Growing up in Beijing with a population of 20 million, I’ve get used to the crowded subway and terrible traffic especially during work time. As the capital city of China, no doubt, Beijing is great in many ways: tons of exhibitions, performances, and small delicate restaurants.
However, every time when I have to take one or two hours’ public transportation to go somewhere that I love or simply hang out with my friends in a cafe, I would feel overwhelmed. Thankfully, I now live and go to college in Danville Kentucky, which is a small town with only 4000 residents.
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Here, I get to slow down my pace and have learned how to appreciate the beautiful nature on campus. From my standpoint, here’re four strong reasons that I believe we should escape from big cities.
1. Living in a big city is extremely time-consuming.
Using Beijing as an example, I live in the Northern part which is next to Hui Longguan Station of Subway Line 13. I had an internship in HP last month in Guomao Station on Line 10, and we could see it locates in the South. Although these two dots look closely on a map, It literally takes an hour and a half for me to go to work every day. Many people would ask: why don’t you drive in this case? Well, the busy traffic or those countless cars beside you can only make you more nervous, and you don’t want to be late for work either. Let me do a simple calculation: if 1.5 hours are wasted per day, it should be 7.5 hours per week, and 30 hours per month. If you ever take an Econ 110 class in college, I’m sure you’ve heard the “opportunity cost.” One can totally spend his/her time on other more meaningful activities such as reading books at home instead of standing in the middle of a crowd on a subway. However, due to a huge city’s size, a leisure lifestyle is impossible.
2. Living in a big city can make you “broke”.
Based on NY Daily News, the median rental cost of a two bedroom apartment is $1638 in New York City and $3,895 in Manhattan. Even though the monthly average salary for a Manhattan employee is $11,388, he/she still has to take almost one-third of his/her salary to afford the housing. If they also count other supplies expenses, clothes’ expenses, transportation expenses, food expenses, performances expenses and etc, their account can be easily emptied. The same condition occurs in Hong Kong too. Because the population is huge there, the housing price is ridiculously expensive. Most graduates, even partly depend on their family support, are not able to buy a two bedroom apartment after ten years off college.
3. Living in a big city is competitive.
As an immigrant city, people are fond of Beijing because there are more job opportunities in this city than any other inner small cities; there are lots of American, Japanese or German enterprises’ headquarters here. However, around 2,300,000 students with a bachelor degree graduate each year. If you have no previous internship experiences or connections in the company that you want to enter, it’s impossible to win the competition. Therefore, under such a high-pressure circumstances, people are hardworking. I’ve seen programmers leaving their office at 11:00 p.m. in order to finish their program on time. We can see that if you prefer a more comfy or high-quality life, big cities are definitely not good choices for you.
