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The competition with China is asinine. It really is time for the West to look inward, abandon Asia to the Chinese (not even really that, given so many in the region have their own severe differences with them, including most of their neighbors - the Russia truces are only ever temporary, the India tensions will continue indefinitely) and resolve the ongoing demographic and political crisis, which feeds into so many other economic and social issues.
China is pretty nice now in the tier 1 cities. Sure, the Chinese work long hours, but so do many Americans (you know who works the ‘996’? New York investment bankers, hotshot corporate lawyers and apparently Silicon Valley AI startup engineers). The food is good, the societies are clean and safe. You can’t be too nasty about state policy, but the same applies in much of Europe, and even in the US you still “just” get your life ruined and yourself cancelled depending on what you said and who is in power.
In 50 years, will Britain still be British? Will Germany still be German? Will America - the America of the prosperous and peaceful time still within living memory - still be America? Trump (or Miller, I guess) was right about this. Countries aren’t soil, they’re people. The people in China 50 years from now will be the descendants of the people in China 50 years ago (by and large). Can the same be said for Europeans, in Europe or in North America?
Forget about Chinese cars and datacenters; the Chinese have rarely dreamed of world domination, they are content in their backyard and with the occasional moment of international abuse around fishing fleets and ripping off poor countries with expensive development loans (many of which backfire on them anyway). Whether America rules the world or not is irrelevant to most of its people - at the height of the British Empire, the greatest in world history, the people of the metropole worked in squalid Victorian factories and lived in disgusting, fetid tenements. Even today material conditions are much better. Plenty of small countries do just fine.
And it really is important to emphasize just how bad the demographic transition is. I would rather live under the Chinese thumb in Hong Kong than “free” in Rio de Janeiro. I would rather live pretty much anywhere in China than in Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan, Niger, much of Central America, Eritrea, Haiti. And yet this is what Western lands are becoming. Better to submit to Xi Jinping than suffer Houellebecq’s Submission, although in many ways even that text is far, far too optimistic about what awaits us.
I would say that's a very specific type of people. Snooty urbanist types like myself sometimes call them "breeders." It works if youre a married couple, age 25-45, with young children and a steady long-term job. It does not work nearly so well for others.
For me, i grew up a place like that. I remember it being great as a kid because the yard was big enough for me to run, and my boomer parents could either leave me at home or easily drive me around town. The local public school was nothing special, but good enough.
When i became a teenager though, it was stifling. A suburban yard isn't nearly enough space for any real sports, so it just become a pain the ass thing to take care of. Everything is designed around driving, so i was stuck dependant on my parents for all transportation until i got old enough to drive. The local school was excruciatingly boring for a gifted kid. No one seemed to care about anything except work, grades, and sportsball. If you were caught outside "loitering," the police would come and forcibly bring you home. The "spacious" surban home still had thin walls and a bad layout, so we had no privacy. I, like many teens, started staying up late to avoid my parents.
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?
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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