Reply #28: Yup. Now you're getting into the meat of it.

[IrateCitizen]

I can certainly sympathize with this, because it's pretty close to what I'm living right now.

I live in a town about 37 miles from midtown Manhattan, and I take the train into the city every day. The entire commute (train and walk) is about 1:15-1:20 each way. If I told you that the vast majority of people I see on the train look like zombies, it wouldn't be an exaggeration.

Personally, when I came to evaluate this choice of lifestyle, I immediately set to work to get my teaching certificate and get out of it. I'm lucky in the respect that I can right now -- that my wife and I don't have kids, that we have a co-op instead of a house, and so on.

But when I look around my area (Westchester County), I just can't figure out how anybody can afford to live around there. Between my wife and I, we make well over $100K per year -- but if we were to buy a modest house, we would barely be able to stay afloat. And when I think of our situation, we're actually pretty well off. What about the countless others who are working two jobs in order to be flat broke (or in debt) at the end of the month?

I've read from several sources that happiness in a society isn't based on attainable wealth -- it's based more on relative wealth, or how much you have compared to those around you. Here in the US, when we see the happy suburban families in a five-bedroom house with a couple of luxury SUV's in the driveway as the "norm", it can't help but breed discontent for the countless people whose reality is vastly different from that.