You can survive on very little, it just will be a lower quality of life than previous generations which feels bad, but you do what you need to in order to get by.

The simplest way to deal with all of this is to actually perform the financial calculations to see what’s the best situation for you.

A $80,000 a year job in a city may actually leave you with a lower quality of life than a $40,000 a year job in the middle of nowhere if you’re spending $4,500 a month on rent for a two bedroom apartment in the city, and it would only be $1000 for a two bedroom house the middle of nowhere.

Calculate some possible budgets for different areas and different lifestyles, and find out what works best for you. Being in a city is not as good as it used to be financially speaking.

If you’re having trouble “surviving” either way, you need to figure out how to reduce your costs and/or up your income.

Common things like sharing a home (with a partner or roommate) can reduce your costs massively, trying to live alone is pretty stupid financially right now.

Learn how to cook things yourself, it’s not hard with Youtube these days, you can massively slash your food budget by not eating out or buying pre-made food. One of the stupidest things I see is people picking up a second job, making very little per hour, and then spending 6 hours of their income on a dinner from a restaurant (eat in, eat out, doordash, etc.). You would have been better off just buying decent meal ingredients for 2 hours of your wage, and then spending 1 hour cooking and cleaning. Then you’ve got 3 hours worth of time back that you can either use to work for more money for other things, or just not bother working at all to have more time for you.

If you’re stuck in a dead end low wage job, invest time in getting new skills that will enable you to get a better job. It’s never too late to retrain for a better position unless you’ve already retired.