Why I Left One of "America's Best Places to Live"
Until a few weeks ago I owned a home in one of “America’s best cities”. Cary, North Carolina is the central suburb in “The Triangle” of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. If you Google “best cities to live in the USA”, the first result ranks the region at number two1. Cary, itself, consistently makes lists of the best places to raise a family2. If it does not make the list, usually one of the neighboring suburbs of Apex or Holly Springs does; my home was near the border of Cary and Apex.
The amenities of Cary and the surrounding region, both public and private, are world-class. It has the best library, park and trail systems I have ever seen in the United States. The population is urbane and diverse; one is never more than a twenty minute drive away from any cultural experience or intellectual pursuit imaginable. I once paid less than sixty dollars for two tickets to see my teenage musical idol, Branford Marsalis (a Durham resident), perform Prokofiev’s Saxophone Concerto with the North Carolina Symphony. The large Indian population of the neighboring suburb of Morrisville results in a massive cultural exchange. There’s even a professional cricket team, the Morrisville Cardinals. I had a thoroughly enjoyable experience playing two seasons on a company cricket team - unfortunately I’m a horrible batter, and a worn out rotator cuff from years of tennis precludes me from bowling, so I was cut for the third season, a humbling experience for a former Little League all-star who assumed cricket would be like baseball.
Raleigh-Durham boasts the fourth highest, per-capita IQ in the nation3. Each of the three cities house a premier university (Duke, UNC Chapel Hill and NC State) and many of the graduates buy homes and work in Cary. The largest, privately owned software company in the world, SAS, has its headquarters in Cary and much of the town was designed around its campus. Research Triangle Park, which sits on the border of Cary and Durham, has major campuses for household name tech companies, such as Lenovo, Cisco and IBM, and is a primary location for the biotech industry, with presences from Biogen, BASF and Quintiles. Apple recently decided to place their number two campus in RTP4. Epic Games, makers of Fortnite and the Unreal game engine, has agreed to purchase the old Cary Towne Center mall and convert it to their headquarters5.
Most of my neighbors and friends were highly educated, white-collar, technology professionals (and lovely people, to boot). In Cary, you are not asked if you went to college or even where you went to college. You are asked where you received your “undergrad”. The median household income in Cary is in the six figures and is nearly double the state average.
By every “listicle” metric, I should have wanted to live the rest of my life in Cary. For much of the time we lived there, my wife and I felt that way. All of these benefits are enough to make anyone question whether they should ever leave. We loved Cary, and in many ways we still do, but something started to change about six years ago.
First, a disclaimer for the dear friends and family we left behind, and whom I plan on visiting regularly: my ultimate grievances are not with individuals, although the situations I will use as examples involve individuals, but with Cary en masse. I lived in my home in Cary for longer than any other single location in my life. My children were born there. In many ways, it pained me to leave. Therefore, I hope you receive these criticisms as more cultural than personal.
When we moved to Cary, “The Triangle” was still a medium sized region. All of the intellectual and multi-ethnic qualities were already there, but it was still the South. Things moved slowly and a culture of politeness permeated every interaction. Openly expressing what might have been remotely construed as a selfish or controversial opinion, without knowing your audience, was anathema. Even though I had lived in North Carolina during my time in the Army, moving back there from Los Angeles, the city of institutionalized narcissism, was a welcome culture shock.
I began to notice a change in that culture around 2016, as the area’s national prominence grew and more “coastal elites” sold their homes in major cities for half a million dollars or more and bought houses in our suburb, presumably for cash on the barrelhead. I would joke with my wife that I could instantly tell if someone was from New York, because they would avoid eye contact as I waved while running past them on the greenway. As the years went on, the regularity of that attitude grew, along with one that was far more insidious.
The more-enlightened-than-thou attitude my wife and I had purposefully left behind in California began to regularly pop up in conversation. To be fair, there is no such thing as a highly-educated city without that attitude, but I had always felt it was somewhat tempered by our city’s Southern and blue-collar-adjacent demographic. As someone who, unlike most of my neighbors, did not grow up in a highly educated, upper-middle-class environment, I had always felt a bit of a stranger in the strange land of Cary, but those feelings were overshadowed by the things I loved about our town. Now, with the influx of hundreds of thousands of metropolitan technologists, middle-managers and executives into our immediate vicinity6, coupled with the unfortunate timing of political polarization in our country, my feelings of being a foreigner were exacerbated to a point where I became ever-conscious of my minority status, on multiple fronts.
As someone who briefly pursued a degree in history before switching to computer science, and whose chief, continued area of secular, intellectual interest is the history, psychology and methodologies of totalitarian governments, I had to purposefully hold my tongue when one of my wife’s best friends, who holds a master’s degree in education, openly declared herself a Communist in my living room. If I had told her what I really thought, that the only difference between a Communist and a Nazi is the disgusting excuse they give for putting a bullet in your head (or, more accurately, the back of your neck), my wife and children would have lost friends. Besides, by that point I knew most of my neighbors, in their academic naïveté, considered their worldviews closer to hers than mine.
I had to learn to keep my mouth shut at work when, after disagreeing with a colleague who openly expressed joy over a peacefully demonstrating, far-right group being violently attacked (I espoused the [then] ACLU-supported position that, in America, even Nazis have the right to peacefully march), it resulted in human resources being told that I was “promoting white supremacy in the office”. When I had my time with them, it was immediately and painfully obvious that there was nothing I could do to convince them otherwise. I didn’t bother waiting for the verdict and quickly left the company. This was not a one time incident. Extreme, activist politics began to be increasingly broadcasted in the offices in which I worked, and one is not allowed to offer even a respectful, contrary opinion without incurring professional injury.
Then COVID happened and I learned something very important about my community and our institutions of higher education, in general. I discovered that I was surrounded by extremely intelligent people who lacked practical wisdom. They were experts at ingesting current orthodoxy as the “correct answer”, like students preparing for an exam, but they were completely inept at using varying data to form their own, heterodox opinions.
My wife and I spent much of the last two years passing academic studies back and forth, having long discussions about their ramifications, and carefully attempting to build a daily routine that balanced ever-updating information with love and consideration of our neighbors, while not compromising our immutable values. We watched in horror as our very atheistic/agnostic community elevated science and politics to religious status. Very quickly, I couldn’t go for a run in my neighborhood without seeing many “In This House We Believe… Science is Real” or “Hate Has No Home Here” yard signs. While I agree with the prima facie essence of these two statements, for the people who take the time to purchase these little flags, “science” is what the doctor on TV says and “hate” is any differing political opinion. To the most ardent believers of this secular religion, dissent from the dogma equals “to the right of me”, and “to the right of me” equals evil.
Cary had already appeared on the national stage as a community of the worst type of “White Liberals”, when in 2016 the city invited Rachel Dolezal to speak at our Martin Luther King Day event7. We made international news in the summer of 2020 when, in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, our city’s protest march turned into a strange distortion of the gospel when two, married, Black pastors took over the ceremony and invited White people to wash their feet and publicly apologize for collective guilt8. Even uniformed police joined in.
Last summer, when my wife shared an academic study demonstrating the utter ineffectiveness of cloth masks, something that even CNN now finally admits9, she was told by a friend, “You’re not a scientist. You need to trust the experts.” Never mind that my wife was explicitly trained in, and built her career on, the practice of reading academic studies on health and nutrition and applying them to the real world - which this person was well aware of. The most egregious error in this statement is the ignorance of the fact that the paper was written by scientists, members of the supposedly infallible, priestly class. “You need to trust the experts,” was coded language for, “you need to conform to the entities I have surrendered my critical reasoning to or you will be excised from my tribe.”
As Stanley Milgram concluded, two-thirds of people will go along with whatever anyone in a position of authority tells them to do. Before COVID, I understood this as an academic truth, but I never understood the emotional trauma of being in the other third - especially the pain of being surrounded by people who agree with you in private, but go along with authority simply out of fear of loss to their personal peace and affluence. To make matters worse, based upon my anecdotal experience and some insider information on pharmaceutical mandate compliance, the sum of both unquestioning and begrudging submission to authority in Cary is probably closer to ninety percent. I believe this to be heavily driven by the credentialed and wealthy demographic of the town.
A few months ago, before making our way back to Cary after putting in the offer on our house in a new state, our family stopped at a restaurant. It was Sunday morning after church and the place was packed. We had to wait thirty minutes for a table, something that, two years into COVID, is still practically unheard of in Cary; I know triple-dosed, healthy thirty-somethings who still refuse to go inside a public building. As we sat at our table, my wife informed me that she was having a moment of anxiety, because of how near all of the tables were to each other. “This is too close,” she thought, before realizing that this type of constant anxiety over every potential exposure is unsustainable. “If I have that feeling, and I’m a grown woman who knows better,” she said, “what is all of this doing to our children who barely remember life before COVID?”
All worry that the decision to leave Cary was rash left me at that moment. My primary purpose as a parent is to foster children into functioning adults with a very important set of absolute values. Surrounding them with a community that is so massively failing the Milgram experiment will ultimately manifest something wholly different in them. Now that I am in my new, predominantly blue-collar, but still sizeable town - where being a “FullStack Software Engineer” is a moderate novelty and not the job of half of the people on my block, and where I have already experienced a friendly diversity of publicly expressed opinion on multiple issues - I know we made the right decision.
U.S. News & World Report The 25 Best Places to Live in the U.S. in 2021-2022 https://realestate.usnews.com/real-estate/slideshows/25-best-places-to-live-in-the-us?slide=25
moving.com 12 Best Places to Raise a Family in the U.S. https://www.moving.com/tips/12-fantastic-places-to-raise-a-family-in-the-u-s/
The Daily Beast America’s Smartest Cities https://www.thedailybeast.com/americas-smartest-cities
WRAL Apple picks Triangle for $1 billion campus, thousands of high-paying new jobs https://www.wral.com/apple-picks-triangle-north-carolina-for-new-campus/19646410
Epic Games Epic Games Announces New Location for Company Headquarters https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/epic-games-announces-new-location-for-company-headquarters
The population of Cary proper is growing by 1.3% year over year, but the population of the neighboring (and much absorbed) suburb of Apex, where there is available land for new development, is growing by 8% year over year.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/apex-nc-population
New York Post Rachel Dolezal tapped to speak at MLK event https://nypost.com/2016/10/06/rachel-dolezal-tapped-to-speak-at-mlk-event/
Daily Mail White police officers and community members wash the feet of black faith leaders in North Carolina to 'express humility and love' https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8397065/White-police-officers-community-members-wash-feet-black-faith-leaders-protest.html