A Movement Away From Our Cities
Photos and words by Katie McKnoulty
A question I'd been dying to ask someone under the age of 55 who has, like me, swapped the city for a small town, was whether this was a cool, new thing to do, or just us getting old before our time.
Francesco reassured me, "I don't think we're getting old! It's definitely not a mass phenomenon, but it's a phenomenon that's becoming noticeable."
It's a movement the pandemic seems to have sped up. Masses of people fortunate enough to have the means and privilege to do so, in the UK and the US in particular, have fled the cities as their office jobs turned remote and their tiny apartments became tiny prison cells.
What probably started as temporary moves allowed many to get a slice of what it's like to live in the country, experiencing firsthand the improvement in health and wellbeing and the freedom it affords.
I ask Francesco why he thinks this movement is growing at this particular time in history, aside from the pandemic's obvious effects.
"We are the first generation that grew up with the values and the teachings and the expectations of the nineties, which is what our parents lived and the big 'everything is good, the economy is going well, you make a lot of money, you have a career', the dream. And our parents, with that dream, destroyed the world and we grew up into that."
"We're also the first generation that as soon as you get out of high school you bang your head against the wall, right? ...It's like 'OK, everything that we thought we'd be doing: you go to university and then you study finance, you become a doctor, a lawyer... you do all of that and then you don't find a job and it doesn't work. And you see how everything is messed up."
In the absence of a big ticket job, and with a growing urge to connect with nature and ourselves, city life loses some of its pull.
We talk about the fact that living in big cities is making less and less sense to people who can work online or turn their hand to more down-to-earth work they can do in the country.
"Maybe you make less money than you would living in Manhattan and working for J.P. Morgan but you spend way less money to have the same things... Here you live in an incredible house with five times the space of your little apartment in Manhattan."
Sustainability Makes Business Sense
Our generation and the generation after us (à la Greta Thunberg and the school strikers) started with a pretty broken world, where the rules we were taught to follow were no longer applicable by the time we were old enough to live by them.
We can see and feel the full extent of humanity's rapid destruction of its own home over the last hundred years. But what are we doing about it? Are we, the younger generations, leading the world towards a new way? Francesco weighed in.
"We're seeing that there is this shift. And even business-wise and on the economy side, sustainability and the environment are one of the main topics... Conscious living, being aware of the food you eat, the seasonality of the food; this is a trend. It's big and it's going to get bigger. And business-wise, young people will be doing something (work-wise) that's more connected with the world that they live in and nature. They're going to be able to pay their bills. And the world is going to be healthier."
The online part of all this is integral, it's why we can imagine all these new ways of doing things. People like Francesco, with a mix of small-town roots and big city experience and networks, can create a new kind of business out of something that is traditionally agricultural work, thankless work. “Everyone that's older comes to me and says, 'Oh you're crazy to become an agricultural worker!' I'm not crazy. I'm not a kamikaze. I'm doing this because I love it and it's fun. But also because I can live off of it comfortably... There is a business, there just has to be a new model."
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