modern city life is bullshit. It's not organic. It's controlled by developers and politicians that hoard land and use their city's real estate as a store of value for oligarchs that don't live there.
Your local underground art & organizing space is part of a developer's plan to artwash a neighbourhood as part of their plan for gentrification.
Spend all day commuting and working and competing with consoomers that will do whatever it takes, compromise anything, just to stay in the city. All for what? Access to better bars + clubs for 2 hours of fun oblivion at the weekend? Access to theaters and galleries you don't have time to go to? Access to interesting people? Cafe life at the weekend or something?
fwiw, living rural is difficult if you've lived in a city for a long time. pay is much shittier, it's difficult to integrate, it's conservative. People are less open, imo. But the massive increase in time and agency must count for something. Please tell me it means something lol.
City life, as it's developed, is a tourist facade, and buying into it is supporting the ghouls that control the markets. The same ghouls that keep an apartment in the city, but would never live there.
This is the most asinine take that always slaps in terminally online spaces that make leftists look like luddites. There are endless aspects of our culture and capitalism to complain about but movies/shows/music and cultural production are literally not one of them. If your movie/music taste extends only to the box office and/or Billboard Top 40 then that's a you problem comrade.
We are quite literally in the golden age of prestige television, independent cinema, and music from an accessibility standpoint. Thinking otherwise either (a) ages you as a shut-in boomer or (b) just an irony brained clout demon.
If the dogshit is what rises to the top (which is true), then that's not a me problem, that's an us problem.