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A lot of people don't work (retired, married a bread winner, or students living off mom and dad).
And there are of course telecommuting jobs now.
And even rural areas have doctors, dentists, plumbers, electricians, gas stations, delivery services, daycare, schools, libraries, churches, post offices, and countless other "invisible" employers that are easy to forget about when you live in a metropolitan city with dozens or hundreds of major corporate employers.
There’s also truckers with over the road/long haul jobs. You and you family can live anywhere when your job is to drive across the country.
Some people will do jobs that bring money into the town such as engineers, hospital workers, etc. Others provide a service to these people such as restaurants and they make their money off them. People overestimate how much you need to survive in a rural community. It’s extremely cheap compared to big cities which is why rural tends to be heavily associated with low income communities
There are people that drive 45+ minutes each way for their job.
9 times out of 10, small rural communities are built up around natural resources, farming, military bases, or tourism. For instance with farming, that creates the need for tack shops, farm equipment sellers, mechanics, chemical distributors, end product distribution etc. With those industries in the core, you get lots of secondary industries.
Then once you have something keeping people around, education and healthcare become sort of self-sustaining employment sectors, leading to a kind of “invisible” government subsidy that will keep a place hanging on even if the original industry fades. These days, it’s closing the hospital or school that truly kills off a town.
Is forestry happening in the area? A few thousand hectares of well managed forest creates hundreds of jobs. A couple of timber mills and all the labour that powers them, mechanics and saw doctors for those.
Trucks to haul the lumber, machines and operators to cut and extract it, and the mechanics for those. Machines to prepare the site for replanting and the operators and mechanics for those. Ground crews to plant trees. Foresters to manage the forest and all of the beaurocracy and hierarchy that comes with that. Fire management crew, science and research crews, plot measurers, tree markers...
Then you need another whole industry to keep this small army plied with booze and food.
I live in a kinda small Norwegian town. I work full time as a developer with remote access to the customer. My office is ~5-6 hours away, but I am very rarely asked to travel.
kinda living the dream i see
Our business does electronic assembly and sells the products online and sells web services. We get UPS and FedEx and USPS, and have a serviceable internet connection.
Lots of people i noticed are either commutinf quite a lot, or they work in construction or with carpentry etc. They can often find jobs out in rural areas, but of course, thats in Denmark and nothing is ever really 'rural' like in australia or some parts of the US
Often times, one or two large companies employ a significant fraction of the community. In my (rural) hometown we had a university and an industrial battery factory. Almost half of all the families in town had at least one member employed by either the university or the factory.
I kinda thought that was how most small towns worked. We got a couple big factories that take up a big chunk of the workforce here. They have a huge amount of power in controlling the wages for the town, which is always worrying. They pay the highest, but it's still not very high
I grew up in "very rural Midwest, USA". My hometown's population is less than 5,000, and it's the biggest town in the county. Some other have already covered the "invisible" jobs that are everywhere, but here are some more examples. If there are houses, there are realtors, builders, inspectors, insurers, landscapers, and service techs (think plumbers, electricians, etc.). Aside from the people you see working in stores, schools, hospitals/doctors' offices, etc., there are the people you don't see most of the time like cleaners and maintenance people. Even the tiniest little "town" usually has at least a gas station and/or bar, even though sometimes they're the same place. There are also police officers, sheriffs, lawyers, judges, and other city/county officials.
Someone mentioned truckers, and even though my hometown was nowhere near any sort of metropolitan center, some independent OTR truckers lived there. And speaking of transportation, cars/trucks are obviously important in rural areas, so you've got new and used car dealerships, mechanics, tow truck drivers, etc.
I live very rural and just travel for work. I know a fair few poeple in my area who do the same thing. Get flown around for work, fun of travel,and then back to our cosy homes in a low cost of living area.
Some of those rural New England towns have colleges. A town like Williamstown or Great Barrington MA has the local college as the largest employer. (With a town population around 7000, that's not too difficult.)
Some have significant tourist trade, sometimes year-round. (In the fall, the leaf-peepers come up from the city to see the foliage.)
I teach their children how to use math to do physics.
"Blasphemy!!! Keep that voodoo magic out of my small town school!"
-probably someone, somewhere in BFE.
My husband is an engineer that works in plants and factories. The last three places he's worked at were rural, or at least further from the city center. COL is typically lower in these areas, too, so lot of people get by on lower paying factory or service jobs, and as someone else said, a lot of retirees, too.
There are a lot of teachers and school administrators. Others will work at whatever factory or do welding or machining at a local fab shop. My dad always was driving an hour for work and I did for a while when I moved back out here until I got a remote job in software.
many jobs in rural areas are services to service the people living there and passing by, also logistics are needed everywhere. the rest often center around one industry, it might be farming, forestry, a factory, mining. then there are smaller industries like machine shops and other smaller workshops plotted all over. for example my grandmother was a shopkeeper and my grandfather was a train driver in a small rural town.
Remote work
Remote work is only widely possibly in the last few years. Most homes I drove past are well kept century homes on 1-10 acre lots
The work is still remote, they just have to drive to the remote location :)
In all seriousness, most people just commute to the nearest town or city.
My grandma used to call her town a "bedroom" community. 600ish people lived in town with most commuting for work. IIRC, there are a couple of nearby towns with around 3k people, the biggest city in the county having 12k people. One of the state's major cities is around an hour away; think 100kish people.
I used to think that would be too far to commute, but from other comments on this post, it sounds common.
SO and I are in engineering fields and the bumfuck midwest was a commonality in job opportunities for both our areas of study (ChemE and EE). We bought a decently sized house and 10+ acres several years ago (thank jebus... definitely couldn't afford it now) that's about 30 minutes away from the "major" town where both our companies have an office/plant, but since COVID everything is semi-work from home now... that is, until management decides they need to lay people off and force everyone back into the office.
I'll be honest, we probably aren't going to stick around here for much longer... had a kid and the daycare options are terrible and I really don't want them growing up with the regressive politics that have gotten out of control. We'll gladly take our high earning jobs and associated state income taxes somewhere else rather than subsidize the bullshit... but its been nice being to amass a sizeable savings/investments and pay off all debt before the next move.
Behavior therapy. Once I move I’ll be completely remote. New England is also weird because little towns get nestled into what you might assume are county roads.
I'm from Cleveland. I'll take a week vacation and drive through NY, VT and NH every year or two. The drive is really amazing. It's really awesome how you can just be cruising down a remote county road at 60 mph, going over hills and around bends then BOOM, you need to drop to 30 because there's a few hundred yards of really old houses and maybe an old church or gas station or pharmacy... then one Dollar General... then back to miles of 60mph of scenic nothing.
Haha yeah. Meanwhile if you take that same trip in other places the roads slowly become dirt, then trails, then fields.