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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?
You will live in the suburb, you will consume essential human experiences via a screen, you will be happy
lol, lmao even
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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?
Why this is a problem?
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
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Move to Europe.
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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
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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.
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"?
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?
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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