The young, the beautiful, the farmers

On idealization and rural life.

Hi Folks,

First, apologies for this coming so late in your inbox today. I spent most of the day— coincidentally, considering today’s topic— on a farm with some friends, and am only now getting around to writing.

Today I want to talk about young people, and rural life, and why it is that we all suddenly want to sell everything we own and buy a farm out in the middle of nowhere. I am thinking of Bernadette Mayer’s beautiful poem, “Essay”, below:

I keep coming back to the lines, I guess I’ll have to give up all my dreams of being a farmer, I guess I’ll never be a farmer now. Many times I have walked city streets and thought this, feeling it to be a trade-off, a choice. That one must be either rural or urban, and there is little room for the in-between. Mostly, I keep thinking about how farming in this poem becomes something all-consuming: art struggles against life on the farm. Life on the farm is hard work. It is difficult, and expensive, and requires sacrifice. And yet, it is transformed here into an endless vision, one that offers an alternative to the day-in-day-out grind of urban work, one especially appealing to the poets of this universe.

If you exist in any internet space these days, I’m willing to bet you’ve seen the trend of young people lusting after rural life. The influencer on Instagram posting from a mountain, a field of flowers. The rise of modern homesteading. The uptick in popularity of organizations like WWOOF and Workaway, which allow you to live and work for free on host farms. Cottagecore. Harry Style’s Adore You music video, which imagines a perfect seaside paradise in the island of Eroda. Teenagers on TikTok dreaming of abandoning everything and moving to a barn, or a ranch, or a cabin in the middle of the woods. The millennial and Gen-Z obsession with farmers markets (and the consequential aestheticization of them). Reflection pieces in Vogue about leaving behind Paris and London and San Francisco for tiny seaside towns and lakeside cottages and kitchens with big windows overlooking herds of sheep grazing in the fields. They’re even calling it an urban exodus now, which means it’s a real, marketable phenomenon: young people no longer want to be in the city. Last year saw a 20% spike of residents leaving behind cities across America for the county.

Last June, I too left the city for the county. So trust me when I say I get it. I spent my entire childhood and teenage years dreaming of living in New York, only to get there and realize I was not cut out for this life. Instead, I too began to fantasize about a smaller, simpler life. I wanted clean air and dappled sunlight through the branches of green trees. I wanted connection, and purpose, and easier joys. Like most of the internet, I became reliant on this fantasy, believing it would solve all of my problems, or at least narrow them down to something more manageable. I even wrote a thesis on the British Industrial Movement and the surge of countryside dreams under the swell of capitalism, noting how it has only seemed to get worse over time.

Every morning now there are the cows, and so I suppose I have achieved this dream. They laze these days in the bright fields of yellow flowers, their bodies flopped over one another, ambling from the road to the treeline and back. It is the part of my day I most look forward to, riding by them, wondering what my life would be like if I could live like this forever, spending my days in the grass, feeling the sunlight on my skin. Wondering how much longer it will be until I could have a farm of my own, be like the poets in Mayer’s poem who raise their animals and make their art and live momentarily, on their own terms.

Have you ever seen a cow run? I thought I knew what true joy was until I saw a cow run, and it was then that I realized I knew nothing about joy at all, or freedom, or bliss. Once, driving down the road, a large brown cow began to chase after my car, its mouth hung open in excitement, bounding through the grass next to the fence. That cow chased the car until we curved around the bend and could see it no more. But never have I seen such unbridled happiness as I have on that cow’s face. I realized in that moment that all this time I had spent wanting to move to the countryside, imagining that I would feel like that cow did, was an illusion. That cow was still trapped behind its fence, unable to follow us once the wood blocked way. The boundaries still existed. This sounds depressing to write, but hear me out: even with the blocks, the joy was still found. The bliss did not cede. Which, in my mind, becomes something reassuring: joy is there wherever we are willing to find it. And let it be said, joy must be something we make the active practice to seek out, and create, and implement into our daily lives. Once, in a professional development training I was attending, the speaker said to the audience: “It is our duty and responsibility to schedule experiences of joy and meaning because life will schedule trauma, fear, and pain all on its own.” I have thought about that nearly every day since.

Is it easier, perhaps, to schedule these experiences when you live outside of the city, where you can connect to nature in a more prominent, meaningful way? Sometimes I think so. I definitely used to. Other times I remember that this year, one in which I see the cows every day, has still been one of the loneliest of my life, even if it has also been the happiest. It is easy to lose ourselves in this vision, this version of ourselves that we all love to give into, a version where we find ourselves in the part of life where the grass truly is greener. It can be easier to find yourself there, too. But make no mistake— it is not the only place to do so.

It must also be said here that farming is hard work. It is not this vision where we wander through the fields all day, on our own time, our life free of deadlines and e-mails and repercussions. Farmers work early, long hours, and spend plenty of time communicating and negotiating and buying and selling, and wrong decisions can have brutal effects. Farming— and by extension, rural life— is not all Walden or hippie communes or farm-to-table food. It is not all sunlight through the window and wildflowers outside the drive. In fact, it’s not even mostly that. And I worry that this so-called “urban exodus” will come to these places, and drive up housing prices, and attempt to fulfill these dreams before realizing they have pictured them completely differently, and then grow bored of them and leave. I worry that everything we aestheticize will be short-lived, and that the lives of people who have been here for far longer than than that will suffer the consequences.

But this is not a new dream. The dream of rural life has been around for as long as cities have existed. And I too am a part of this; I do not believe I will stay in this area forever, or even after the next year. I too am afforded the privilege of coming and going, flitting from place to place and life to life without the real and frightening requirements of putting down roots. Still, I keep thinking that what I want more than anything is to put down roots. To buy the land and plant the seeds and build the cabin and get my hands back in the dirt, where I can feel something that will long outlast me, and know that there is meaning to life. More than anything, I want that.

Your prompt this week is to imagine the place where you are happiest. It does not have to be somewhere you have been before. It can exist entirely in your imagination, or it can be somewhere that feels known and familiar. Go there in your mind. Be there, really there, for a few minutes. Tell me what you see. How it feels. Where you will go next, and what you will do.

I hope your week brings you a moment of joy that makes you feel like the cows running in the field. Feel free to tell us about it if it does.

— Spencer

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This week’s song is Country Roads, Take Me Home by John Denver, which feels self-explanatory. I have sung this song with groups of people in nearly every rural place I have been. At summer camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains as a girl, around a fire with friends in South America, clustered in canoes on the Canadian lakeside. Back in New York, when I would dream of the peace I would find when I finally left, this is the song I imagined playing as I drove through the hills into home. I’m pleased to say I finally did that this year, and it was as beautiful as I imagined it would feel.