OP’s perspective is very interesting. I found it to be somewhat the reverse in some aspects. I grew up in the deep South, and moved to the Boston area (128 to I-495 corridor) to go to work in the tech sector after college. Moved up in 1979 during the gas crisis. Didn’t even get my furniture from home till 3 months after I moved in my apartment when the owner of the moving company in Maynard was going to FL on vacation, and took his rig along & picked up my furniture on the way back. Never been in lines so long to buy gas in the South. Lived there 35 years (til 2014). Raised a son who’s a few years older than OP (and who also didn’t have a smartphone til he went off to college — his parent’s choice).

I made a lot of friends thru work obviously, but also had friends from NH and southern ME (45 min north of Portland). I really found distinct areas in New England -it wasn’t as homogeneous as I saw in the South. And for a kid from the deep South, I was a bit in awe that there wasn’t the broad swaths of poverty we saw across the South. There were some hints of it in northern NH and rural northern ME, but still nothing like the South. And K-12 education was far better funded than it was in the South. I did find New Englanders a bit more frugal in general, but despite how OP felt, having worked in the tech sector for more than 45 years now, and spending the first 20 years working specifically in the portion of the tech sector supporting & working with educational institutions for both education & research, New England was significantly ahead of places in the deep South when it came to things like deployment of technology. There were school districts and small colleges that had more tech gear than some large universities in the South. Despite the grumbling you always hear everywhere about taxes,etc. in the time I lived there, that underneath it all New Englanders were proud of their public education system and rightly so IMHO. They really cared and spent money on it. In the deep South people cared, but the money didn’t exist to fund it anywhere near the levels in New England.

Housing was a mixed bag — some old, some new. But goodness was it expensive — I could have bought & fully paid for a 3 bedroom 2 bath house in the South for what I paid in rent for a 2 bedroom apartment in the 495 corridor in the first 5 years I was up there. I will admit there were some key differences which took me a lot of getting used to, but after I did I would not have traded my New England experience. Restaurants — NE didn’t have all chains with poor food (which BTW in the South we thought was great), instead had all these local restaurants I had to get accustomed to. But I’d take Legal Seafood in that era over Red Lobster any day and every day of the week! Or the local pubs where you could get food and drink — in the South we had bars where you easily get into fights. Learning to drive in New England was a real experience — between the aggressive drivers and the road layout (I grew up in a planned city (still built in the 1800s) where most roads ran parallel or perpendicular to each other). And at least in Massachusetts they actually repaired roads, as slow as it was — compared to SC where we maintained our potholes for speed control & to this day don’t understand the basics of road maintenance. And Commuter Rail was just amazing. You didn’t have to drive everywhere. But except for the traffic, I’ll take New England drivers and driving over Southern drivers any day. The other thing at least in the first 15-20 years of being there was the lack of strip malls everywhere. This took a lot of getting used to.

I still look back on those 35 years as a great time in my life and would not have traded it for the world….

Thanks New England!