Rural Gen-X and Urban Gen-X experiences

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MowgeeCrone@reddit

My town and surrounding rural properties didn't reach 10000 until I was early 20s. Before puberty it was about 5000. And we are surrounded by other smaller towns, villages and hamlets.

We'd play cricket in the middle of main street cbd with the older kids on Sunday arvo. We'd probably only have to move the stumps off the road a couple of times for passing cars.

Now it's about 24000 and set to triple in the next 2 years.

RIP to the safe little town I grew up in.

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The fact that I lived on Army bases till I was 15 made my Gen-X experience a little different than everyone else's. My mom was a stay-at-home mom till we were early teens (around 14 for me. I have a slightly older brother). Even when my mom worked outside the home, she was usually home within an hour or so of us getting home from school.

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skryking@reddit

Same for me, grew up on army bases until my dad retired when I was 17... seems like such a long time ago.

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PahzTakesPhotos@reddit

Some folks don’t understand that if WE got in trouble, then our military parent would ALSO get in trouble. We didn’t do anything like mild vandalism or whatnot.

Could you imagine being the reason your military parent didn’t get promoted? Or if the family was kicked out of base housing? I’m not sure I would have survived that!

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skryking@reddit

only happened once that my dad got called in because I did something stupid. I think I broke a window with a baseball by accident. It only happened the one time, that was for sure.

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ToArgueWithAssholes@reddit

Was rural, spitting Copenhagen at the 24 hour gas station because there was literally nothing to do.

Had CB radios and would (kinda) play Marco Polo, hiding in woods and cornfields and places we'd take our GF's parking

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Zestyprotein@reddit

I grew up in one of the most densely populated urban areas in the northeast. Slmost everyone's parents or grandparents were immigrants. Mostly Irish or Italian. There were tons of kids, and we could pull together a full baseball or football game just by ringing doorbells on my block. If you did something wrong, the grandma network meant you were in trouble before you got home. It was absurdly easy to get alcohol. If there was a funeral, the whole neighborhood showed up. But god forbid you dated someone not descendants of your grandparents' home country. Almost everyone's parents were blue collar. Despite everyone being Catholic, the divorce rate was very high. Very few people had cable. But we had a blast. Rode our bikes for miles, regularly took the subway by ourselves at 9 or 10 without our parents knowing. About 1/3 of my childhood friends did time at one point or another. It was a great way to grow up.

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muphasta@reddit

45-50K people is rural? Where I grew up, the population on the sign for the town where our post office is was 321 people the last time I saw it. We didn't even live in that town! We were in the "greater area". There were 5 houses on our side of the road in a 2 mile stretch. On the other side there were 12 houses. Everything else was farm land.

But I get what you mean. I grew up on 5 acres surrounded by farmland. There was a lot of self entertainment out there. I could ride my bike to my grandparents' farm, fish in the ponds, spend the night in my tent, whatever. I did drink out of the hose... at my grandparents' place the hose was a hand pumped operation.

My neighbor across the street had an Atari 5200 before I got a 2600, so I had some exposure to console video games back then, but there was a lot of work to be done on our 5 acres, weeds to pull, rocks to pick up, both from the gardens, lawn to mow, sticks and walnuts to pick up. I didn't appreciate living like that when I was young, I kind of wish my sons could have grown up out there, but we live in SoCal in a suburban neighborhood.

There are pros and cons to both.

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Remarkable-Ad3689@reddit (OP)

You do have a fair point regarding 45 to 50K to maybe being classified as urban, not rural. I guess I was going for "my whole state" is considered rural when it comes down to it. That's my perspective growing up in Wyoming.

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muphasta@reddit

Funny thing is, I grew up 15-20 miles from the state capitol. May as well have been 200 miles, we didn't go there often!!

I totally get what you mean so I hope I didn't come across as harsh.

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Remarkable-Ad3689@reddit (OP)

No worries. Discussion is good!

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muphasta@reddit

OMG!! I just checked the population of the town where the post office is, it is down to 106 people!!

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Savings-Baker-9083@reddit

I lived in an extremely rural area and I loved it! I graduated high school in 1992 and there were 10 people in my graduating class. And everyone graduated. Thats how small the town was. School was like a family. Since the pandemic we've been invaded by mostly people moving to Texas from other places. In just a couple years every green pasture I've looked at my whole life has been turned into a huge housing edition. They came to "live in the country like us" but have just made it into another crappy city. I feel sad for the kids who won't get a small school education anymore. It's an experience I'll always treasure

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RSVPno@reddit

Urban GenX: Blair Witch was the dumbest movie I've ever seen.

Rural GenX: Nah, dude. That shit was real af and could totally happen.

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Monkeynutz_Johnson@reddit

I know where that shack in the woods really is, been there a few times.

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RSVPno@reddit

That guy standing in the corner of that shack at that end still haunts me.

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Monkeynutz_Johnson@reddit

If you ever want to go, it's near Woodstock, MD. Friend of mine lived out there.

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BMisterGenX@reddit

I feel like a lot of Gen X-ers grew up in very suburban areas where like 45 minutes to an hour away was a major city, an hour in another direction was rural. I know that is what is like for me. The town I lived in tried to pretend it was more major city, with dinky libraries arts festivals that attracted has been musicians etc.

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R67H@reddit

My childhood was rural but near an urban center (SFBay area), so it was all about hunting down by the creek, stealing avocados, grapes and artichokes from the farmers, walking the woods for the hell of it, having the horses and pigs, cow tipping, mailbox baseball, dirt track racing ... then going to the city to really cool stuff, too. My experience with parentals parallels those raised in an urban environment.

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Easy_Ambassador7877@reddit

I grew up on a farm outside of a small town of less than 1000 in the Midwest. We lived about an hour from the second largest city in the state. We parked down by the river, drove drunk on gravel roads 🫣 and parties were always in someone’s field. I was pretty sheltered and didn’t know much about modern music until I got my drivers license and could listen to music in my car. We had 4-5 tv channels that all went off air overnight.

I didn’t have access to lots of cool cultural things that non rural kids would have had, things like cable tv, movie theaters and malls. Those were available but it was a special trip to the city to do those things. As a result there is a lot of movies and music I was never exposed to and as an adult I am fine not trying to keep up with whatever is the newest coolest thing. Like if I think something isn’t interesting but everyone else is watching it? So what. I’m not watching it just because everyone else is. Like during the pandemic when everyone was watching and talking about the Tiger King, I just shrugged and said I wasn’t going to watch it. So there are plenty of things where there is a disconnect between popular culture and my knowledge of it. But I don’t feel like I am missing out on anything except the moments when everyone is talking about it. I feel it’s part of my duty as a GenX to not blindly follow everyone with whatever has provided the newest distraction. And seriously, very rarely do I feel like I missed out because I refused to follow the crowd.

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Mouse-Direct@reddit

I grew up in rural Oklahoma between 1970 and 1988 with no cable in rural areas. My Dad was a true Okie whose family drove the jalopy to CA to pick fruit in the 30s and 40s. I was a total 80s kid who hated lakes, trucks, football, domestic beer, and animal husbandry. I did have an odd fondness for ATV vehicles and fishing. I worked my butt off to get a college scholarship and get out of there…all the way to Oklahoma City. 😆

Randomly, I was shocked the other day playing a trivia game to learn that Wyoming, not Rhode Island, is the smallest state by pop. By A LOT.

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scarybottom@reddit

Kinda the same. As a girl, the only options I was "allowed" to have were home maker, wife, and maybe part time nurse or teacher.

But I was blessed with a brain, and parents that supported female education (and grandparents that did the same- despite others in the family disagreeing). I got a scholarship (actually 3), and got "out" to the state's big city university.

But then I kept going- all the way to the west coast (and a PhD- hehe). And I love it. I would never even consider going back.

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billyjack669@reddit

Woo! Another small town Okie!

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Excellent_Brush3615@reddit

I had a pretty standard GenX life. I wasn’t born in a small town, but moved to one later in High School. Was a bit of a culture shock moving to a small Midwest town. Couldn’t believe that we weren’t allowed to dance. I rallied the local youth though, and we ended up showing the adults that dancing was just fun and harmless. Later I went to college and joined a frat. The dean had it out to get us, but we ended up settling his hash with a zany plan.

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_fiz9_@reddit

"settling his hash with a zany plan"

Can I get a translation?

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Normal-Philosopher-8@reddit

I don’t mean to brag, but the person posting “anonymously” here? I know a friend of my cousin, who is married to a woman who had a daughter that has a stepfather who went to school with him!

But that was before he moved to a small Midwestern town.

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CynfullyDelicious@reddit

Didn’t you also go to med school and become obsessed with what accurate in the mind while hovering between life and death?

Or did you marry your high school sweetheart and struggle with married life while struggling at an advertising agency?

I can’t remember.

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OldBanjoFrog@reddit

He later lost a lucrative job on Wall Street and took a job as a bicycle courier.

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SirkutBored@reddit

we should kidnap him, for Christmas.

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Hilsam_Adent@reddit

I heard about a guy with a remarkably similar life story that leaned hard into the sketchy scientist bit and eventually turned himself invisible, then got really creepy and rapey.

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daltontf1212@reddit

But weren't were a pledge in the Omega house at the time?

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draggar@reddit

Were you a cake in the parade?

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Sufficient_Stop8381@reddit

I covered all to an extent. Raised rural, but moved to the burbs in middle school. The burbs were adjacent to a high crime city where you had to go to do anything interesting. So I saw a little bit of everything, from rural county country living where people left their houses unlocked to comfy middle class suburbia to high crime city with bars on all the windows and hearing shots a block away. People idealize the 80s but forget how bad the crime was in some areas.

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CynfullyDelicious@reddit

I grew up in the northern suburbs of Atlanta in an upper middle class family. Mom stayed at home with me and my sister until I was 13, when she got her real estate license and went to work. We didn’t need the money; she had a lot more free time as my sister was in school all day and she wanted something to do that she enjoyed, and I was old enough to help with Sis after school if the need arose.

Neither of us were parentified, but we did have chores at home that were reasonable - at 13, we were expected to start doing our own laundry, keeping our rooms and bathrooms clean, helping with kitchen duty, and helping with tasks and projects at home.

Although we lived in the Burbs, a half-hour drive north, and you were in farmland, a half-hour south, and you were in the city. One weekend there would be a bonfire party or beer bust in a remote field, the next we’d be down on Spring Street at 688 with our fake IDs (drinking age was 19 then) to see whichever punk band was rolling through.

The Atlanta Metro is way, way more vast compared to back then - that half-hour drive north won’t come close to getting you out of suburban strip mall, tract housing hell.

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BossOtherwise1310@reddit

Exact same life, but outside of Dallas… except we were more lower-middle class (mom always worked as a teacher)…. But same exact experiences. To be honest, all things considered, it was a helluva time & place to grow up in the burbs. We had fun. I don’t think I would change much, if anything…

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Beelzebozotime@reddit

I grew up in small town Nebraska. pop. 800. There was a larger 'city' nearby where I went to school & work. The town had a gas station (attached to a Co-op grain elevator), a tavern, a post office, and, for some reason, a steakhouse. I remember how happy we were to finally get a convenience store, which meant if Mom really needed milk, she didn't have to drive 7 miles 'into town' to get to the nearest grocery store. It also sold pizza, which was convenient on those times when we were stuck due to bad weather.

I remember when we also finally got cable TV in town. The village board had control of the service and decided MTV was too risque for our little burb, so we never got it. Best we could get for music videos was TBS's Night Tracks, Radio 1990 & Night Flight on USA, and whatever was playing on Video Jukebox when we had HBO. Our local NBC affiliate closed down for the night before Friday Night Videos would air.

Since I went to school 'in town' rather than the rural high school, I was frequently seen as a 'city kid', never mind I learned to drive on a tractor, sunburned my back hauling irrigation pipe at my grandparent's farm, and shredded my hands detassling corn for two summers. Not that I didn't mind the moniker, because my dad was a computer programmer who had to spend time around our extended family of farmers. He used to say "Thank God for football" when he needed something to talk about.

I did have some touchstones to the wider world due to TV and the radio. Dad loved watching Miami Vice. My peers attempted to emulate 80's fashion, but were limited by 'small town values' so it rarely got crazy. Our mall was small, but we still hung out there. Our arcades always took a while before the newest games got to us, but they'd eventually come.

But we also saw another side of the 80's. Does anyone remember the farm crisis? The family farms being bankrupted by low grain prices? The government basically paying farmers not to grow crops to up demand? Anyone remember Farm Aid, which popped up at the same time Live Aid and Comic Relief did? I just looked it up, Farm Aid is still going, btw. My grandfather ended up going to a lot of those farm auctions. Once came back with a pallet of spark plugs. I don't think he managed to go through half of them before he died in 2020.

Just to round it out. Being a rural GenX-er, I identified with Luke Skywalker's "If there's a bright center to the universe, you're on the planet that it's farthest from." quite a bit.

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Available-Bison-9222@reddit

I lived in the suburbs in Ireland and my friends stories of rural life was wild. Because of lack of facilities in rural areas for teenagers, they seemed to be allowed to go everywhere. If there was a dance/disco/function teenagers were included, which meant they were exposed to alcohol and drunk adults alot more. This lead to some very unsafe and even illegal situations, drink and sex wise. We seemed really square in the suburbs going to youth clubs, teenage discos and being collected by our parents.

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Formal-Cut-4923@reddit

Grew up in rural northern Utah. Town had about 600 people. Every “big city” was 30-40 minutes away.

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Dyna2004@reddit

Rural/suburban Mississippi. The nearest big city was Jackson. We had a very vibrant local music scene in my small town, grunge was the genre and the dress code. Seems like everyone had a band and there were plenty of small venues that would allow them to play, we all claimed that our town sucked and there must be something better somewhere else but in hindsight, it was great. We also had long hair, skateboards, weed, and rednecks who wanted to kill the hippies for Friday night entertainment. Good times. 10/10.

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SquintWestweed@reddit

Grew up in a tiny MS town, population about 600-700. One school, one stoplight, one grocery store. Most of our time was spent outside, in the woods, on the river, or in the swamps. Everyone knew everyone. As a result of such a small school (my senior class was 17 people), there weren't any cliques. Everyone got along with everyone for the most part. Nerds and jocks, black and white, etc. We were all friends. And I have always appreciated that aspect of small town life.

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JKnott1@reddit

We moved from an urban environment to rural when I was starting high school. Culture shock! I had already had booze, drugs, my first "romantic interlude", been arrested, etc. These kids went to church on Sundays and knew nothing about the joys of teen thuggery or LSD! The first year was torture, but afterwards I got used to it. Made some good friends whose positive aspects grew on me, because I ended up going to college (Hell, now I teach at a college!). By the time I got to college, I was way done with getting into trouble - bored with it, really. A good chunk of my friends from middle school did not do well in life, but most of those from high school are just fine. Take that for what it's worth. Looking back, I wouldn't change a thing.

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hells_cowbells@reddit

I grew up in the southeast in a smallish town. I think we had around 20k people there when I lived there. It was the only incorporated town in the entire county, so there wasn't a lot around it. The closest "big city" of over 100k people was about 2 hours away. The town felt big, because we had a mall and two movie theaters.

The town had cable, but i lived outside of town, so I never really had it. We had a river, so a lot of us would hang out and party on the sandbar on the river. We would cruise through town on a couple of popular routes on weekends. I didn't have any burning desire to get out, but i did anyway. I went to college any 4 hours away, but that college town was about the same size so it wasn't much different.

I do kind of miss my hometown, but it has really fallen on hard times. We used to have three main industries that employed a lot of people, but they all closed. Last time I looked, the population was below 15k now.

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Avasia1717@reddit

i grew up in the woods. had a 45 minute bus ride to school in a town of 2000 people. it was a 20 minute drive to town in a car. another hour past that to the city of just under half a million.

crime was pretty low like you said.

the economy wasn’t bad. the biggest employer in town was the produce packing plant, but a lot of people also commuted to the city or to the bigger towns between our town and the city.

in the hilly woods i didn’t get the constant experience of “riding bikes all over the neighborhood with my friends,” though i did occasionally get my bike and myself driven to a friend’s house where i got to do that. maybe twice a year.

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IamtherealMelKnee@reddit

I grew up in a town with 2,500 people, logging and farms until the logging stopped. Our "big city" was an hour and a half away and it had about 50,000. We had a bar called the Stoplight Lounge because it was next to the only stoplight in town.

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Boshie2000@reddit

Lived both experiences. Grew up next to the housing projects where my stepmom grew up and it was in one of the most dangerous and economically depressed cities in the country outside of New York during the crack and Aids epidemics. But I loved my childhood and mixed family and colorful neighbors and friends. Although as I got older my life was definitely facing challenges there.

So my family moved to the sticks for “safety” and instead faced racism and attempted bullying.

Luckily I’m a rather physically formidable Italian from Jersey with older black step brothers and loads of Italian cousins, so it ended up quite reversed, but I was in and out of detention and nearly worse due to how many hillbillies I had no choice to smash.

It was untenable and so I lost myself in music and left the violence behind for the arts… mostly.

Overall I’m glad I grew up in the city despite it being dangerous. The country is for the cows. They can have their woods and tractors and belt buckles.

Hillbilly food and music sucked hard and they were basic and racist.

I moved back to the city for college and although I moved coasts after, I live in a major city.

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Djragamuffin77@reddit

I grew up rural (coal mining town of 2,000, count was a population of 13k). Drank shine on gravel roads or bonfires in the woods. Moved to a larger city (1 million) for college and saw my first person of color and tried ethnic food at 18. I explain this to the teens I work with and they don't believe it was possible.

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XTingleInTheDingleX@reddit

Rural AK.

Younger years with grandma after school at her job.

Parties at the rock quarry.

Wasted youth, as they say.

Sometimes I pine for the streets and friendships I had back then.

All I ever wanted to do was leave.

Now that I'm gone I miss it.

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Confident-Echo-5996@reddit

Rural - Kmart Urban - Mall

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OldBanjoFrog@reddit

Was born in a large French city, and lived in a high rise, where my mom would let me play on the balcony.

We then spent the early to mid 80’s in the Middle East, but I am not sure what that counts as. According to my mom, we didn’t have an official address back then (it’s since changed). There were souks, beautiful mosques, dows, and dromedaries everywhere, and only one tall building. I don’t remember there being a dense population, but it wasn’t exactly desolate either.

After that we moved to the suburbs of Paris, and then a few years later, to the US to various places, and I ended up growing up in Dallas.

Paris, we saw some crime, homelessness etc when we took the RER into the city. Overall, it was an interesting perspective where I shared different experiences with different groups.

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upnytonc@reddit

I grew up in a rural suburb. There were subdivisions surrounded by farm land. My high school was on a main rd, so no one was walking to school. We had the parties in the woods, bonfires etc. Yet, in a 15-20 minute drive we could go to a bigger suburb and hang out at the mall. As for teen dance clubs, I vaguely remember ads for them. I was born in 77, so I think I was too young for those when they existed in my area.

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PhotographsWithFilm@reddit

I grew up in Rural Australia, so we were on another level again.

The town closest to the farm had a population of about 300 people. The next closest bigger town was 45 minutes away, with a population of around 10,000 people.

Yeah, it was vastly different to a lot of the stories in here.

But a lot of the pop culture is exactly the same

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whimsical2399@reddit

I think for the most part no matter where we all lived we had similar experiences.

I use to think we didn't until I made some online friends on Social Media in our age group who grew up all over the place and yet we all had the same type of memories of 80s-90s Music, Fashion, Cars, Entertainment via TV shows Movies and Video games etc.

The main differences are probably related to School Population differences and means of travel.

But we all experienced and grew up in the same Culture imo.

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Unplannedroute@reddit

Don't forget the ever growing suburbs many were raised in too, the stuff of ET and Brady Bunch. Plus many of us are 1st generation or 3rd country kids, 'home' has more than one answer and expectations were high.

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Ok-Parsnip-7981@reddit

Home definitely hits different when it’s layered in generations and cultures like a mix of classic reruns and an improv set.

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Unplannedroute@reddit

I got sent home every summer, loved it

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1BiG_KbW@reddit

Interesting because what scholars of yesteryear call "The Grunge Movement." That's rural and urban rolled together. Rural flannel hitting the high tech urban streets of Seattle and then beyond.

My Posse's on Broadway.

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lawstandaloan@reddit

I agree that rural and urban Gen-X experiences were probably pretty different.

No teen nightclubs for us unless you count a bonfire out on someone's back 40.

Couldn't spend hours on the phone with your friends because the neighbors on the party line would keep picking up

Getting your license and driving to school was probably the most important date of high school. No one wanted to be a senior riding the school bus.