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philh comments on Open thread, Nov. 09 - Nov. 15, 2015 - Less Wrong
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Short version: If telecommuting was an option, would you live in a big city? Why? Why not?
I don't know whether I am overestimating the impact of city population on my daily life. What change can I expect from moving from a city with a population of 200K to one with 2M(and between that and one of 20M)? (or, on the contrary, to one with 20K) I always wanted to move to {regional large city}, but I can't name anything that my current locale lacks, that I would really like it to have. (I know that we don't have toastmasters here, but that's not an active current desire of mine. Some specific goods ren't sold in the shops, but those need to be so specific, that eBay becomes the standard venue for acquiring them anyways.) Jobs don't matter for me specifically, as I can work from anywhere.
I think I've seen more people with colorful hair there, and traffic seemed like it could easily turn into a nightmare. (which is less of an issue, if I intend to use the underground. I don't have a car either way)
Looking into the demographics, the average age is higher, number of children low, with a significant trend of people over 20 to migrate there. I couldn't determine the make up of the migrants from a glance, but I suppose with the help of an actuarian table, I could calculate the difference between expected number of people of that age, versus actual.
I don't know whether absolute number of people with similar interests to mine, or their relative density matters more.
I am wary that I may 'want to be where it's at', or where I assume it's at, shouldering the financial costs, and not getting any of the expected benefits. (I assume job opportunities are the usual attractors)
Mostly only answering the short question, but: most of my friends are from reddit. This is super convenient, and I'd be very hesitant to move somewhere that didn't have a similar ready-made community for me.
(But I don't know how I'd tell. I imagine only a handful of cities worldwide have a suitable subreddit, and a handful have large rationalist communities. Beyond that, I'd want to check for sunday assembly and for Meetup groups. But I guess not every community of suitable size and demographic will be a good fit for me, and I don't know how I'd test that in advance.)
London also makes it easy to take up hobbies, and I imagine that would be more consistent in big cities. Your current location might not lack anything you currently want, but that may be partly because you haven't had a chance to discover you want them.
I'm in NYC, and hobbies here are INSANELY expensive. Sure, there multiple makerspaces, but their memberships are all $400/mo+. Classes are expensive. Rent is so high that no one has room for hobby equipment. I would like to try brewing, but have nowhere to put a big jug. There are a lot of hobbies I would like to try but I have to space for it. Also, there's not a lot of free and open space for hobbyist groups.
Contrarily, I've also lived in the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest in mid-sized cities, and THERE was the sweet spot for hobbies. Big enough that there are people interested in esoteric things, but small enough that it was affordable and there was space for it.
Also, I actually prefer the more tight-knit groups that result from esoteric hobbies in midsized cities. In NYC, there are hundreds of people interested in Underwater Basketweaving, but in Generic Midwest City there are only 10, and so those 10 people become a close-knit community.
Furthermore, in NYC it takes an hour to get ANYWHERE. For one of my main "LOCAL" hobby groups, all the get-togethers are anywhere from 1:30-2:00 away. Almost everyone I've dated here lives about an hour away (the exception is if they happen to live off the same subway line). But in Generic Midwest Town, you're never more than half an hour away from local groups. Travelling two hours would put you in a completely different city/scene.