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Having lived all over as an Air-Force brat I can say that there are "pace" difference everywhere!! I don't think we rush or hurry in the Norhteast, but folks are a lot more aggressive - people in the south are generally nicer, but their ambition doesn't have the same kind of edge to it. Regardless of the pace, there's plenty of grass and trees up here and other natural phenomenon such as "snow" that needs to be shoveled in addition to the lawn that needs to be mowed!!
For me, Northeast is the NY-Boston stretch - anything South of New Jersey/Delaware is Southern for me. I say that only because some people call Detroit and Chicago the "North" when we generally consider that the mid-west - again, a totally different pace/vibe. Also, when I lived in DC, there were people I met that didn't consider themselves southeners, while they were VERY southern to me!!
The one thing I couldn't get used to when I've been in the south was the poverty - I'm not saying there isn't poverty in the North, Lord knows there is - but there seems to be two classes of people in the south - well-to-do Southerners and all the broke folk without much in between. Rural poverty was new for me and it seemed so much harsher than urban poverty! You can also make a decent blue-collar living in the Northeast which I haven't really seen in the south!! Even though the cost of living is higher up here, if you are talented and aggressive you can get a lot farther and if you have the right kind of money in your 20s and 30s, you can do most anything and live most anywhere in your 40s and beyond - my peers in the NE are "obsessed" with retiring before 45 while my friends in the South don't even seem to consider it as realistic - some of us are mamking almost double that of some of our classmates/line sisters in the same or similar fields, and the cost of living is higher up here, but the differential is not 100%!! But there are social trade offs!!
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