I like to know how the rest of y'all are living. Get an idea of the hexbear residents. Be honest. If ya livin nice that's no bad thing.
For me, I lived well in my hometown, but I've been living alone for... 4 years now. That went fast.
In those 4 years I've lived in an old council block where there was always piss and occasionally a shite in the elevator. I've lived just down the road from that council block in another area people grimace at when I tell them where I live. I think it's actually alright, although this year I did get burgled by a crack addict. Luckily they stole a bag of 'decoy' laptops (broken ones I accumulate and then scrap for spare parts) and left my working one alone.
I'm moving out of there now, and into the worst place I'll have lived yet. A gang and gun crime hub. Even people who lived there tell me the best thing about living there is the feeling you get when you move out. Again though, although it might be a bit grotty, as with most 'bad' places if you keep your nose clean and aren't a numpty at night you'll come out of it fine, I think. Time will tell.
How about y'all?
i liked it a lot more 10 years ago, but it's alright compared to a lot of places. it's about 1,000 km from where i grew up, which is a chud occupied shithole undergoing climate apocalypse. i like the climate here much better. a medium-small city with a large state university, so the infrastructure for walking and biking actually exists in some places and is only sort of terrible. right at the tail end of this being a LCOL area i lucked into a deal and bought the dumpiest little baby house in a nice, quiet neighborhood with like trees and parks and streams and shit.
people from the region think this city has major traffic and crime problems, but where i am from had real crime problems and deadly shootings in traffic so this place feels like a hallmark movie. the housing market has been tight for decades but since AirBNB and other STRs came to town, it's become a recognizable crisis. prices for houses and rents are going up like crazy (2 years after i bought my place, it was appraised at a level i could not afford and interest rates were twice as high... i make the median income for my postal administrative unit) so i expect desperation to climb as well and maybe have some parts of get a little bit weirder. there has been and continues to be a lot of internal displacement in this region, so people coming from some dead town to find work here and make a go of it. the labor market is also relatively tight here, with very low unemployment.
there's a lot to like about it, but i want to move even further away from the equator. not just for climate stuff, but the institutions here have been heading in the wrong direction for a while and it seems like some capital formation(s) finally noticed there's a lot of assets to strip here, so they're working hand in hand to convert everything i like about this place into a pile of cash and put it in an overseas account.