My husband is from a smallish village (around 1000 people) and whenever we go there to visit his family I think 'what do people do all day'.
It depends on the area, but I'd suggest that "in a small village" is not a particularly rural setting, in the context of what people are going for. "A few acres" or "A few dozen acres" is closer to what a lot of people consider rural, and there's
plenty to do if you've got land and goals.
I live where a lot of people would call "the middle of nowhere," though I argue that I simply have a really good view of that from here. It's rural farm country, though not particularly remote (15 miles/20 minutes into a decent sized down).
I'm still working (from home) part time, so I do that, I work on the property, I mess around with small electronics (see blog link for the type of stuff I do), etc. It's also a great spot for creative work - some of the best artists I know are from my wife's family and grew up in "the middle of nowhere." Like, a few hundred acres a half dozen miles outside of a "town" that consisted (at the time) of a few buildings and a small general store.
But you find things to do - it's not ready-packaged for you, of course, but there's a lot you can do, and a lot less interference with it. My wife grew up out here, and we lived in the suburbia of a big coastal city for a few years. We were miserable. We described city life as "sitting in traffic to stand in line to spend money," in the common case, and discovered that the vast majority of people in urban/suburban areas have a burning passion for telling you what you can't do and what you must do. Our backyard was "overgrown" (the grass was mowed, but the ground cover/trees/bushes covering a third of it were certainly lush), a neighbor hacked back and basically killed some very nice bushes that were over her fence (she'd asked if she could trim them - I assumed, "at the fence line," not "as far over the fence as she could reach with long limb cutters"), I've got a complaint filed with the city for the apple tree having dropped apples on the ground, had arguments with people about how often one of my vehicles moved (I dared to bike to work because it sucked less than driving, and resolved the vehicle movement issues by parking worse so I was in a different position regularly), etc. Cost of living was stupid, and we simply didn't care about most of the stuff that cities offered, and they didn't offer stuff we cared about. Like being left alone.
I'm radically busier on a few acres than I was in the city - I rarely watch TV anymore and no longer play computer games, because I'm a whole lot happier working on projects. Currently, I'm adding shelving to a new shed we got, getting some plywood prepped to replace the floor in an old pickup bed trailer (as a trash hauler), and getting my old tractor into shape for this winter (it's the main source of driveway clearing, and will be used for garden beds/moving the chicken tractors/discing cheatgrass/etc as well).
People in rural areas don't care about "parks". If you choose where you live, there's plenty of public land/forest. You're missing the point on what makes rural attractive. You don't just simply take the life you're living now and transfer it to a place with less stuff. It's the lack of things that make it appealing: the slower pace, the friendlier people (as a result of a slower pace - I'm not saying there aren't friendly people everywhere, just overall), the quiet nights, the bright night sky.
Yup. I can see the milky way from my front porch. I'll go outside on a moonless night just to watch the stars. The sky is full of them in a way that is foreign to people who live in a city. I can pretty much read by the moon when it's full.
And I've got a somewhat distinctive vehicle that gets a lot of questions (sidecar motorcycle), so I stop and talk to people constantly. I'll run across neighbors at the D&B parking lot (country farm supply store), at gas stations, etc.
People from built up areas tend to freak out about the distances involved ("the grocery store is
15 miles away???"), but miss that you can actually get places at a reasonable pace. The 15 miles is about 18 minutes of driving, unless there's a tractor (add a minute or two to get around it if there's oncoming traffic).
Not many people here really care that much about a huge selection of restaurants and stores - especially considering you can have 99% (not including food) of what you need delivered. If you have one big supermarket with a huge variety near you wherever you are within a 30 minute drive, do you really need anything else?
So true. It's also worth mentioning that once you get used to home grown produce and other products, restaurants just aren't very exciting anymore. My wife is excellent in the kitchen, and between our garden (small this year, but grew a ton of basil and more peppers than we know what to do with, some amazing strawberries, and a watermelon), relatives gardens (which grow... oh, just about everything, a lot of which is canned for later use), and some of the stuff we buy from various neighbors, most restaurant food is just... meh. At best. We plan to expand that. The taste of stuff fresh from the garden is so, so much better, and we know what went into it. Strawberries off our plant are, for lack of a better term, explosively strawberry-y. It's like eating concentrated strawberry flavor compared to the store bought ones. Same for the peppers, the basil, and stuff from relatives gardens. It's also picked when
ripe, not when still stone hard for transport.
But I do think that if you're someone who chooses to make the move/leap, it needs to be primarily because you envision a different/better lifestyle and not just because you want to FIRE ASAP.
Absolutely. Nothing is more annoying than someone who moves to a rural area and then whines that it's not like the city they left. Except, perhaps, people who move to a cheap house by an airport and then try to get the airport closed. There's a special ring in Hell for them.
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That all said, rural areas suck. Definitely don't move there. Just a bunch of meth addicts watching TV all day. Terrible, terrible places. Stay in the cities. Get all your friends to move to the cities. Pay tons and tons of money to live on top of each other, because... uh, whatever reason sounds good to do something silly like that. Rural areas wouldn't be any good if everyone moved there. :)