How to live on $432 a month in America

I've commented (probably too much) to argue with the harshest critics of this piece, but I am surprised to not have seen much this criticism which is my main one:

Supposing I've made peace with the main gist of this: Cut living expenses to a point where you can work ¼ or so of the time most of us spend working by living somewhere cheap and not being so materialistic.

The missing piece here is social connections. Family and friends. If I could take my in-laws and my 2 best friends and their families with me, I'd sign up to move to a rural place like this tomorrow. But it's impractical for nearly everyone in the whole country to make such a thing happen. This limits its appeal. This place is 90 minutes or so from the Montreal airport, which is actually not bad for rural places, but flights are not cheap, certainly not accessible on the budget described here, so for you to have contact with anyone outside this town, they're likely going to have to drop about $500 per person, per visit, and will be staying at the Super 8 since you probably don't have a guest room). So, implied but not acknowledged in this piece is the assumption that you are almost definitely going to only see your family and friends a few more times (maybe once a year each, if you're super lucky) for the rest of your life.

And unlike questions of money; food, entertainment, family and friends aren't fungible. You can start over and hope to make new friends out there, but you can't replace people. This is what would make this life untenable to me, and I'm not even all that extraverted.

That's the other unspoken side of the boomer-emulation argument, too. People's access to the world when boomers were buying houses and raising families was much less. Their families and friends were already close because few, if any, of them left where they were from (except to get drafted into wars). In some of those who left, they did so to enable the rest to follow.

These things just don't happen anymore. To find better work (especially outside of tech), people move, some constantly. Siblings wind up across the country or further from each other and where they grew up. Elders are either left behind or move into retirement homes.

There are exceptions, and those who keep some of that support network find the real boomer superpowers of sharing costs (financial, time, and labor alike) and inheriting wealth. But the ease with which people could leave home for good is one of many factors that make emulating boomers difficult, if not impossible: that rural cheap house isn't 10 minutes from the rest of your family, your childhood friends, and your co-workers anymore.