to work from home, for a whole myriad of reasons. Likewise, if I am feeling lonely the last thing I want is to confront a dystopian reality of telecommunications being my best option because I live in the sticks and society has forgotten about me.

I know it may be a bit tropey but Ready Player One book did a great job of portraying how something like that could destroy what it is to feel part of a community in the real world. Even if you step outside of your little comms den for the day, no one else has and there is no one to talk to.

It happens now with social media. People spend all day clicking about, then they stop and take a moment to realise none of it actually happened, it's just text and daydreams, and they are alone in their house again.

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The promise of telecommuting for me isn't living three miles way from my nearest neighbor, but rather living in a town of less than 10,000 people and still making six figures. I live in a town of 7,000 with a strong community and a good downtown, but I don't have to commute a half hour into the city. Instead I can wake up at 7am, walk down to the local coffee shop and chill for a bit, then go back home and work. I can pop out for lunch to the diner, and at 5 when everyone is just getting into their cars, I'm already at the local brewery unwinding.

That's the kind of lifestyle previously reserved for people living and working downtown in major cities, but can be (and for me is) a reality in small-town America. I make more money in one year than it cost me to buy my downtown, 2000 sq ft house with a two car garage and a half acre of land. And I don't have to drive anywhere unless I want to.

That's what remote working can offer. That's what small towns should be promising today.

So very much this. I don't want to be disconnected from the world, I just want my location to be disconnected from my employment. I don't want to be forced into one of only 2 or 3 hyper-inflated housing market cities because that's where all the decent paying gigs have decided to focus their headquarters. I can and do make friends and socialize anywhere I go, but most of the places I like are nothing like New York or San Francisco, and most of them have a hell of a lot better cost of living.

I'd take it one step further and say think about a little office a floor or two above that coffee shop, across from an artist or a lawyer. There's something nice about a place for work and a place for home. It's nicer when they're separated by a few small obstacles.

With a home office, you don't have to put on pants to go to work. It's always beckoning. Although, your small town might be relaxed about walking around pantless, the walk alone will help give some hysteresis between switching from work mode to home mode.

I guess the promise of remote work is a lot about the promise of not having to pay premium for space. I can't help thinking though that once remote work become more common the same thing would happen to nice places in smaller towns as have happened to nice places in cities.

There is a lot of "out there" out there.

I want to live in a walkable place where I can ride my bike without dying. I also want the same for my kid.

Right now, in the US, that means cities. That's _it_. And even then, most cities are horrible places to cycle.

But it doesn't have to be that way. I'd love to walk or cycle around Houten (NL, pop ~45,000 and built for walking and cycling from the beginning), or perhaps Rothenburg Ob Der Tauber in the old town centre (Germany, pop 10,000 for the town as a whole, smaller within the medieval walls of course).

I just can't think of any place built since the rise of the car which is not a city, and pleasant to walk in, aside from some very small communities like ecovillages (which are nice but not going to be self contained) - https://ecovillage.org/ . Even towns in the US that like to think of themselves as fitting this tend to be fantastically expensive and still very car dependent (San Luis Obispo comes to mind)

You might be surprised. My Midwestern 7,000 population town doesn't have very many dedicated bike lanes, but biking in town is incredibly common (to the point that the local library allows you to check out bikes like books) and we have a long-distance bike trail connecting us to the nearest "big" city.

Not every town is like that, of course, which is why I picked this town to live in. The best walkable/bikable towns, I've found, don't advertise themselves as walkable or bikable. They just are.

If you don't mind sharing, can I ask what town it might be? Or if you don't want to reveal your home do you know of any others with similar traits?

I'd rather not say where I live (even though I love my city and really do want you to move here), but I can tell you how to find similar cities. Pick a mid-size Midwestern metro area (say, Madison Wisconsin), then do a Google search for "best suburbs around Madison Wisconsin". I see a site like niche.com and click on it. I know the first few results are likely to be the most expensive places to live, so if my budget is high those are where I'm going. I might go down into to 5-10 range if I'm looking for a more budget-friendly place. Now I'm looking at Oregon, WI, which is about 15 miles from downtown Madison. Bringing it up in Google Maps, looks like there's a bike trail that will take me all the way into Madison without having to ride on the road? Score. Zillow shows housing prices around $150-$300k, great. Yelp shows a coffee house and a couple of tasty looking restaurants. Doesn't seem to be any local breweries, but oh well.

I'll also check out Verona, another well rated suburb. Looks to be a bit more expensive in housing, but also more local food options. Again a solid bike trail into the big city. Monona might be a little too close to the big city. Sun Prairie might be a little too far away. Disclaimer, I've never lived in any of those cities, so this is all based on just 5 minutes worth of Internet research. YMMV.

We got lucky when we settled down in that we knew what state we wanted to live in and what metro area we wanted to be around. From there it was just trying to find a bedroom community with a good solid downtown. Most suburbs close to the city won't have a downtown (they're more like residential areas), so it really narrows your choices a lot. I like using Google Maps to find area bike trails and bike lanes, which helps show how seriously a town/area takes bike safety and their overall attitude towards bikers/pedestrians.

Hopefully that helps.

so as a weird counterpoint I live in a somewhat unique part of Atlanta (east-side in-town) where you could exist without a car, housing is relatively affordable (400K - 900K for single-family-house, much less for condo/townhouse) and can walk to: a small grocery, coffee shop, a few restaurants; biking opens up to pretty much anything and thanks to The Beltline and The Freedom Path is very safe

>400K - 900K for single-family-house

Hot piss, my house cost $150,000.

don't look at NYC or SFBA :)

That reveals part of the bigger problem, though - it would be nice to live somewhere homes were affordable for people who don't work in tech (or the few other high paying professions out there).

"it's just text and daydreams, and they are alone in their house again."

The wording on this struck me as poignant. It almost sounds like it should be part of a poem or philosophical treatise. Have you used this phrasing before?

I have just been trying to write more concisely. I am pretty verbose, as my comment history is evidence of. I appreciate the kind words!

1. Most everyone steps out at lunchtime

2. you start to bump into same people - in fact you will likely have more in common than average office neighbour because you live in same school district, have chosen to telecommute etc

3. mostly telecommute does not happen because it's less convenient to manage not to do

I can agree to point three being a big contributor but it is definitely not the only reason. It would alienate a lot of people if you just switched to entirely remote one day.

Number 2 is highly circumstantial but it does ultimately come down to the individual to make friends. My concern is just that it becomes harder when everyone else is also locked up at home working or consuming entertainment all day. Many people are only a commute and an office away from that being their life.

I definitely prefer working from home for myself mind you, but I can see the negatives and totally understand why many peoppe would rather an office. I currently split time between office and home and they both have very diverse pros and cons.

Most of my original comment was just speculating a possible future scenario. I just see the possibility for people to fall through the cracks of society and just work and consume entertainment all day at home, and if that becomes the everyman then society will change to accommodate that.

I think the cracks innsociety are as a big as we allow them to be - but yes, they are already too big, and too many people fall through.

It's just those cracks are not easily visoble. Perhaps even putting more of our lives online will make the cracks more visible - our shared pessimism may be wrong :-)

I agree, it is ultimately our problem to solve.

I couldn't stand in NYC when people out-to-lunch in midtown starting changing into IT people instead of $other people. I don't want to hear about your stupid computer problems while eavesdropping over chicken-and-rice-with-white-and-red, I want to hear about your fabric distribution problems or your cold-call-scam problems or just anything not "I couldn't get that version of stuff to match up with blah so idk lol". Stupid computers eating the world.

What I've seen work is satellite offices in other cities followed by satellites of satellite offices as people realize they don't want to commute into a beltway. No one in these satellite offices had a direct business relationship with others in the same office and I don't think that hurt, just as I see no actual business advantage to living downtown.

We want to be around people and have all the urban advantages in our free time, but most of us learned in past decades that we want to be around different people than we work with.. and this decade, we want to be around different people from work and inside a social media blackout.

Maybe we can live with our extended families and childhood friends then? Of course problem with that is my interests have diverged vastly from those my childhood friends.

This is a problem of having an open liberal culture -- loneliness. In closed conservative cultures, people have he same interests.

I don't see the link between liberalism and loneliness. Are you implying that liberals can't share interests?

I think the idea is that in a (small c) conservative community, everybody has the same religion and goes to the same church, say, and that fosters community spirit. In a more (small l) liberal society, people are more free to figure out religion for themselves and do their own thing, but that contributes to social atomisation.

This isn’t specific to religion, that’s just an example (but I think a pretty useful one).

I've heard the related argument that cooperation between people with more differences requires more cognitive effort, so you can get a simple economic or second law of thermodynamics explanation for loneliness. More effort equals less of something.

In closed conservative cultures, people pretend to have the same interests to fit in and avoid persecution but pursue other interests in secret.

I think philosophical explanations for our loneliness epidemic (found on both right and left) are missing more obvious practical causes: how we build, urban planning, economic systems that incentivize workaholism and anxiety, etc. Not saying other causes don't exist, but we should look at the simple ones first.

Gave you a compensatory upvote though because I am sick of ideological echo chambers. Things one disagrees with nevertheless can provoke productive discussion.

Your comment does get at the core of the issue I think. Many of us through all kinds of circumstances, have found ourselves in adulthood without a robust community.

Perhaps I am wrong about mass telecommuting isolating people. Perhaps instead it would give them more time and opportunity to be part of and support their communities.

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