I moved to the country because I wanted to see the stars.

That sounds like a line from a postcard, but I mean it literally. Nearly 80% of people in North America can no longer see the Milky Way from where they live. The sky is still there. We just built something brighter underneath it.

The stars in the city

The city has stars too. They’re just people.

We look up at them the same way. Athletes, founders, influencers, the loudest person in the room. We admire them, study them, and try to become them. And a lot of what makes them stars really is remarkable: rare, unrepeatable qualities that happen to shine in their moment.

But a quality that works once doesn’t always work a million times. Some of what we copy from our stars was designed to signal success rather than to produce it. Copied across a whole city, those qualities don’t make a million successes. They make a million people comparing themselves to someone they can never be, and chasing the parts that were never the point.

A million stars

Out here, I look up and see a million of them. Real ones. The same beauty, just a different version of it: nobody to envy, nothing to copy, nothing asking you to be anything.

I expected to pay for that. I didn’t.

When I finally ran the numbers honestly, living in the country cost about a fifth less than the city. And it wasn’t mostly about cheaper housing. It was that I stopped paying for a city life. Eating out, events, gym memberships, paid services and parking mostly disappeared. In their place came a different bill: land, fencing, water, equipment, fuel. And some of that comes back, as food you grew yourself.

To be fair, cities are better for hospitals, and for people who need other people. I don’t say that lightly: for a lot of people, that second one is the whole point of a city. It just isn’t where I get my best work, or my best peace.

Where the dopamine comes from

I’m a high-agency person. I shape my environment, and I’m very good at getting what I set out to get.

In the city, a lot of my reward came from people: relationships, and the work of keeping them. I value those. But I didn’t get to choose when they needed me. They’d find me in the middle of something and pull me away from what I was building. My attention ran on other people’s schedules.

In the country, I’m at a kind of peace I didn’t have before. I decide what gets my focus. And I’m connected to the ground in a way I never was: I can see where things come from, what depends on what, and how one small change moves everything downstream. Water, soil, weather, work. The feedback is honest, and it’s mine.

Compare yourself to the earth

I’m not a Buddhist. But I do believe this.

When someone has lost their alignment, when they’re working hard at a life that doesn’t fit them, one of the best things you can do is bring them to the country and surround them with good people.

Something shifts. They stop comparing themselves to the stars of the city, people whose qualities were never in line with their success, even when those qualities were designed to look like success.

And they start comparing themselves to the earth.

The earth doesn’t signal anything. It gives back what you put in, on its own time. It’s patient. It’s honest about what worked. It rewards effort you can see.

That’s a much better thing to measure a life against.

I came out here to see a million stars. I stayed because I stopped needing to be one.