Frustration about where i live.

[Skids]

Hello again everyone.

I'm not usually depressed or down but lately i've been sleeping much of the time and i don't see a solution to my problem.

The problem is where i live. It's nice enough and quiet enough but i have a deep desire to move away to somewhere else. Preferably by the sea. I think i've been in this area now for nearly 20 years of my adult life and become bored. I yearn for the sea.

I've been to every place possible within a 50 mile radius of where i live and as is a trait of mine. I have become bored. Really bored. I don't think it would be so bad if in the gorgeous summers evenings i could head off to the beach or even in the harsh depths of winter see the sea crashing around but in both scenarios currently i don't want to go out. That would involve driving a few miles to get to the countryside which is all the same topography and no sea.

In the last few years i have been struggling with an auto-immune disorder as well as having HFA and i've not been able to work. My partner works.

Basically due to the cost of housing i am well and truly stuck where i am with no opportunity to change this and move on. I keep thinking that one day knowing i will die and purely because i don't have enough money i cannot fulfil a dream in life so i am living like a zombie each day because i am frustrated and have given up.

It's not like i can just get a job and then rent in the area i want to move to because of my disabilities.

I am aware that compared to a lot of other people in the world i am in a good position and i recognize and appreciate that but that doesn't make my feelings of deep sadness and frustration go away. I still yearn for that move.

I know that wherever i live i am unable to work so would just be stuck in the house / local area again anyway but i need the sea. It would really help. I am a 2 and half hour drive from the nearest coast. (UK).

I expect a lot of you are in unfavourable conditions and positions when it comes to housing and where you live and if so, how do you plan on improving this or if not how do you come to accept your arrangements as just how it is without intense bitterness and anger?

Have any of you managed to move to another area and it was the best thing you ever did and how?

Or have any of you really felt the need to escape where you live but over time have adjusted and have become ok with it and stayed?

Just interested in any thoughts / advice please. Thanks everybody.

 

[Judge]

I suspect most of us at one time or another have been unhappy with where we live, and for a variety of reasons. Though the reality is often that "sometimes the grass is greener on the other side, and sometimes not". In essence that much of any move more often than not is little more than a crapshoot as to whether it will satisfy you, or mortify you.

So many big and little variables that can add up. That's the truth of it all.


I get what you are saying though on a very personal level. For what it's worth, I spent a very long time contemplating leaving the state of California to move to Nevada. When I finally did, I never looked back. Preferring the mountains and desert to the ocean, having spent most of my life near the water.

 

[Tom]

The physical surroundings have always had a great effect on me. And I enjoy and think I gain mental peace and strength from simple walks in nice natural environments. Recent scientific studies are bearing this out with visits to both the woods and shore showing beneficial physiological effects. But due to my career I was not in control of where I was and had to relocate regularly. So what I learned to try and do was investigate the local area and make the best of the location where I was at. At different points it was the coast, desert, woods, mountains, plains and even sub-artic tundra. No matter where, I would try and make regular walks my main exercise, weather permitting. If you are in the UK I imagine you have quite a few interesting areas to explore. And perhaps you might be able to manage a overnight trip to the shore once in a while.

 

[Skids]

Thanks for your quick reply judge. Points taken, especially the 'grass is greener' conundrum.

The only glimmer of hope i can see to ever moving is to move to the Scottish islands and i've been looking at the Orkney Islands.

I've always been fascinated by the sea and remote islands and whilst Orkney couldn't be considered remote for many people living around the world in seriously remote places, in terms of the UK where generally speaking you can't move for people it is as remote as it gets.

The house prices are really low and affordable too but then there are other things to consider as you might expect living on an island.

I just find it a bit sad that in order for someone to afford a half decent house in the UK they have to consider moving to a remote island!

 

[Tom]

I get what you are saying though on a very personal level. For what it's worth, I spent a very long time contemplating leaving the state of California to move to Nevada. When I finally did, I never looked back. Preferring the mountains and desert to the ocean.

I was stationed there for two years and initially was discouraged, but soon found there where actually many different environments and ecologies. I could hike in the desert, scramble up rock hills, hike in high forests, canoe rivers. And once in a while walk in places you knew no one had been in a very long time. It was really a great experience.

 

[Skids]

Tom i liked your post. It sounds like you have been fortunate to have been able to experience a variety of different locales due to moving around a lot. I do get to visit the coast but it's a 5 hour round trip just for the day which leaves me tired and barely able to relax properly and enjoy it. Staying a night or two costs money which i wouldn't be able to afford at the frequency i wanted to visit.

It would just be really nice and relaxing most evenings to walk down to the seafront from my home and just embrace it all. It gives me an incentive to want to get out of the house and relieve a lot of stress and constant anxiety.

 

[Judge]

-

Thanks for your quick reply judge. Points taken, especially the 'grass is greener' conundrum.

The only glimmer of hope i can see to ever moving is to move to the Scottish islands and i've been looking at the Orkney Islands.

I've always been fascinated by the sea and remote islands and whilst Orkney couldn't be considered remote for many people living around the world in seriously remote places, in terms of the UK where generally speaking you can't move for people it is as remote as it gets.

The house prices are really low and affordable too but then there are other things to consider as you might expect living on an island.

I just find it a bit sad that in order for someone to afford a half decent house in the UK they have to consider moving to a remote island!

Indeed, I know what you are saying.

Cost of living expenses is what drove my desire to leave California for good.

Though the rebound of our economy has slowly driven up the same costs here in Nevada. Ugh.

 

[shysnail]

What's your situation now that you can afford where you're currently living, but not to move to the seaside? Is it because of your partner's job?

While Orkney is indeed beautiful and I can understand wanting to move there, I can't see the same being true for a lot of other seaside places in the UK. A lot of them are very deprived, especially the more affordable ones. You may be near the sea, but there's a lot that comes along with that. I went to Blackpool a while back during the off-season and it was just the most desolate place I have ever been. Then I went to Clacton and there were teenagers smashing windows for the fun of it... Sigh. So you might be trading in your quiet life for something much worse.

I also wonder if you're pinning hopes on being by the sea being the thing that brings you peace, but I wonder if it will in the long-term. It's like, my girlfriend's mother has a dream of moving to Norfolk and walking a dog on the beach every morning. And it's just like, "Okay, but what will you do the rest of the time?" It's more an image or a daydream than something that will necessarily be a great lifestyle.

 

[Judge]

One great thing about the Internet is that it gives people the opportunity to research in depth any possible move to most places. It's how while I once contemplated moving to Arizona, that in the course of my research I discovered that while rents are cheaper, utilities costs are astronomically higher. Essentially spoiling a once perceived thought of drastically cutting my cost of living expenses.

It's still weird to realize that the summers in the high desert are not nearly as nasty as those I endured for years in a microclimate only about 30 miles from San Francisco. But then in the Bay Area utilities are the least of one's concerns compared to the cost of housing itself.

So wherever one thinks about moving to, it's best to do your homework and learn about all the details, whether they amount to the good, the bad or the ugly.

 

[Misery]

Oh yeah. I know how you feel on this one. I'm in the US, I live in Illinois. Fortunately not in the utter hellhole that is Chicago, but instead south of it. Takes about an hour to get to the city, if I was insane enough to ever do so. This position means that I'm on the very edge of what most people would call "civilization", and past that boundary (like, a 20 second drive from here, is how close that boundary is) is unending grass and farms, which make up MOST of the state.

Now, the lack of "excitement" isnt what gets me. I would never even consider going to something like a bar or a concert. I shudder at either concept. No, what REALLY gets me is the climate. We have 3 good months in the year. Well, I should say "good" with sarcastic quotes, actually, because Illinois manages to even screw up the summer months with the falling slime. Er, I mean "rain", some call it rain, I guess. This section of the continent is notorious for unending storms, and indeed, that makes up quite a bit of the weather. When it's NOT during those few months, the rest of the year involves lower temperatures (bleh) even more slime (bleh!) and snow (BLEH COUGH GAAAAAAG). On top of that, being on that "boundary" means that while the gloriously empty roads, free of brainless idiots, are nearby... there's still enough populated-by-utter-morons roads to be super annoying. The town that's nearby is mostly a major shopping zone, so it draws in distracted twits from neighboring areas. There is a road, route 59, which I usually instead refer to as route fifty-&#$@ which passes very close to where I'm at... it's about 30 seconds to get there. You want to get ANYWHERE around here that isnt grass/farms, and you MUST interact with that road. Either you'll need to drive along it, or you'll need to cross it, either of which are horrible options. That one road is so freakishly bad that it makes other roads bad by their mere proximity to it.

What I want to do, and what I've always wanted to do, is move to Florida. Southern Florida, specifically. The heat, and the ocean... that's what I want. I've always had an affinity for water, but the ocean is better than any silly lake (usually). I've wanted to do that since I was little, but alas, only very rarely got to go there on family vacations and such. I've always found it incredibly frustrating. Stuck in this area that I utterly cant stand.

The good thing though happened.... about a year ago? My father & stepmother bought a third house (#2 is up in Wisconsin, which is also kinda bleh) down on an island nobody seems to have heard of off the coast of Florida, indeed down by the southern tip. We'd been on that island numerous times, after starting to take yearly trips down there, but I never expected them to actually get a place there. Now we go there muuuuuch more frequently, and my father wants to just outright move there once he retires in like a year. You better believe I'll be going with.

Not that the island is perfect though. The driving is EVEN WORSE than Route Jackass, not because there's too much traffic, or too many idiots... the population there is dramatically lower. No, it's because it's an incredibly THIN island (and a very small one). So alot of drivers are cramped onto this one specific road, because it's the road that actually goes somewhere.... including being the only way OFF the island. Which leads to a series of hideously long bridges. So if you're ON the island, driving is very slow as the speed limit is low and most of the people that live here are older than dirt. If you're trying to get OFF the island (or back on) you're driving with braindead tourists on either side. It manages to take even longer than Route HULK SMASH while having nowhere near the amount of cars on it. It baffles me.

Other than that, the place is a freaking paradise. Well.... maybe not so much in the summer months. Right now it's near 100 degrees down there. But still. I'd take that any day, over where I'm at right now.

 

[Judge]

I do feel a bit sorry for those who long to move to Hawaii and do. Where if the cost of living doesn't drive them into the ocean, the overcrowding will.

Visiting an island is a very different proposition from actually residing on one. I know when I lived with my parents on the little island of Guam it used to drive my mother nuts. But then she just plain hated the place. Murder on our allergies apart from the climate itself. Though housing was much better compared to so much of it stateside. And as an island there's only so much you can see before you have seen it all.

At least when we were stationed on Whidbey Island we could always take the ferry to Seattle or Bremerton. So in that instance we weren't really isolated. But geez, the traffic is so bad now in the Metropolitan Seattle area that I'd never want to live there again, having lived there twice already.

Though if you truly want to "get away from it all", living on an island might just fill the bill. Being raised in a navy family gave me all the salt air I'd ever want to breathe. Just another reason perhaps why in my old age I like the mountains and desert.

 

[Peter Morrison]

Hi Skids, Your dilemma isn't unusual and a move is proper if you have exhausted everything your current community offers you. People change, and longing for something new and exciting becomes a new obsession. Judge suggested questioning the "grass is greener" approach, and I agree completely. Every environment has something special to offer. Might I suggest that you find a way to spend time at the rough, rocky coast that you love so much before committing to a complete move. Plan some visits when you have spare time and investigate the reality of living in those places. You are never stuck anywhere. The ability to go is always with you, so there is no rush. Go ahead and indulge the idea as much as you want, just don't over-romantasize it. Variety is the spice of life, though. Dreaming costs you nothing.

 

[oregano]

I looked at many different places to move to when I finally got fed up with Sacramento, California, where I've lived my whole life. (I was born in a suburb called Roseville, which was founded as a work camp for Chinese building the Transcontinental Railroad and which was named by one of the white bosses for a prostitute named Rose, and I am not kidding, the tale has pretty much been verified.) Except for 20 months in San Francisco just before the Internet showed up and demolished the city's societal structure, I've lived in either Placer or Sacramento counties my whole life.

I looked at the Nevada high desert as well, and the things that put me off were the severe problems with narcotic addiction among the locals, the wholesale corruption in local governments, and of course the severe lack of water.

Then I looked at Klamath County, Oregon, and had settled on an area along US Highway 97 50 miles from Klamath Falls, and then I realized that the area is snowbound much of the year, and Klamath Falls itself is dying an unholy death with abandoned strip malls everywhere and everybody on meth. (Oh yeah, and a bad corruption problem to boot.)

I signed up to Autism Forums during the period I was considering Klamath County, and the username "oregano" is an anagram of "Oregon", as well as an in joke about the fact that marijuana is legal in Oregon and that some stoners are sold oregano (an herb) instead of weed by street dealers.

I finally settled on Siskiyou County, California, or as locals call it the State (or Republic) of Jefferson. The people are very independent and self-reliant, the local governments don't have too much of a problem with corruption, lots of small parcels of land in "neighborhoods" platted by crooked land speculators during the Vietnam era that go for cheap, and in areas remote enough that the central administration in Yreka doesn't care too much about them.

Lots of problems with cartels (Mexican and Chinese) from outside growing marijuana near Mount Shasta, but the sheriff was given a blank check by the locals to go after them (especially after the narcotraficantes attempted to rig an election AND bribe the sheriff to get carte blanche to grow as much weed as they wanted, the locals were NOT amused) and the local newspaper is constantly printing tallies of how much cartel weed is ripped up. My land is quite a ways north of that though.

The UK is tough from what I hear, extremely overcrowded and expensive and reliant on imported everything that has soared in price due to Brexit.

 

[tlc]

Oh yeah. I know how you feel on this one. I'm in the US, I live in Illinois. Fortunately not in the utter hellhole that is Chicago, but instead south of it. Takes about an hour to get to the city, if I was insane enough to ever do so. This position means that I'm on the very edge of what most people would call "civilization", and past that boundary (like, a 20 second drive from here, is how close that boundary is) is unending grass and farms, which make up MOST of the state.

What I want to do, and what I've always wanted to do, is move to Florida. Southern Florida, specifically. The heat, and the ocean... that's what I want. I've always had an affinity for water, but the ocean is better than any silly lake (usually). I've wanted to do that since I was little, but alas, only very rarely got to go there on family vacations and such. I've always found it incredibly frustrating. Stuck in this area that I utterly cant stand.

The good thing though happened.... about a year ago? My father & stepmother bought a third house (#2 is up in Wisconsin, which is also kinda bleh) down on an island nobody seems to have heard of off the coast of Florida, indeed down by the southern tip. We'd been on that island numerous times, after starting to take yearly trips down there, but I never expected them to actually get a place there. Now we go there muuuuuch more frequently, and my father wants to just outright move there once he retires in like a year. You better believe I'll be going with.

Not that the island is perfect though. The driving is EVEN WORSE than Route Jackass, not because there's too much traffic, or too many idiots... the population there is dramatically lower. No, it's because it's an incredibly THIN island (and a very small one). So alot of drivers are cramped onto this one specific road, because it's the road that actually goes somewhere.... including being the only way OFF the island. Which leads to a series of hideously long bridges. So if you're ON the island, driving is very slow as the speed limit is low and most of the people that live here are older than dirt. If you're trying to get OFF the island (or back on) you're driving with braindead tourists on either side. It manages to take even longer than Route HULK SMASH while having nowhere near the amount of cars on it. It baffles me.

Other than that, the place is a freaking paradise. Well.... maybe not so much in the summer months. Right now it's near 100 degrees down there. But still. I'd take that any day, over where I'm at right now.

I drove through your area when I went to the eclipse in 2017. I can't say flat as a pancake, because a pancake has some convexity to it. I say flat as a surface plate. Fields and farms as far as you can see.

I live on one of those areas similar to your island description, where everybody wants to visit but not many people want to live (at least for more than 3 months out of the year). In the summer and fall we are overrun by tourists. Traffic backups, rude people, and campgrounds and hotels are booked solid in advance if you ever did want to get out and do anything like that on a whim. The town where I work has one road through and it's a drawbridge, other than that it's about a 50 mile drive around the lake to get to the other side. It's a nightmare and me and most of my coworkers chose our homes specifically to avoid crossing town. And due to the tourist economy (probably similar to many places on the sea) there is not much besides low paying part time seasonal jobs, they don't want industry because they want the town to be quaint and pretty. I'm lucky my company is still going, as all the rest but one have shut down.

But I love being near the bridge and the lakes. You get ocean vista sunsets and can drink the water. In the off season it's quiet, many places just shut down for winter. Just have to put up with the summer, but there are countless things I want to do at home when it's nice out.

For the OP, I sort of did it. Not a total relocation, but I used to live in an HOA and loved the house but hated the location. I felt stuck and didn't think I could ever afford to move, even with somebody else helping. But once I tried it, contacted some unconventional banks, I found it was actually doable. Wished I'd have done it sooner. And my old house sold, I didn't think it would. So I say do some serious looking into it, and if you do that, you at least have a chance that it will happen. If you just assume it will never happen and do nothing, it will never happen.

 

[Progster]

I can relate to your wanting to live near the sea. I live near the sea, and I find that it calms me to look out over the water or to take a walk along the sea front. But only in winter when the tourists are gone, in summer it's full of traffic and tourists and campers with their noisy kids and there are few places to go to be alone. But local knowledge helps - there are still a few places which aren't on the tourist radar where you can go and walk or sit or swim in relative peace. Though swimming and sitting really aren't my thing

If you are going to move, you need to think carefully about the kind of place you choose to stay in. As @shysnail points out, some seaside towns in the UK can be very run down and dilapidated, with social-economic issues, others are very expensive. You need to think in practical terms, what will you do there, how will you live, what else does the town have to offer? Is your life really going to be any better? You may indeed find peace being near the sea, it might be great for a while when it's new and there are places to explore, but when the novelty wears off boredom very quickly sets in again, and meanwhile life goes on, the same old chores to be done, shopping, cooking, etc. There might be new, different issues to contend with that you didn't have before. Also, you mention that you have a partner who works - you need to consider their needs and how living far away might affect your relationship. These are all things you need to consider.

Another option that might be worth looking into is having a caravan, or camper or going camping, and taking holidays near the sea. When I was a kid, my grandparents had a caravan which was left permanently in a campsite by the sea, and it was like a second home - we used to go there and stay as kids in summer.

 

[Skids]

Interesting post Progster. Thanks. Commenting upon what yourself and shysnail touched upon regarding the less desirable seaside areas of the UK. You don't need to worry on that score. I know most of them and have experienced most of them too so i have my eyes fully open.

Cleethorpes and Rhyl at the height of summer are depressing let alone in winter. I prefer the natural small resorts that aren't packed with summer only attractions such as Sidmouth in Devon for example. Lyme Regis too is beautiful. On the flipside you can get some small fishing communities by the sea that are very picturesque but that are very insular and don't like strangers moving in. There are a lot of these i find in Cornwall. So it's imperative to do your homework and make multiple visits before deciding to move there.

I totally agree with you about how difficult it is these days to find space by the sea, especially in summer when the kids are off school. I have a 10 year old and i reluctantly have to endure alll this noise and traffic and stress when i take her to the seaside. Often i take my shoes and socks off and paddle knee deep into the sea and just try and take 5 minutes out listening and observing before going back to chaos of noise, litter, people and arcade machines.

The mostly northern seaside places i visit are simply a magnet for boy racers, chavs, rough aggressive families and anti social behaviour. There are some places that are better than others but even if you go to a small seaside place in the UK, even affluent ones you'll come across these people regularly because they are a plague now.

As for having a caravan / campervan i'd love that but just no way i can afford that.

Anyway, plenty to ponder.