This showed up in my Twitter feed this week:

An interesting question, one I’ve been living for about a decade, in fact.

In the summer of 2011, when I was hired by The American Conservative, I was living in Philadelphia. The idea was that after a year or two, I would move with my family down to the Washington area. Then that autumn, my sister Ruthie died, and my wife and I felt that we should be living in the small town of St. Francisville, La., my hometown, to look after my aging parents and to help with my sister’s kids. Wick Allison, who ran the magazine (and who died last year, RIP), generously agreed to let me do this, trusting that geographical distance would be no problem for me, given the kind of work I do.

And that was the birth of what I used to call the St. Francisville bureau of TAC, which became the Baton Rouge bureau in 2016, after my father died and our mission parish had to close; we moved 30 miles down the road to be nearer the closest Orthodox church. So, I live in a smallish city — about 400,000 — in the Deep South, and write this blog, do podcast interviews, and write books — three New York Times bestsellers since I relocated here. The cost of living is low compared to East Coast cities, and the airport is very easy to use (and the New Orleans airport, which is much bigger, is only about an hour to the South). Louisiana is not for everybody. It’s hot most of the year, and very humid. There are snakes. But you can’t beat the people. It works for us.

Covid forced the whole country to realize how much of the work that we do can be done remotely. It ought to be compelling young people and especially young marrieds to think about the possibilities of relocating to smaller cities where you can still find the good life, but on a friendlier budget. It seems especially true that conservative Christians of the Benedict Option persuasion who are going to be working remotely even after Covid passes should reconsider the feasibility of relocating in larger numbers to more friendly redoubts.

There’s no doubt that you give up a lot when you leave a big city. I would say the happiest time of my life was living in New York City from 1998 to 2003. But my wife and I always knew that if we were going to have the big family we wanted, we were going to have to leave one day. It’s just too expensive for the kind of life we wanted for our family, and it’s too intense. Having kids takes a lot out of you, and trying to navigate with children around New York City is a real challenge. People do it, but it’s hard. When we moved to Dallas in 2003, man, I have rarely seen my wife more joyful than being able to put groceries in the back of a minivan instead of having to push a stroller home through the snow, with plastic sacks of groceries hanging off of it.

Still, depending on where you move to, you are going to give up the same kind of nightlife, a rich restaurant culture, art house movie theaters, and all the little things that make big cities so alluring. You’re going to have to give up the kinds of fun things that can really only happen when you have a big concentration of people in one geographic space. The thing that’s hard to see when you live in a big city, and love it, is the things you get to compensate for not living there. Life is just a lot more relaxed elsewhere (and not only because you don’t have to think about money all the time). This really, really matters when you start having kids.

My wife and I found that the Internet makes life easier for people like us, who like big cities. You can get anything you want on video-on-demand now, obviating the need for art house movie theaters and well-stocked DVD stores (‘memba them?). You can get any cooking spices you need online now — even NYC’s legendary Kalustyan’s will send things right to your door in a trice. Even better, the kinds of culinary changes that have come over America in the past twenty to thirty years means that you might have a good fresh spice store right in your city (we do). It’s a lot easier now to get good coffee, good beer, and good bread in many more places — without having to pay big city rents.

A down side, I have found, is that it is very hard to be social if you’re working from home a lot. My wife has a very different social life than I do, and by “very different,” I mean that she has one. I don’t. She socializes with the teachers she knows from work at the school. I socialize with … almost nobody. It’s kind of my fault — as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more hermit-like — but mostly, I think, it’s because that aside from church, there are no routines that get me out of my own bubble and out of the house on a regular basis. I had not realized until I started working this way what a powerful force entropy was on me. Again, I’m not blaming the city where I live; I blame myself. I’m normally quite social, but I had not realized until moving down here how much of my socializing depended on habits of leaving the house compelled by my work. I really do miss workplace culture, but based on the kinds of things I hear from people still in it, I doubt it would be worth re-entering an arena where one false move, or one innocent move taken as hostile by the right person, could end my career and ruin my reputation.

My point is, if you do move to a smaller city and work from home, you will need to take a lot more initiative in getting out of the house and making friends. To be honest, though, this would me a problem for me if I was working from a condo in downtown Philly too.

What about the rest of you? What are you finding? Has the past year put you to thinking about moving to a smaller, more livable city? What holds you back? Did you make the move, and regret it? Or was it right for your family? Let’s start a thread.