It sounds like the ‘coastal’ lifestyle you allude to should really be called ‘my experience with rich people living on the coast’. It doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever been privy to, and it doesn’t look like the kind of life most people in Brooklyn, the Bronx, or 99% of the cities on the eastern seaboard. Yeah, there’s some rat-racing going on, but for the most part, especially in the greater nyc metropolitan area, there’s just people living in neighborhoods. I’ve found a greater sense of community up here than in any city in Indiana. When you ask a New Yorker where they live, they won’t say Manhattan or Brooklyn, they’ll tell you the name of their village, like Chelsea, or Stuyvesant or Gramercy or Harlem. The people in those places know each other, they interact with each other on a daily basis. They can’t AFFORD to act superior or racist to one another because if they do, then Tom at the corner green grocer won’t give them a discount on apples, or whatever.

I understand your desire to move home. I’ve thought about it. It still is a possibility for me later in life. But for me, moving to the coast was the best decision I’ve ever made. Like my grandpa before me, and his ancestors before him, immigrating to a new place in search of a better way of life and more opportunities has yielded me exactly those things.