Spending Time in Small Towns

When I take trips with friends, they tend to be to fairly remote locations. Some recent examples include Nova Scotia, the Shenandoah Valley (rural Virginia), and upper Maine. 

This is in large part because my friends (and to some, albeit lesser, extent myself) are very outdoorsy people, so our excursions tend to include a strong orientation around nature. But one nice byproduct is that going to these remote regions has given me a glimpse of what life is like outside of big cities. No surprise, it’s very different.

A lot of these towns have one or two commercial streets. There’s typically a coffee shop, a few restaurants (often including a diner), a pharmacy, a bank, and a church. The consistency is honestly quite remarkable.

What’s struck me most, though, is how local life is. Many of the people who lived in those towns had grown up there. It seemed like there was a good chance the kids we met would stay there their whole lives, too. The set of considerations that matter seem to just vary so vastly from what people spend time on in cities. I can’t remember the last time I heard a local resident on one of these trips talk about AI, crypto, or defense tech. In contrast, one cafe in a small town about 30 minutes outside of Charlottesville had a book with every person in the town’s photo and a little bio about them. It was maybe 100 pages. 

I really like visiting these small towns and I’d recommend that more people try to visit them, too. It’s a different slice of life and a good reminder of how the things that matter are all anchored on perspective.