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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24151 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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When i go back there now as an adult, it seems creepy. An adult single male just doesnt fit in there at all. Everything is oriented around child rearing- for young children. Almost nothing is open at night. There's hardly anything in the way of aets, music, or culture. The social life all revolves around "the parents of my chikd's friends." Its just not a place someone like me can live.

Depends on what you value. Arts, music, and culture can all be readily found on the internet. If you want to go experience it in person, it's typically a 20-30 minute drive away from the suburb. You can easily manage that a night or two a week.

I accept your critique as stifling a teenager, though I don't think that's a bad thing. What exactly is the problem as an adult male?

Arts, music, and culture can all be readily found on the internet. If you want to go experience it in person, it's typically a 20-30 minute drive away from the suburb. You can easily manage that a night or two a week.

But you're supposed to be doing all that socially, with other like-minded peers.

Arts, music, and culture can all be readily found on the internet

You will live in the suburb, you will consume essential human experiences via a screen, you will be happy

lol, lmao even

I'd say its a vibe more than anything specific, which makes it hard to put into words. Almost everyone i meet there is married , has kids, and moved there intentionally to raise their kids. They live in a world of Disney movies and Youtube Kids. Talking about sex, drugs, or anything "weird" is verboten.

And yeah, there's the internet... but I feel like the internet is getting worse every year. And driving 30 minutes for real life culture is highly optimistic. I don't just want to stare at some paintings, i want to be part of a community that looks at paintings, do you feel me?

They live in a world of Disney movies and Youtube Kids. Talking about sex, drugs, or anything "weird" is verboten.

Why this is a problem?

Since this is Themotte, the main factor I'd definitely bring up is that the US suburb is a heavily blue-pilling environment.

thinking bit more, my first reply above was too flippant.

More charitable version: vibe of no sex and drugs is exactly the main feature. And frankly: when I was kid, there was some amount of sex and drugs^1 and rock'n'roll behind the curtains. Anti-signalling is there to establish safe limits for teenagers to rebel against, to keep it at manageable levels, because is is frickin bad sign to have that stuff overtly around when you are raising kids.

I view that there is a purpose for having different urban environments for different stages of life. Single adults are more than welcome to leave suburbia, try adult life in college towns or artsy parts of big cities or spend few years as vagabonds (and ultimately see it for its emptiness in comparison to simple joys of love, marriage and family, and see the benefits of suburban environ).

^1 mostly pot and alcohol

And yeah, there's the internet... but I feel like the internet is getting worse every year. And driving 30 minutes for real life culture is highly optimistic. I don't just want to stare at some paintings, i want to be part of a community that looks at paintings, do you feel me?

Move to Europe.

And driving 30 minutes for real life culture is highly optimistic. I don't just want to stare at some paintings, i want to be part of a community that looks at paintings, do you feel me?

What's interesting is that most highly-cultured tier-1-city people live around 30 minutes by public transit from their local art museum, symphony orchestra, etc., but that doesn't stop them. I suspect it's partly a question of driving having a higher activation energy and commitment than public transit, and partly that, realistically, your suburb's city is unlikely to actually have good enough culture to sustain a feeling of culturedness.

Other public transit pros:

Generally the density of places with it means I can add a second or third destination after the primary museum, gallery, glory hole, restaurant on a whim

If your social sphere lives in the same area, it's much easier to meet up with people while doing any of this

You can read or do other stuff while you travel, no attention required

I can get drunk or high at the destination without coordinating a DD

Edit: I realize this is mildly uncouth but I'd like to offer an open mic to anyone drive-by downvoting this comment, why? Do you think my 'pros" here are stupid? Do you dislike public transit? I'm genuinely curious what motivates someone to look at the comment and go "I dislike this" but then also not articulate their thoughts at all. Let's chat

Other public transit pros:

Generally the density of places with it means I can add a second or third destination after the primary museum, gallery, glory hole, restaurant on a whim

If everyone else drives to a destination neighbourhood, then once you get there the place is necessarily dominated by parking so you can't walk from the theatre to the restaurant to the bar. There are ways of fixing this problem - New Urbanists talk about "park once" districts and point out that the proof-of-concept is the mall, which forces people to get out of their cars and walk from shop to shop by putting the "street" the shops are on indoors. But it means giving up the ability to park right outside the building you are going to.

Self driving cars make this a lot easier because (even if they are privately owned, rather than robotaxis which don't park up at all) parking in a lot outside the destination neighbourhood becomes zero cost. On the other hand, they will add a whole different set of moving congestion problems that we haven't really thought about yet.

I don't really understand your point because I live in Toronto and I have never once thought to myself "damn I can't walk from the ROM to the restaurant I'm meeting my friends at because there's too many parking lots in the way". I'm also generally not suffering for parking in Toronto when I drive places, I love how much underground parking we have hidden away.

Although that was actually my experience in San Antonio, so I think the real thing here is an urban planning skill issue lol

so I think the real thing here is an urban planning skill issue lol

This is the New Urbanist view - that you can absolutely build destination neighborhoods where everyone arrives by car, parks, and then walks within the neighborhood, but Americans fail to do so by default. Apart from indoor malls and planned New Urbanist communities, Toronto is the place I would most expect to pull it off.

Just put the parking spots underground?

I live in a suburb right now and it's a 50 minute drive to the nearest proper city, where I can spend another 15 minutes looking for parking.

Looking at pics on the Internet is so far away from what any humans before the rise of the otaku would have recognized as "participating in culture" that I'm not even sure what you mean.

What exactly is the problem as an adult male?

OP's point is that there's no benefit to living in the suburbs as a single adult male and nothing to do. Is your rebuttal "that's not true, you can drive half an hour or more to a place with something to do, what's the problem"?

it's a 50 minute drive to the nearest proper city

This is an exurb. You live in the countryside. You might as well own a farm.

My friend, I live in a bedroom community of nearly a hundred thousand people. This is the reality of life in the bay area.

My apologies. I forget that a disproportionate share of this community hails from the most topographically inefficient metropolitan area in the country.

yeah? where do you live, where it's a 30 minute drive to the opera house, live theater, and art gallery, or any other sort of cultural scene, but you can still buy a large suburban home for cheap? are you a time traveler from the 1950s?

Houston is that way.

This is the infrastructure that enables the modern miracle of affordable housing within 30 minutes of a city center, and all it ever gets is hate.

Insane.

The upper and lower classes hate that miracle, but for different reasons, and it's just classic high-low vs. middle dynamics.

If they could, they'd take it back.

Any city in Texas.

I used to live in Silver Spring, MD, in a decently sized house (it was a group home situation with a bunch of singles). It was 15 minutes drive to Bethesda, which is a fairly metropolitan downtown with everything a young man could desire (even art galleries!), or I could even ride my bicycle to the red line of the DC metro if I wanted to go into the city proper. To be honest I rarely did either because it was more fun and cheaper to spend time with my friends. A 4 bed, 3 bath similar to the one we rented is currently selling for $400K.

Not cheap, but my suburb of Seattle is a quicker drive to the theaters and museums and such than much of Seattle proper.

It’s about a 15 minute drive at this late hour, with no traffic.

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