I'm gunna say some shit that no one likes here.
Small towns have a lot of job opportunity with great wages (WFH still going strong in many fields too) and incredibly cheap housing. The idea that you must live in a large city is sold to you by billionaire companies making money off of the agglomerative properties of economic centers like NYC or LA.
They sell you merchandise produced and managed by minimum wage workers overseas (who get paid less than we do, and we don't even get access to those jobs). They rent to you property that could be bought with a mortgage for hundreds or thousands less and use that money to buy the rest of the property available so you can't have generational wealth to pass to your kids. And every time we come to address these problems, our local government doesn't want to dissuade them from investing in their economy and leaving. That's their paycheck too after all.
If we really want to boycott something, we should form some sort of exodus from megalopolises. Everything incentivizing you to stay in the much more expensive area is either a guilt trip or false promises left over from the nuclear family era of policy under Reagan. We should be leaving these cities until they better their conditions for working class families struggling to get by.
Something I want to eventually set up is a non-profit to assist struggling families to move to small towns that want to help them instead of these incredibly large and dishonest Omelas types. If you've ever read the short story I'm referring to here, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, you are the creature everyone above you despises. I am asking you to join me and become one who leaves Omelas to never return.
Let's stop the directionless posts on this sub around this topic and bring this call to action directly with those who profit off of us. They cannot profit any longer if we are not there. No more doomer posts. No more meme “eat the rich”. Let's do something that sticks.