I really don't think I could be happy in a big city

This is the redneck coming out in me at least in part. I have lived almost all of my life in cities or areas that are sparsely populated but not at all remote. I'm not a hermit and I do actually need to be at least somewhat close to areas where I get my stuff from. This is particularly important with my job since I work in construction and the gathering of materials gets more and more expensive the further you are from the source. Everything has to be transported after all.

Not long ago I traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina, to get a few things done including visiting a friend from college that I haven't seen in quite some time. While Raleigh is certainly not a metropolis like Los Angeles, it is significantly larger than where I live outside of New Bern.

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The first thing that gets to me, and is noticeable long before you ever even get to the city center, is the traffic. They have done a pretty great job with the roads and the interstate, but when you get into a bottleneck situation, there really isn't anything they could be doing to make this flow better. There is no reason to make this one road bigger when the reason why the traffic exists in the first place is because all of these cars are going to another road further up that is even smaller. It wouldn't make any sense to have things moving quickly here only to end up in gridlock further down the road.

When I finally got to the interior of Raleigh, I was on a highway with residential areas on both sides and it was just stoplights as far as the eye could see into the distance. Of course it always seemed like all of the ones I got to were red every single time. I am not an impatient person, and I wasn't on a deadline or anything but I can't really imagine very many inconveniences that suck worse than being stuck in traffic for miles and miles and miles. I can't understand why anyone would choose to live in this sort of environment unless their career dictated that they had to.

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One of the things that me and my old friend went to go do while I was in town was to go to a food festival that was being hosted in the city center. Finding a place to park for free was impossible, so we ended up needing to pay to park in a high-rise parking lot at the cost of around $10 an hour. Then, when we walked the the festival, there were what I consider to be entirely too many people there. I found it very difficult to enjoy myself when I was constantly in danger of bumping into a stranger. Maybe it is my country-boy roots but I found myself constantly being worried about "giving way" to other people so it was impossible for me to relax.

Thankfully, my buddy's place was on the outskirts of town in the same direction as my home city is, but when we finally left the food festival it was a relief but only momentarily because it took us an hour to travel around 20 miles thanks to the backed up traffic.

My friend is a lawyer now and therefore must live close to this area for his career. A country boy at heart as well, even he said that if there was an opportunity for his career to continue upward and also not live in a congested area like this, he would jump at the chance. Unfortunately for him, these dream jobs in smaller communities simply don't exist since all the legal action takes place in the state's capitol so therefore it is necessary for him to live near Raleigh.

When we were sitting in his yard in the evening having a beer he said that it takes him an hour or more every day simply being in the car going to and from work every day. That is definitely not the life for me and I guess you could say that I am just very happy that my path in life didn't lead me to that.

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Another thing that I didn't like was his neighborhood. Even though it is considered to be quite posh compared to other parts of the RDU area, every house looked the same and they were all very close to one another. I didn't tell him this at the time but all of this seemed quite depressing to me. I guess I just prefer having space that is my own and also a house that is not exactly the same as the guy next door's.

Raleigh isn't even a super huge area. I don't think there are even a million inhabitants there. If I were to get plonked down in an even larger city like say Chicago or Atlanta, I think I would quickly lose my mind. I guess I just need peace and quiet as well as a lot of personal space and these things simply aren't going to happen in cities with that many people in it, no matter how much money you are willing to spend. The cost of living also goes through the roof because as my one an only economics professor once said "supply will always be dictated by demand."

I am 100% sure that I hope that the demand in New Bern, where I currently and likely always will live, never has demand of this magnitude and if it does, I will move.