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.

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My depression and intrusive thoughts actually got worse during the redditpocalypse. But that was, at least in part, coincidental. A lot of life stress stuff started happening at the same time, and my usual coping mechanism for when things would become too much (scrolling through reddit) was seeing a rapid drop in quality. After approaching a new low, the stressful stuff started subsiding, and things are mostly better now. There are some aspects about yourself that you can’t change, but you do ultimately choose how you react to, cope with, and manage these issues. I will have depression and ADHD for the rest of my life, I but I can choose to manage things in such a way (taking more time for myself, having a better diet, being more active, etc.) that these “attacks” are less frequent.