I live in a dense urban environment surrounded by apartments, taxis, etc., but I happen to live in a house with a wonderful backyard where we grow vegetables, fruit, and flowers in addition to a lawn I mow with a manual push mower. It’s winter now, but we still manage to find some joy in the garden with my “visual interest” plantings that may more signal lack of weeding. (I have a 5 month old, it’s hard to keep up).
I’ve been reading a lot about rural life and farming lately. Various things converged to make this happen. Anyway, there’s a lot of writing about the contentment that comes in connection to land and place, even if it appears to outsiders to constrict choice. I’ve never really read Wendell Berry before, but I’m going to start, because I think he has a lot of value to say about life in rural areas that comes from a more useful point of view than the bloviating in political discourse.
I don’t think technology entrepreneurs need to farmsplain rural life to people who live there, who aren’t all the same and don’t think all the same.