Are Small Towns Are Better? Happiness in Small Town America

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer. I’m your happiness expert, and here I am in small-town America. I’m in a little place called Robinson, Illinois, where there’s a real sense of community. People come together; there are a few big employers, a lot of agriculture around in the area. There’s even a chocolate bar factory, Hershey Chocolates. It kind of leaves a sweet, chocolatey smell in town, and it’s fun being here. I sense that there are even just happier people than I see in a lot of the big cities I travel to. So, you gotta wonder, well, what’s that all about? What’s going on that people are happy in this small town? It’s not like you can just arrive at some destination and say, “Oh, I’ll be happy here.” There’s no magic ingredient; sometimes, they call that the arrival fallacy. That you get to a place where happiness kind of lives, and then you’re assured of happiness ever after. Nowhere does it work like that, but there are some fundamental things going on in small towns that make a unique living experience. We often hear about it; people love their small-town living. This video is going to be a little bit about what are the attributes of small towns that lead to people feeling happier and more connected, and maybe there are some lessons there that we can apply no matter where we live, whether we’re all by ourselves in the middle of nowhere, or we’re in a big city fighting the concrete jungle with everyone else. So stay tuned, that’s coming right up.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful.

Yeah, so I’m really enjoying my time in this little town. I’m doing some training for a really great client over the last couple of days, so I’ve been here for almost five nights at a little Airbnb, and it feels a bit homey. It’s not just in and out, as I usually go into big cities, and I’m getting the real sense of this town. I went to see a movie, watched some 14-year-olds playing all-star baseball, and just a sense of the space around me and the people here. There’s something going on; they got a good thing going here, and I want to share some of my observations. One obvious thing that we’ve talked about in the past is that by being exposed to nature, people tend to be happier, breathing fresh air all around me. It’s not exactly wilderness, but there are big cornfields and agricultural areas, and as you drive from one place to another, you’re passing through the countryside with deer gallivanting across the road. We saw a beautiful red fox the other night, just pretty, just lovely. You breathe deep, you relax in nature. One of the things that are true about this little town too is that the expenses are low. Just out of curiosity, I looked up some houses on the internet, and buying a house here, on a relative basis, is pretty cheap. People don’t have a whole lot of expensive things to do. There aren’t fancy shows to go to, and they aren’t dining at five-star restaurants. It’s kind of very middle class and simple, and people’s expenses are lower. Money does not make you happier. I’ve talked about that in the past, but it is true that a certain amount of money, a certain confidence that you can meet your basic needs, takes stress out of our lives and allows us to be happy. Being rich, rich, rich doesn’t make you any happier than solidly middle class, but solidly middle class is better than being poor from a happiness perspective, and in this town, middle class comes more easily because the cost of living is less. So that’s one of the things. And there’s also just this truism that I’ve been talking to people who come into the meetings that I’m attending, and they tell me why I live in this town or that town, and a lot of people are commuting relatively short distances from one small community to this particular one, Robinson. When we talk about the commute, they’re saying, “Oh yeah, it’s about a 25-minute drive or a 30-minute drive or something like that.” But they’re commuting across beautiful, empty agricultural roads that just make driving a pleasure. So first of all, most people aren’t commuting very long at all, and their commutes are relaxing and pleasant and beautiful, much different than my driving around in Vegas experience, for sure. And then I’ve talked in previous videos about something called weak ties. These are the informal, kind of casual relationships that we have momentarily. The conversation we have with the barista or the person who we meet at the grocery store, and they’re not going to become our best friend, that we’re for sure going to see each other every weekend or anything like that, but it’s a good connection just for a moment where we feel, yeah, I liked that. I felt a true touch of human connection. And in this town, it happens in big cities too, but in this town, almost everywhere you go, people have a sense of knowing each other, and they’re friendly. Even if I didn’t know anybody in this town, as I went, filled up with gas or got groceries or anything like that, there was just a certain level of more sincere familiarity in the way they related one to another. When I work with these people at this particular client, their kids play ball together; they all know the same high school. Many of them graduated from the same high school, and there’s just this deep sense of inter-connected, woven ties all across the community, where people feel that they belong, that they know others, and that relationships matter. Then they can count on people to be honest and straightforward because the conversation I have today is going to come right back to us tomorrow and the day after and the month after. These are people that we know for a lifetime. And then finally, I think I have this one little last example. There’s this tremendous amount of community pride. People have been giving me advice about things to do in the evening, and one night, we went to the ball game, and it was nothing to get in. Of course, it was so free to get in, and right at the between the bleachers, a woman’s handing out these little red 50/50 tickets. I’m thinking, and I want to support the local community; I’m interested. So I said, “Well, how much is it for tickets?” “Oh no, no, no, nothing. It’s free.” I said, “How can it be free?” “Well, all these people have donated prizes, and some were homemade, and some were from companies in town, and one was from a restaurant, and just a whole bunch of stuff.” And there were only like 40 people there, and so sure enough, of course, I even got my number drawn and got a little prize from this community. People all over were engaged in supporting little league ball in a very concrete way, and it just felt like the pride of the community came through time and time again, in big and small ways. Now, all of these things being in nature, keeping our expenses low, utilizing the weak ties that we have with people to make a sense of connection, an honest, well-meaning, humanitarian, genuine connection. Also, the idea that we have this pride in just being in our community, in our neighborhood, in the clubs that we belong to, in the workplaces we go to. There’s nothing dynamically true about a small town that is exclusive to small towns that we could not have in big cities, and we do have them, of course, to a degree. But all of these things, if we made an intentional investment in them, so that our own lives were more invested in our weak ties, committed to the community, making sure we spend time out in nature, even if it’s just walking in a local park, and then maybe managing our lifestyles to have a degree of minimalism so that our financial stress is reduced. All these things, and making sure we’re managing our time to spend it so that we’re doing the stuff that we value most, hey, we can do that anywhere, big city, small town, you name it. So there’s a little insights into some kinds of happiness. Thanks for watching. If you like this kind of content, click the like button, share it with your friends and family. My clients are usually big corporations, so share it with your human resources director. Maybe this is the kind of teaching for more happiness that you need in your workplace. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you again next week. Bye for now.