The “Milton bubble.” Anyone who lives around here knows exactly what this means, and if you don’t live around here, you probably live near or even in a town that has the exact same concept. A suburban town in Georgia just north of Atlanta where four-car households are commonplace and it’s totally normal to have at least one parent who’s the CEO or VP of their company. The houses are big but the salaries are bigger. (To put it into perspective, the median household income for the city of Milton surpasses six figures: $110,891). Maybe your town isn’t that extreme, but you get the idea.
I moved to Milton when I was 14 years old, having already lived the majority of my life in the average, middle-class town of Bel Air, Maryland. I was easily one of the richest kids at my school. No one there casually rolled up to school in a brand new Mercedes. No one went on weekend trips to California or spent Christmas break in Italy. Rather than going to a big-name school and joining Greek life, attending the local community college upon graduating high school was pretty standard. When I told my friends I was moving to Georgia, they all imagined me living somewhere with deep southern accents and people marrying their cousins, and I pretty much envisioned the same thing. You can imagine the culture shock that hit me when I showed up in Milton and the only thing remotely “hick” about it was all the lifted pickup trucks.
I’m not trying to say that Bel Air is completely low-rent and that Milton is made up entirely of spoiled rich kids; that's not the case at all and I’ve met truly incredible people in both places. But it’s really important to recognize that the lifestyle of the latter isn’t normal; and when you get submerged in the culture of this town it’s pretty easy to forget that.
With living in somewhere like Milton comes a lot of opportunities that most kids don’t ever get. You have to take advantage of that. When you complain that your school sucks when in reality it’s one of the best in the state, remember that there’s kids on the other side of the world that would kill for the quality education you get to have. Better yet, there’s kids right in downtown Atlanta that would kill for that education. Whether you're the richest kid in this town or you're relatively average, recognize how privileged you are to even be here, and know that there are things way more important in life than how nice your car is or where your family goes for vacation. Milton is just a very small "bubble" in a very big world, and I'm sure there's hundreds of other bubbles just like it all over the country. If you're lucky enough to live in one, you should feel pretty blessed to be there.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." - F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
