Don't we all want that?

From "My life is completely different now. I can’t imagine myself living 100 percent back in Tokyo anymore. I love how I’m surrounded by nature here, and I feel healthier and emotionally full." by Ann Althouse.  See original post for links.

Said Kana Hashimoto, 25, quoted in "Goodbye, city life. Green acres in Japan beckon as pandemic shifts priorities" (WaPo). 

 

In April, she moved to Minami-Aso, a village of about 11,000 people in southern Japan, and now balances many jobs she loves: farming, helping distribute local ingredients to nearby restaurants, working at a miso soup shop and a hot-spring spa....  

 

[Y]oung workers are seeking alternatives to Tokyo’s corporate grind, marked by long hours, cramped subway commutes, meetings with bosses over after-work drinks and strict corporate hierarchies. About one-third of the people in their 20s and 30s living in greater Tokyo said they had taken steps in the past six months to move to rural Japan, according to [a] survey. Among 20-somethings alone, 44.9 percent said they were interested in moving to rural Japan....  

 

ADDED: Here's the top-rated comment at WaPo, from ZanHax: 

 

Stories like this are so inspirational to me. In America, however, I don’t think it would be so easy for all people. I would love the opportunity to move to a rural community and work the land. The reality, for many Black and minority people, is that policies and rural communities themselves, may not be supportive, safe and welcoming to people like me. There are communities here that I fear driving through when traveling. I think it is simpler to do something like this when a society is more homogeneous. I do wish these young people success, because this grind? It isn’t all life is about. 

 

Rural Americans "may not be supportive, safe and welcoming." You "fear driving" when you pass through their territory. But do you know any of these people or are you just prejudiced against them? Where did you learn that prejudice? In the city? And here you are wishing for a more homogeneous society. This is a prime example of how much racism is woven into anti-racism.

I agree with Althouse - the comment is straight up racist and popular with the readers of WaPo.

There is something else going on in that article and it is a frequent issue in public discussions.  That is the tendency to view everything from the perspective self-maximizing rather than self-optimizing and to treat anything less than maximizing as some sort of systemic failure.

A clear example of this was the early second wave feminist position that women could have it all.  A hard charging career, a full family life, and self-fulfillment.   It was a ridiculous claim.  

In 2012 Atlantic Magazine published one of the more class-centric, oblivious, self-indulgent complaints in recent times, Why Women Still Can't Have It All by Anne-Marie Slaughter.  A privileged female academic from Princeton, married to supportive Princeton academic, gets a policy job in Hilary Clinton's State Department in Washington, D.C. working in exciting environment with lots of social and financial support, finds it difficult to be away from her family during the week.  She eventually resigns the position and writes an article lamenting how unfair it was for her to have to make trade-off choices and how we might redesign the economy to make it work better for privileged women of academia such as herself.

Despite the nausea-inducing classism, it was an article filled with interesting and frequently unintentional insight.

The biggest for me being that there are people who have no concept of trade-offs.  We are all born into constraints.  Health, wealth, capability, class, society, etc.  We are all constrained by circumstance.  The goal cannot be to get everything we want.  The goal is always about how to best achieve the optimum mix of what is most important to us given the constraints within which one is working.  There was no sense of awareness in Slaughter's article that she deserved anything less than all that she wanted.  It was up to government policy to make it easier for people like her to get what she wanted.

ZanHax's comment betrays that same lack of awareness of the world.  

Stories like this are so inspirational to me. In America, however, I don’t think it would be so easy for all people. I would love the opportunity to move to a rural community and work the land. The reality, for many Black and minority people, is that policies and rural communities themselves, may not be supportive, safe and welcoming to people like me. There are communities here that I fear driving through when traveling. I think it is simpler to do something like this when a society is more homogeneous. I do wish these young people success, because this grind? It isn’t all life is about. 

Let's look at the blind assumptions.

I would love the opportunity to move to a rural community and work the land. - Sure, just about everything is easier and cheaper in America than almost anywhere else in the world.  Land is cheap here compared to most countries.  Transportation is cheap.  But if you move from an urban environment to a rural one, you give up a range of things not limited to restaurants, entertainment, access to select educational institutions, quality of healthcare, job opportunities, etc.  Agriculture is expensive, hard work and only occasionally remunerative.  Work the land if you want but you better start with a small fortune.  Old joke "How do you make a small fortune working the land?  Start with a large one."  You have to make a trade-off decision between all the pleasures and opportnities of urban living and those radically different pleasures and opportunities of living off the land.  You can't have both.

Policies and rural communities themselves, may not be supportive, safe and welcoming to people like me - Well.  They are supportive of the people who live in rural communities and it is only prejudice on the part of the commenter which drives them to this conclusion.  And in what world is your success and happiness predicated on all your new neighbors in the countryside being supportive of you.  And countryside living is more dangerous to everyone living there than in the city.  You want safe?  Stick to the suburbs.  And again, what obligation does everyone else have to be welcoming of you.  Nice if they are.  And based on having moved dozens of time around the world and within the US, it is my experience that new neighbors are usually welcoming.   You have to make a trade-off decision between the familiarity of urban living and the radically different challenges of living in a new and unfamiliar place.  You can't have both.

There are communities here that I fear driving through when traveling. - Again, this is a personal prejudice.  You have to make a trade-off decision between the comfort and security of urban communities and the comfort and security of new communities.  You can't have both.

In America, however, I don’t think it would be so easy for all people. - There it is again.  That underlying and unexamined assumption that all things should be equally easy for everyone.  Of course it wouldn't be equally easy.  But compared to almost anywhere else in the world, America affords everyone a wider range of choices, better trade-off decisions, and greater opportunity.  Equal outcomes for everyone?  Not so much.  But it is far worse everywhere else.  

 

All this comes off as an ignorant self-serving accusation against the nation for not being able to have it all.  You can't have it all.  Nobody can.  You have to make trade-off decisions just like everyone else.  And not all of those decisions will pan out.  

The latent idea that someone is owed something simply because they want it?  Where did that come from?  Yet it underpins so many arguments today.

There is a further reality.  Everyone has to make trade-off decisions.  But some people have a richer set of trade-offs than others owing to ability, inheritance, circumstantial good-fortune, etc.  But complaining that others have better choices than the good choices you have?  That is just an emotional envy that underpins all forms of communism, a desire for equal outcomes.

And even those making trade-off decisions in the most unconstrained and privileged environments possible?  Are they happy?

See Anne-Marie Slaughter's article.  If she isn't getting everything she wants, if she isn't free from the trade-off constraints everyone else has to work with, and she is unhappy.  She wants maximum outcome for herself without having to give up anything.  Don't we all want that?  It's just not available in the real world.