also, and this is personal taste of course, it can get to be pretty soul-crushing working with and being around mostly people that don't value a nuclear family, when you yourself do. this was a major reason for moving away from the video game industry and greater Seattle area and returning home to South Dakota a few years ago. it took a lot of mental and emotional effort to kill the lifelong dream I worked toward since elementary school (I turned 30 this year) and "settle for" a local government programmer job... but so far it's been 10000% worth it, I'm much happier than I've ever been, I'm going to start a family very soon, and I'm surrounded by people who have the same core values as I do. nobody in the greater Seattle area wanted to hire a white male with no degree but a frankly ridiculous amount of self-driven personal project experience (plus some team project experience from a few contract positions and an unfinished (stopped halfway when the college fund ran out—best decision of my life) degree) in the fields of game and web development, but my hometown was overjoyed to get someone exactly like myself to write SQL and learn all the ins and outs of the public education system and how it interfaces with state and federal requirements. it's not my first choice of work by a longshot but without having money to either finish a degree (like all my friends did) or make my own gamedev startup (in an increasingly flooded market to the point of ridiculousness), I've finally found happiness, and, more importantly, a very direct path to achieving the actual lifelong goal I kind of always had but never knew it: starting a family. like you said, you can't put a price on something like that.

my best friend had a complicated career trajectory that began with a music education degree, until he found out he hated teaching music to middle schoolers, then he decided to get a two-year online CS degree. this put him in a fair bit of debt as he comes from a very poor upbringing. he got married and moved to the D.C. area a couple years ago to work for a CRM shop there and while he loves the work, he hates the crime and bullshit of the Big City Life, and while he and his wife have gone from enjoying it to tolerating it, they're moving back here to South Dakota at the end of this year before they have children.

I wonder if, going forward, with the advent of remote work and the like, we're going to see less and less people who come from rural/suburban/otherwise sub-100k-population cities choosing to either move back to areas like those they grew up in (if not where they grew up specifically) instead of migrating to The Big City to Make It Big, for these exact reasons. there just doesn't seem to be much to gain from moving to The Big City anymore, if starting a family is your ultimate goal in life.