Explore where you live

What is the point of going to a big city if you haven't even experienced your small town?

So I currently live in a relatively small college town in the middle of farming country, I love it here but I often find myself surrounded by fellow students who don't. Most of their complaints revolve around a common theme which is that this town doesn't have In n Out, or a Krispy Kreme, or a Raising Cane's, or (insert name of overrated restaurant chain here). I've also heard some other pretty dumb complaints such as:

This 30 mile stretch of road with almost no night traffic doesn't have streetlights.
The county doesn't plow the roads in this particular area with more cows than people where a solid 30% of residents own a plow they can hook onto the front of their truck
Public transportation in this town where gas is cheap and almost everyone owns a car is terrible

If you think about these complaints (and others that one might hear here) you'll notice that they all have something in common (other than being dumb) they are all focused on what the town doesn't have and they don't take into consideration what the town does have.

If you sit down to think about it it is really childish to complain about having to drive to the next closest city to go to a Starbucks or something, especially when you haven't fully explored the places that are right by you. A common thing that will happen to me whenever I tell people that there is a boba place here is that the person I'm talking to will be shocked and ask me where it is. When I tell them that it is right by the Sonic they'll often respond by saying, "We have a Sonic?" even though they drive right past it when they go to Wal-Mart to stock up on top ramen and Kraft macaroni and cheese two times a week.

The thing that too many people don't realize is that there are plenty of interesting and great things around you wherever you live. This talk about being more appreciative tells a story of a man who traveled across the country to see a wonder that locals of the area hadn't bothered to visit, while the locals had been to places close to where that man lived where he hadn't been. In my situation I find myself constantly hearing about new cool places I've never been that are just in the small town that I live in. I've never been a fan of the idea of traveling for the sake of traveling, you should have a purpose beyond simply seeing cool things when you travel because chances are you haven't seen half the cool things in your backyard.

Don't complain about the things that the place you live doesn't have if you don't even know what it does have. You shouldn't contatnly say, "This place doesn't have x and I miss x" we should be saying, "this place has y and I've never been there." Learn to explore your town rather than drive four hours just to have a different cheeseburger, learn to shop local rather than eat at MacDonald's twice a week, and most importantly learn to love where you live rather than long to be somewhere else.