Literature throughout the ages is rich with bildungsromans about young, ambitious people leaving home and heading to the hard, bright, glittering lights of big, nasty cities that don’t care for them and will spit them out given half a chance.

That city could be London or New York or Tokyo. It is never Tamworth.

In Australia that city is Sydney – the place of the head office, the Asia-Pac headquarters of a global company, the leading research institute, the bank or media company, the tech startup or national theatre school. It’s where you go to further your career, to study in the best schools, to strike at fame or fortune, or even just get a good job. It’s where you’re sent after you’ve done time in Brisbane or Adelaide, but before you go to London or Hong Kong.

Yet increasingly Sydney is not the place where you (if you earn an average wage) can live long term. Politicians haven’t understood this disconnect – that we are not moving to Sydney because we want, in the words of Barnaby Joyce, “views of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge”.

We are moving to and staying in Sydney because that is where the good jobs are.

You don’t so much move to Sydney as get funnelled there. In some industries, a stint in Sydney is almost impossible to avoid. Up and down the Hume Highway my removalists and I have travelled over the years, as I’ve tried and failed so many times to move away from Sydney – only to be lured back because of a job (media is centralised in Sydney).

But even now, a good job will not get you a house in Sydney – and so a difficult choice must be made at some point. Desert the city to live somewhere without the money stress but lacking in career opportunities, or stay – and resign yourself to renting forever. In households all over Sydney discussions like these are taking place. What do we value most? How to live? How important is work? How important is owning a house?

This isn’t a path previous generations have trodden. And no – it isn’t because millennials buy too many avocado breakfasts. It’s because house prices in Melbourne and Sydney have far outstripped wage growth.

So what to do? Move to Tamworth or Charleville, as Joyce suggested on the ABC this week? He doesn’t say what sort of jobs may be available in Tamworth (although his electorate has the highest unemployment rate in the country) for the journalist or the software developer or the biotech researcher. Nor does he mention the missed career and social opportunities when you leave Sydney – all the people you don’t meet, all the serendipitous encounters you are no longer having.

People I know don’t want to live in Mosman, they just want to live somewhere near their job. And if they can’t, fantastic leaps need to be made. Like the guy I met at the weekend with a young family who has just moved to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains but commutes four hours a day to and from work. Or indeed my own situation: I left Sydney because I couldn’t afford to buy a house there (my mortgage in the country is half my rent in Sydney) yet find myself constantly getting on planes and staying at Airbnbs because the work is not in my town. Any savings are eaten up by travel but at least I’m on the housing ladder.

It’s not just people’s personal lives that are affected. The housing affordability crisis will have many unexpected consequences on how our cities and towns look. Expect a talent brain drain from places like Sydney – where people abandon jobs in important areas such as science, research, academia and teaching because they simply cannot afford to live in the city where the most appropriate jobs for their skills are. These people may move to regional areas where housing is affordable but they’ll take a step down in terms of their career.

The money spent educating, training and recruiting this cohort will have been wasted. Sad!

But the move of bright, talented and educated people into regional areas or smaller capital cities could spark a renewal in regions. And this is a good thing. Last weekend I was in Hobart for the annual Mona Foma festival, where I met loads of ex-Melbourne and Sydney people who had moved to Tasmania in search of affordable housing and a better quality of life. Hobart – with a median price of $345,000 – is the cheapest capital city in Australia in which to buy a house.

It’s also filled with artists, creative people and interesting parties. What a coincidence.

On Sunday night I went to a party in a massive abandoned office block in downtown Hobart. The party – Faux Mo – is a hugely popular mashup of a nightclub and after-hour’s museum.

On the way up to the rooftop as we were climbing some rickety fire stairs, a man with a black beard stepped out of the shadows (I’m not being dramatic, he really was in a shadow) and gave me a letter from a Scrabble set (it was “W”). The token got me in to some club within the club – a claustrophobic space with a tiny bar that fitted about four people and looked like an oxygen tent with strobe lights. It was weird, like being in Alice in Wonderland. I fretted for the people who might enter the space on drugs.

In other years, people in the Faux Mo queue have been kidnapped, blindfolded, put in vans and driven around Hobart – and left with a Polaroid, evidence that their strange night was not a dream. Sometimes they are taken to other parties. One guy told me that in previous years kidnapped people had been taken to a “fake hen’s night”.

On the roof of Faux Mo, all the Sydney people stood around doing a compare and contrast – such a night would be unimaginable in Sydney now. We have become used to the taste of drinking our $24 cocktail from plastic cups and security telling us to stand away from the balcony, and only drinking whisky after midnight when we travel interstate.

Imagine all the red tape to turn an entire office block in central Sydney into a party space! It would never happen, we marvelled, before returning to talk about what all Sydney people talk about – house prices.

The centre cannot hold

In 2016 an old WB Yeats poem The Second Coming was being referenced everywhere – from tweets to essays about Brexit to fears about Trump. Yeats’s lines:

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

It resonated with a world that had spun off its axis.

If 2016 belonged to Yeats, then 2017 belongs to George Orwell. Sales of 1984 have surged since the inauguration and Kellyanne Conway’s use of the phrase “alternative facts”. Nineteen Eighty-Four – published under the shadow of fascism in 1949 – is now in the number six spot on Amazon.

Orwell – the most lucid essayist of the 20th century – writes of truth, language and politics in a way that is eerily, and unwelcomingly fresh today.

Take this, from Nineteen Eighty-Four:

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.

Sound familiar?

• This article was amended on 26 January 2017 to replace an incorrect quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four.