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DeVliegendeHollander comments on Can we talk about mental illness? - Less Wrong
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The last time you posted something like this, I fretted for a whole day, trying to figure out how to respond. I found I could not do so without a mindkillxplosion at how offensive it is, so I settled for a silent downvote.
Welcome to the Mid-southern United States, where nothing is within walking distance of anything else, huge swaths of land have no sidewalks, gas mileage is artificially deflated, public transit consists of like three buses if you live in a huge town with at least 60k people, and there is no way to travel between towns other than owning your own vehicle or having people willing to drive you. (I did find a cab driver willing to get me to the nearest town with an interstate bus terminal; he estimated that trip would cost me $130. In a good month, that's over 10% of my cumulative funds.).
On the bright side, the cost of living is low enough that Wellfare is actually livable, if one min-maxes food and utilities and has no debt.
Now, add mental illness on top of that. Then, be careful never to so much as hint that you might maybe possibly be anything other than a practicing Christian (or at least be so damn smooth that you can get people to believe you're joking when you reveal your nonchristianity, on the grounds that "I don't believe you're a bad person" (an actual quote from one of my father's customers)). Not that religious discrimination matters when you're completely isolated.
Now, you have lots wrong with your life, but the tiny handful of things that you still manage to care about are staying here.
You're unemployed, disabled, friendless, have less than $2000 to your name, ~$90000 in student debt, and are drowning in anxiety/depression/akrasia/learned helplessness... and someone from a nice city with financial security expresses bafflement that you don't just move to a nice city like theirs. The pattern-matching alone was absurd enough that I couldn't trust myself not to quote The Grapes of Wrath.
I really don't feel like I handled this well, but I've been holding it in for a couple years, now, and clearly, something needed to be said.
In a conservative society/culture why do people live on their own? Why not in their extended family?
To be fair, being in love with living in nuclear families is a standard feature of Anglo cultures, some even proposed they actually caused them becoming richer than others. There are 13th century records of English villagers moving to other villages to work and then buying land and settling down and hardly ever seeing their relatives again in the old village. I find this mind-boggling.
Still, even in an individualist Anglo culture, I would expect its more conservative subsets would be in favor of blood relatives living under one roof. Which is an excellent idea for people poor and ill.
For example, in Eastern Europe (both poor and conservative) the idea of every adult child gluing another wing to the parents house, big enough to marry and have a child or two, is very popular. It is cheap, no mortgage, just buy materials and DIY with friends. And the generic conservatism of the region supports this, because it puts family and relations and community before the individual.
America actually has this weird cultural thing where living with your parents past 20 is seen as a badge of shame. You might have heard the "nerd in his parent's basement" stereotype a few times. The conservative families I know do have the "family values" thing, but they also have a huge "independence" thing. Most of them don't want their kids still in the home after they hit adulthood. They do tend to want to be near family, though. Obviously this is anecdotal evidence and should be taken with a grain of salt.
It's hard to say; maybe there's a bit of cultural osmosis involved? Maybe it has to do with the combination of the vast amounts of unused space and the influx of jobs other than family farms (the one branch of my father's family that almost kept their own little extended clan together is so big on livestock, especially horses, that I honestly have no idea what jobs any of them have had. There was a family farm before I was born, but my father's oldest brother mismanaged it into oblivion).
My town has a significant manufacture sector, but it's mostly food products. It has some diversity by virtue of being a college town, though the college's primary majors are agriculture and business. So it's a bizarre sort of place that keeps growing, but refuses to stop being the biggest small town around in spite of a population literally 100 times the size of many nearby towns*. I think it's technically a city, but in practice it's an amalgamation of rural and suburban.
* I don't think this town has broken 100k yet. I haven't heard population numbers on nearby towns in a while, but I was not exaggerating my orders of magnitude, given the populations when last I heard them.