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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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To the extent that the thing making the youth grumpy is a crisis of meaning (I think it mostly is, in the US at least), it is probably harder to generate meaning in a suburb.

Plenty of people have made rural living, small-town living, or urban living a big part of their identity. I have never met someone who made suburban living a part of their identity in that way - the people who are best able to articulate why they love US-style suburbia are LARPing rural lifestyles while living within (single-occupant pickup or SUV) commuting distance of a major-metro job market

Eh, there is no meaning in that sense, beyond "a zygote is a gamete's way of producing more gametes". Certainly that's what 19th-and-earlier century rural living was about -- you lived to survive and raise the next generation. Works the same in suburbia, it hardly matters that the zygotes make their living in the back area of Walmart or the cubicle farm rather than the back forty of an actual farm.

The tastemakers have made hating suburban living part of their identity, and that's part of the culture -- Little Boxes, Pleasant Valley Sunday, Subdivisions, A Wrinkle In Time, The Stepford Wives, etc. Which is why few will claim that suburban living is part of their identity; it's Just Not Done. Yet nearly every time someone's complaining about the cost of owning housing (as opposed to rent), the benchmark is going to be a single-family detached house, likely in the suburbs. Often enough, one in the town they grew up in, or perhaps the very same house.