Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Nick Hollfelder asks, With all the places to live and complete freedom to choose where. Why did you choose to come back to your hometown in Wisconsin?

This is a really good question, Nick. I was actually living in Minneapolis as early as 2020. I had also been living in the Twin Cities for years before I started traveling, as that was where I had attended college and launched several businesses.

I considered many places to live. One of the conclusions I came to was that large cities are, for the most part, just not worth it anymore.

Cities played an important function for thousands of years. There were many trades that were much easier to ply if you were around a lot of people. As the world industrialized, jobs were available in factories, which required a lot of people living in proximity.

In some industries, you just had to live in a certain area to take part in it. If you wanted to be in the motion picture business, you had to live in Los Angeles. If you wanted to work in publishing or finance, you pretty much had to live in New York.

Technically, the internet, and socially, the pandemic, changed everything. We can just as easily communicate remotely as we can in person.

The city I live in isn’t huge; it has about 80,000 people, but it isn’t tiny either. We have multiple restaurants of almost every type of cuisine you can think of, at a quality level that is on a par with what I’ve experienced in cities around the world.

I have a fiber internet connection. There is an Amazon fulfillment center on the edge of town.

I’m hard pressed to think of anything I’m lacking living here.

While I’m not losing much, I’m gaining a great deal. Prices here are significantly less. I’d probably pay five to ten times more for a similar apartment to the one I live in if I lived in New York City. There is very little in the way of traffic. Crime is very low. There is almost no threat of natural disasters where I live. There are no hurricanes or earthquakes. I can’t recall there ever being a forest fire. The river I live on has never flooded in recorded history and probably never will, given that it has two large bodies of water on either end with dams that can control the flow.

Tornadoes aren’t even that frequent here. In the event of a drought, there are 15,000 lakes in Wisconsin, with two Great Lakes that surround the state.

People think of the cold, but the dirty secret is that it really doesn’t get that cold. Temperatures can sometimes drop below 0°F, but in many winterers, it never does, and 20°F is more normal.I also don’t think that this is just a ‘me’ thing. The cost of living in major urban areas in almost every developed country has skyrocketed. This has happened precisely at the same time when the benefits and reasons for living in large cities have decreased, mostly due to the spread of the internet.

Now that Starlink is up and running, the number of places that have become viable has increased even more.