City or countryside, new construction or renovation – the agony of choice!?

Only the argument: you have to be constantly on the road by car – I would like to disagree with that.

My experience shows me that the argument "car" usually does not hold true, and the shops one likes to visit are not exactly nearby, so you end up sitting in the car again – but then in city traffic and with parking problems. And... there is also a drastic difference between rural living and rural living; upon closer inspection, some rural residents have a significantly better infrastructure at hand than some city residents. Because of the many options, the trusted baker is in district A and the butcher in district B, the department store in C. If you actually want to enjoy the advantages of nearby infrastructure, you would have to live in a shopping center. We now live in the countryside but often visit the city, and I cannot see any real differences in household supplies. Living in the countryside in Germany is still something completely different than living in the countryside in the USA or Canada. Here you are connected properly almost everywhere within a few minutes; but you don’t have to move there. I keep reading quite a bit of stereotypical thinking, as if the city were always good and the countryside always bad, so black-and-white, but that is not the case.

Without work, we hardly need a car.

Someone wrote he only needs 30 minutes to get to the city center
just for comparison
15-20 min are 4 smaller towns with under 50,000 inhabitants; in 35 min in a city parking garage center with over 200,000 inhabitants without rush hour and traffic jam on the highway.

I would look at the village, what there is, what lies on the way to work, where you have to drive.
how do you want to live? The only relatively plannable thing is the village in the city, which you might still look for in a few years. Would that be okay and what compromises would you be willing to make?
Where are family and friends?
Would it be terrible if decent sushi no longer comes from your favorite Japanese by delivery service, but is only rarely possible in a restaurant?
I really missed the sushi terribly. What passes for sushi here you don’t want to know.
What about work if you want to change jobs?

I do not live on the outskirts of Frankfurt, yet it still takes me easily 30 minutes by car or public transport to get to the center. Soon I will have a shopping mall almost next door, so I can shop at the same chains faster, even though I no longer live in the city.

Sushi: I usually make it myself. It works great with trout or char, and I get those directly from the water of the fish farm in the neighboring village (which, by the way, also supplies Dallmayr in Munich - you just pay more for the fish there *g*). If I want salmon or tuna for my sushi, then I go to the other village, where there is a fishmonger (yes, here too in the Upper Bavarian outback!) who also has saltwater fish. And in the other neighboring village there is another trout farm. All doable by bike within a few minutes. I make good makis, my husband the nigiri. And recently even our regular grocery store has a sushi bar where you can get not so bad sushi for take-away. Since my brother and sister-in-law are also sushi addicts, we usually have a family sushi battle. The joint sushi crafting on my big island is also quite fun.

As I said: there are weeks when we have enough at home and don’t go to the city at all. Since the beginning of March, Corona times, we have refueled our cars maybe twice.

Same here. The year before last, when living in the city apartment, it was still 25 to 30 thousand kilometers per year. Since March, this is the second tank fill-up that is currently being used... apart from the weekly big shopping (which always includes the hardware store and drugstores) and two visits to the old office, everything else has been worked from home or bought locally. You can get used to it D And the Prime subscription delivers the rest.

Doing it yourself is not the same for me in this case. Something is missing. Society etc. It was simply an example to also think about small things that make the city or countryside worth living in and are missed when changing scenery. In the end, if there are many such small things, which may not even be rational, one will not be happy.

Life changes. I moved from the village to the city and back again. Each time there were reasons, and they were not necessarily rational. However, at that time, they were right.