Life 2.0: How People Across America Are Transforming Their Lives by Finding the Where of Their Happiness [Paperback]

Rich Karlgaard (Author), Rick Warren (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 25, 2005

Do You Know Where Your Happiness Lies?


In The Purpose Driven Life, I consider the question “What on earth am I here for?” This book considers another important question: “Where on earth should I be living?” Is where you live worth the stress? No one is forcing you to stay where you are. It’s your choice. —From the foreword by Dr. Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life


Would you be happier if you lived somewhere else? A place where the quality of life is greater than the cost of living? Such places do exist—you just have to look a little harder to find them. The answer probably doesn’t lie in the big coastal cities: the cost-of-living gap between those urban areas and the heartland is an immense chasm. And yet the “sophistication gap” between these regions is steadily shrinking—cable tv, computers, fax machines, cell phones, and broadband Internet access are making it possible to work almost anywhere.

Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard wanted to explore the new appeal of “flyover” country, and he decided to sky-hop around America in a single-engine Cessna, talking to people—those with a nose for entrepreneurship, a faith in technology, and the willingness to take a chance—who found their bliss in places like Green Bay, Wisconsin; Des Moines, Iowa; and Bozeman, Montana.

America offers up scores of these gems—cities and towns with a winning combination of low cost of living and high quality of life—and Karlgaard provides an in-depth look at the country’s 150 cheapest (and greatest) places to live.

Life 2.0 is the story of those who are living larger lives in smaller places, and a road map for those who want to follow their lead.

Where is your happiness? Check out Life 2.0’s “150 Cheapest Places to Live” section, featuring dozens of cities and towns that offer the good life at a great price.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As the publisher of Forbes and with an extensive background in Silicon Valley, Karlgaard might be expected to have particular insight into how Americans rattled by the bursting of the dot-com bubble are coming to grips with their tightened circumstances and creating their own minirecoveries. His book's problem is lack of focus—is it a personal account of his learning to fly a small aircraft so he can fly state-to-state to meet local success stories, or is it a more detached observation of the economic forces driving folks out of the coastal metropolises to find "larger lives in smaller places"? The two halves never really gel, and though the economic aspects of the story generally hold sway, his own stories overshadow the perspectives of those he's reporting. The compelling story of a woman who retires from the State Department to do freelance foreign political consulting out of Bismarck, N.D., for example, is interrupted by Karlgaard's telling of his high school crush. A tail-end list of "150 Cheap Places to Live" creates further fragmentation, but it is one of the book's most valuable sections. There's definitely a thought-provoking story to be told here, but it's debatable whether Karlgaard has succeeded in putting the pieces together.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap

"A delightful, and surprisingly moving, tale" -- Michael Lewis, bestselling author of Moneyball

"Karlgaard flies in with a companion concept to David Brooks’s On Paradise Drive" -- Tom Wolfe

"While counterintuitive to those on the conventional fast-track, Life 2.0 offers great promise to those who are open to personal innovation" -- Clayton Christensen, Professor, Harvard Business School

"This fascinating treatise will make you think deeply, and may just give you the impetus to uproot" -- Tom Peters

"An original and exhilarating look at options many Americans don’t realize are now open to them." -- James Fallows, national correspondent, The Atlantic Monthly

"Not only will it widen the horizons of your life, it could also renew your health and wealth." -- George Gilder

Have You Found the Where of Your Happiness?

One of the intriguing things about the United States is the idea of the second chance, that when you feel stuck there is always a frontier you can cross to reinvent yourself. In Life 2.0, Rich Karlgaard used his own personal and professional midlife crises to look at the state of the American dream—the belief in continuous personal upward mobility—and where it stands in the twenty-first century.

At the ripe old age of forty-five, Karlgaard fell in love with flying and mastered the art of lifting up and bringing down a "2,500-pound aluminum box kite"—a four-seat single-engine airplane. As the publisher of Forbes he felt that he was doing too much armchair theorizing and didn’t really understand how Americans were responding to the changes that had started taking place so swiftly over the past few years.

So he put together his new flying skills and reportorial mission and flew around America to places like Green Bay, Wisconsin; Bozeman, Montana; Fargo, North Dakota; Des Moines, Iowa; and Lake Placid, New York, to gain some insight into how ordinary Americans are untangling the knotty problems of constant stress, crushing expense, and bewildering hassle that often characterize life in the nation’s urban centers.

He discovered their simple solution: they moved. What Karlgaard found on the road are fascinating and inspiring stories about people— those with a nose for entrepreneurship, a faith in technology, and the willingness to take a chance—who are finding the new American dream in places as far from New York City and Silicon Valley as you can imagine. Some of those people include:

• A burned-out insurance exec who fled his overworked East Coast life and settled in tranquil (yet dynamic) Des Moines
• A tool broker who traded his brick-and-mortar business in sunny California for a life in the Pennsylvania hills, where he relaunched his business on the Internet
• A road-warrior democracy specialist who conducts her worldly affairs from the low-key outpost of Bismarck, North Dakota
• A self-made millionaire who paid for his financial success with his first marriage and who did things differently the second time around by moving to smaller cities and focusing on family as well as work

Adroitly combining analysis of the economic and social trends challenging middle-class people with perceptive advice on how to escape the rat race of the coasts, Karlgaard explores the eye-opening possibilities of that huge tract of land often carelessly dubbed "flyover country." Filled with stories of personal reinvention and triumph, Life 2.0 is the story of those who are living larger lives in smaller places. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press (October 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609810316
• ISBN-13: 978-0609810316
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #135,768 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Times They Are A Changin', August 16, 2004

By 

Kevin W. Moore (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Life 2.0 : How People Across America Are Transforming Their Lives by Finding the Where of Their Happiness (Hardcover)

I'm a 17-year resident of Palo Alto, California, land of the $700,000 fixer-upper, and it's indeed a wonderful place to live if you can afford the price of admission: safe, excellent schools, a mild climate, pleasant & bicycle-friendly tree-lined streets, and a community life strongly flavored by proximity to Stanford University. Unlike a number of the subjects interviewed in Rich Karlgaard's Life 2.0, I have been fortunate to enjoy (?) commutes of 20 minutes or less. Downsides? A few: high mortgage, state income tax and property tax bills-EVERYTHING costs more here-congested rush hour and weekend getaway traffic, and a workaholic culture in which one schedules a dinner with friends a month or more in advance and it is rare for a long-time neighbor to be more than a passing acquaintance.

Nonetheless, in recent years my wife and I have often pondered whether we might enhance our family's quality of life by relocating to a smaller community. So far, in the last analysis, it has always come down to, "They don't have my kind of work [biotechnology research] there."

This sort of yearning is part of aging ("When you're young, you want to get away, when you're old you want to go back...") and is not unique to the nation's post-boom cultural and economic circumstances. However in Life 2.0 Karlgaard has identified a number of economic and social developments that in the next 1 or 2 decades could well synergize, transforming "yearning" to "megatrend." These include the aging of the huge baby-boom generation; the prediction, well-informed by history, that the next 10-15 years will likely see below-average investment returns and wage growth; and the huge impact of the information technology revolution that enables much knowledge-or service-based work to be done from anywhere and will doubtless catalyze a great leveling of the world's standard of living over the next two generations. In my opinion, he makes a compelling case.

This subject could easily have been the substance of a ponderous ethereal academic tome or a dry compendium of statistical analysis intertwined with cadaverous prose that would put 10,000 people to sleep if they were running from a napalm attack. Thankfully the author has instead chosen to illustrate his thesis in an engaging way through real people's experiences. The lengthier interviews are devoted to the more unusual and exceptional folks-entrepreneurs of various flavors-who have made successful transitions to stimulating, productive lives in "flyover country." Shorter "sidebars" are also included as excerpts of letters he has received from others who have found happiness and meaning, if somewhat more modest success, in smaller communities. I found the combination very enjoyable and read the book in but three sittings-a remarkable achievement for a 51-year old father of a lively six-year old son who normally takes a month or more to read a book! In addition Life 2.0 was for me a very thought-provoking read on several levels: both in its relevance to my personal circumstances and future, and in a more global (or at least national) sense.

What didn't work so well? As a pilot myself, I think the segments about the author's experiences in personal aviation might have been better integrated. Reading the first part of the book, I imagined that the aviation-related segments would serve as a metaphor for the broader theme, describing the author's own journey through a difficult transformation: finding fulfillment and satisfaction in mastering a new set of skills, finally opening up a completely new set of opportunities and experiences. Instead this theme seemingly just faded away as the narrative progressed and came to no satisfying conclusion. However, the subject and style of Life 2.0 foreshadow future revised editions containing at least updated information and perhaps additional stories. These future editions would also be an opportunity for the author to more tightly weave the theme of personal aviation into his tale.

I enthusiastically recommend Life 2.0 as a very interesting and enjoyable book that will make you think differently about your own life and our society's future. I plan to give it as a Christmas present to a number of family members and friends! In the meantime, my wife and I may make a few investigative visits and domestic inquiries in places such as Payson AZ, Columbia CA, Groveland CA, Albuquerque NM,...

38 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It's okay. Some good stories but also questionable, September 28, 2004

By 

Stacy E. Burrell "stacyburrell.blogspot.com" (Detroit, MI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Life 2.0 : How People Across America Are Transforming Their Lives by Finding the Where of Their Happiness (Hardcover)

This book reminds me of "What Should I Do With My Life?" by Po Bronson, just shorter and with an emphasis on finding a more quality place to live. I didn't mind the side stories about the author's flying experiences and didn't think it took much from the book.

There are two things about the book which I had problems. First, the people profiled were high achievers and not typical of the average citizen that lives in high priced urban areas and is looking for an alternative. Technology has allowed for people to work in places outside of the large cities and it would have been nice to hear about "regular" people who have been able to make the transition to smaller places. The people in the book would probably be successful wherever because of the track record and capital that they had previously built. The second thing I had a problem with was the third section "150 Cheap Places to Live". There are places listed that I had not considered and merit further research. However, there are place listed, such as Boulder, CO, that are very expensive, unless you are downsizing from a house in LA, Silicon Valley, etc... Also, some of the choices are suspect. For example, Cleveland is listed under Bohemian Bargains, yet this city has the highest percentage of residents living in poverty. Omitted was Dallas, TX which has fairly low housing prices and a stable economy versus Austin, which is also reasonable, but not as diverse of an economy.

Overall, I enjoyed reading the book and it is a starting place for thinking about alternative locations to live.

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Almost insightless, May 28, 2005

By 

John W Phipps (Chrisman, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Life 2.0 : How People Across America Are Transforming Their Lives by Finding the Where of Their Happiness (Hardcover)

Once you skim the flying blither, there is little other than clumsy narratives about people who have gotten their share of the pie moving out to expropriate the communities of those who have made do with less to build. Karlgaard seems to assume that relocating means one can immediately participate in social structures built painstakingly one year at a time. The author offers no suggestions about how to make a community better by being part of it, only shopping advice for those who are location "consumers". Perhaps "home" is now a commodity to be researched and purchased, but it will not be a place for the heart ot reside.