zlacker

>>NotInO+(OP)
People tend to care when they feel that they are being given a good deal.

In my experience (UK), people are usually more pleasant in smaller towns, and I ascribe that to, well, the cost of living is lower relative to their wage, they probably have a decent flat or a small house at least, maybe a car, etc.

In London if you work in a coffee shop then you either have a well off partner or you are in some shoebox counting your pennies to make the bus fare, your life is just stressful and you don't feel like an equal to the person on the other side of the counter.

>>naming+o8
There's also no real future to look forward to. Take London. Outside of finance, technology and law, even manager level positions won't earn you enough to ever own the roof over your head. The median salary is just under 50k pounds. Once you pay out of your ass for the myriad of taxes, you are left with say 30k. That's enough to rent yourself a really shitty apartment from an absentee landlord living either abroad or somewhere in a large house in Surrey. Anywhere within commute distance to London, living is so expensive that a large portion (probably the majority) of the population has the beautiful outlook that they'll never own anything and will work until the day they drop dead. Why bother? What is the point of making an effort?

The cost of living a good life has completely run away from the vast majority of the population.

>>short_+ha
Yeah even if you had one of those fancy job and make over 150k, owning a decent flat in London is still out of reach nowadays.

>>curiou+jd
Sadly this is true. 150k a year is "only" about 80-85k net, good luck buying a tiny Victorian row house for >1mln quid without your parents sponsoring the down payment. Or you can buy a crappy apartment built to "UK Standards" where everything is done by people who truly don't give even a shred of effort to quality and you are in the hilarious position that you don't even own your own walls.

And that is all on a very-very good salary in the UK (90th %ile is 60k).

Moving out to the suburbs or to satellite town is not a solution either. If you want to be on a main train line, the prices will be just as bad as in the city. If you compromise on the transport, prepare for your life to become an unmitigated misery as the terrible, dysfunctional, unreliable and at the same time extremely expensive UK train system bends you over the barrel.

There are a few lucky people who manage to pull off a London level salary and work remotely from a LCOL area, but this is not possible if your job physically requires your presence (e.g. you are a dental hygienist).

>>short_+4y
When the vast majority of people stop caring about working in London then wouldn’t the prices drop noticeably?

It seems to be contradictory, the very fact of the price wage disparity suggest many many people care to an extremely high degree of working within that literal specific geographic area.

Which demonstrates they care very very much about their economic interests at least.