With the pandemic, employers discovered that employees do not go out to buy cigarettes and never come back if they do not work under their eyes. Not only does the employee work when he is at home with the internet, but the boss also cuts a lot of building expenses. So, I believe that the home office is here to stay. The employee lives in his underwear in front of the computer and the employer no longer has to spend on rent, water, electricity, computer, etc.
Of these jobs, not all of them can be done completely by computer. Lawyers, for example, sometimes have to go to the forum. But someone who works with IT or texts doesn’t have to go to any specific place very often. That’s why moving away from the metropolises is a rational tendency.
If people follow rational tendencies, it’s another five hundred. I believe it is more feasible, for example, to leave the capital of São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro, whose prices are notoriously high. In Bahia (and perhaps in the states of the Northeast and the South), the prices in the capital are not exorbitant, and there is a relevant cultural factor in the opposite sense: it is beautiful to live in the capital and ugly to live in the countryside. In Salvador we have a pejorative word for those who come from the interior, which is “tabaréu”. It does not designate a cultural type, such as “gaúcho” or “hillbilly”. It is merely pejorative. This prejudice has a reason to exist in the Northeast, since the region only gained electricity in its interior with Lula. As for the South, we see that there is a prejudice against the “settlers”, who are a population of rural origin – a sign that among them the thing is also not very well regarded. An exception seems to be the historical Bandeirante area, with São Paulo full of middle-class cities in the interior. The strictly offensive use of the word hillbilly in decline.
There is a mutual estrangement and a nagging between São Paulo and São Paulo, but, I believe, not a contempt for those who live in the interior for the mere fact of living in the countryside. On the contrary: it is even possible for people from São Paulo to leave the capital and go to the interior depending on their quality of life, accepting the price of being associated with rural people. It’s a bit like the English moving to France despite the French.
Rio de Janeiro
The countryside of Rio de Janeiro is too small for Cariocas to form a homogeneous prejudice against Rio de Janeiro residents in general. There are municipalities that are known to be favelas taken over by drug trafficking, there are municipalities with paradisiacal beaches that São Paulo loves (but the Northeast won’t find much, as the water is icy), there is the mountain region (which is touristic), there are municipalities that already look like Minas. The state of Rio is small, has a lot of internal tourism, and urban parts outside the capital have a bad reputation not because of the capital’s special prestige, but because of its notorious status as a bang-bang land with a rifle. So the wealthy Fluminense lives wandering between these bang-bang zones; in summer it goes to the region of Búzios or Angra, in winter it follows the custom of the Royal Family and goes to Serra. His greatest contact with anomie is when he takes the Red Line (leaving the South Zone) or the Yellow (leaving the West Zone) and passing through an immensity of favelas. In the part of the international airport, some mayor thought it was a good idea to put a containment with drawings made by the local children. Maybe it’s a good idea anyway. Were it only a containment, not a corny containment, the practical purpose of preventing trawls would be evident. But preventing bang bang won’t do. Sometimes a drug dealer closes the traffic to exchange fire, which is why my aunt advises me to take the subway to get to the West Zone and avoid the Yellow Line.
I notice the tendency of the middle class to wanting to “leave Rio” (that is, the capital) and move to the mountainous region, where the cost of living is lower and the pace is quieter. The state of Rio, being small, well-known by its population and heterogeneous, does not have a notion of “the interior”.
Bahia
In Bahia, I realized that I made an eccentricity when I moved to the interior. “The interior”, in the Northeast, is seen as a backward and poor place, where it only makes sense to live if you have properties. Contested people often live in Salvador and take the road to work in the interior. Because of these and others, the sense of distance of a northeaster is quite different from that of a carioca. “Lá far” for Bahians is Barreiras or Conquista, which require a journey of more than ten hours to get there. (And I’ve already met a civil servant who lived in Salvador working in Barreiras. He lived on the road and was hoping to get a transfer. In fact, almost every civil servant in the capital who passes a public examination in the interior lives longing for the blessed transfer) Meanwhile, Paracambi is “over there” for the carioca, who wouldn’t even have the means to travel ten hours in a straight line within the state itself.
Given this notion of distance, I didn’t believe I had done anything very eccentric moving to a city just two hours from the capital. And I believed I had done something very rational, as I reconciled a lower cost of living than in Salvador with my personal taste and, in addition, an improvement in the quality of life.
My personal taste it is by Bahia and by the historic center. As the Historic Center of Salvador has little residence and, although it is well policed, it is located in a region full of rough spots, which would force me to travel by car. That alone costs you, and living in fear of cracudo is bad. For the rest, I like to do things on foot.
The urban center of Cachoeira is a large Historic Center with the facades listed by IPHAN, with some slums on the edges. The town is small enough that I can do everything on foot in it; and, if I want to go to Salvador, I just take a ride during off-peak hours, and I get where I want to go in less time than someone who uses a car and gets stuck in traffic jams.
Still , I committed an eccentricity because I went to live in a poorer place than my hometown. Being rational, living in a poor place makes you a relative rich, which is good for your pocket. But people aren’t that rational; and, except when pressured by exorbitant costs, they tend not to stay in a “backward” or “poor” city. Prestige is an important factor when deciding on the city to live in.
High standards
In this, the interior of the Northeast it preserves a more antiquated culture and lifestyle, as few people move there. So, my move to the interior brought a pleasant surprise that these standards are much higher than mine.
The easiest example to explain is the environmental one. The Paraguaçu River, which bathes the city, is beautiful and fishy. But whoever hears a city dweller talking about the river will think it’s Tietê. A leather factory was set up nearby and, as they say, the water is no longer drinkable ever since. Also, there seems to be a point where people litter. And all this makes the Paraguaçu River a “polluted river” according to the people’s mouth. I think it’s great that their parameters are like that. As far as people with parameters similar to mine were concerned, metropolitans would only be polluted when it started to stink.
The issue of prestige also affects neighborhoods. In metropolises, the cut is for mere income: a good city is an expensive city, a good neighborhood is a rich neighborhood. The only bad surprise in Cachoeira for me was the real estate prices, a consequence of the listing by IPHAN. Thus, the people ask for four hundred thousand for regular houses of the years in an area adjacent to the favela. On the other hand, a better house than these, in an area with no space for even a favela to appear, has its price plummeted due to the traditional presence of cabarets on the street. People have no problem living close to a favela, but they think it’s absurd to live in the most traditional cabaret street. In other words, they have a parameter other than income to decide if a place is good or bad. As cabaret street is not crowded, for my metropolitan parameters everything is much better than the order. As a bonus, I’m spying on other people’s lives and finding a subject to write about. If you are a writer, living next to a cabaret is good for the profession.
Finally, there is safety. The pedestrians who made a funeral face when I moved to the cabaret warned me that Cachoeira is impossible and told me to close the door. Elementary, I always lock the door. It took me a while to understand that they were recommending me not to leave the front door wide open, as some poor old people still do. Given my metropolitan parameters, there was never the possibility of leaving the front door wide open. I lock the door casually as I enter; I grew up like that. But in Cachoeira the visitor can be scared, thinking that I have ulterior motives.
