THE COUNTRYSIDE

We often imagine the countryside as the ultimate antidote to modern life: slower, simpler, quieter. It’s a romantic vision of green fields, timeless traditions, and natural rhythms that promise refuge from the pace and pressures of urban existence.

But is the countryside truly an escape from society? Or is that just another cultural fantasy we carry with us?

The Restfulness of Space

There is no doubt that rural landscapes offer a kind of psychological rest. As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan writes in Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977), open, unbroken landscapes provide a sense of freedom, even infinity. The countryside’s expanses of fields and sky can soothe the mind precisely because they lack the visual noise and density of cities.

This is real and important. Human beings evolved in open landscapes. We find security in sightlines, comfort in horizons. Neuroscience even suggests that views of natural landscapes reduce stress and help regulate our emotions (Ulrich et al., 1991). In this sense, the countryside genuinely offers respite: its openness is a restorative psychological space.

A Myth of Simplicity

But the idea that the countryside is “slower” or “simpler” is more ideological than real. Raymond Williams, in The Country and the City (1973), famously dissected this romantic binary. He argued that pastoral images of rural life have long served as idealised counterpoints to the city’s vices—offering moral purity, social harmony, and natural rhythm in contrast to urban corruption and speed.

Yet this vision often ignores the realities of rural work, the harshness of agricultural cycles, and the ways rural economies have always been entangled with global markets and technological change.

Today, that entanglement is more advanced than ever. Fields that appear timeless and natural from a distance are often planned with precision farming systems powered by AI and big data. Soil sensors, GPS-guided machinery, and satellite monitoring are standard tools. Supply chains are managed by algorithms that predict yield, optimise logistics, and negotiate markets in real time.

The surrounding landscape may look ancient, but it is thoroughly modern—an extension of global industrial agriculture.

Global Expectations, Local Realities

Moreover, rural life is not necessarily “simpler” in terms of cultural pressures. Expectations of quality, style, and consumption are globally spread. Rural areas consume the same media, brands, and technological conveniences as cities. The idea of local simplicity is complicated by global connectedness.

Ironically, despite technological sophistication, yields in certain rural regions are stagnant or declining—due to climate change, soil depletion, and market pressures. This is a reminder that “planning” and “control” have limits. The promise of optimised agriculture meets the stubborn complexity of natural systems.

Not an Escape, But a Difference

This is not to say the countryside offers nothing. On the contrary, its psychological benefits are real and important. Its expanses allow for rest in ways urban spaces cannot. Its distances from centres of power can foster different kinds of community and identity.

But it is not an escape from society. It is society, shaped differently. Its apparent slowness is less about time and more about space: the unbroken horizon, the fields between houses, the silence punctuated by wind or birdsong. These qualities matter deeply—but they don’t mean life is simpler, easier, or free from technological and economic complexity.

In many ways, the countryside is both more planned and less predictable than it appears. It is a landscape written by AI and global capital, even as it remains vulnerable to weather, soil, and limits we cannot fully master.

A More Honest Vision

If we want a more honest vision of rural life, we should appreciate it for what it is: not an unspoiled refuge outside society, but another expression of it. A place of difference, not escape.

It offers us a change in perspective—a place to rest our gaze on distance rather than density, to feel the unbroken sky instead of the city’s enclosing walls. But it also demands we see the planning beneath the fields, the technological logics running the farms, the global expectations shaping local lives.

In the end, the countryside is not about abandoning society, but about encountering another version of it—one that, in its openness, may help us reflect more clearly on the world we’ve built, and the ways we might want to live within it.