...so I was drunk in rdrama/motte BotC server one day and promised to write up a post-level critique of the American middle class. Of course, the "project" kept getting bumped for the sake of far more important things, such as drinking joylessly while reposting telegram posts on shitty drama discord servers, this being a far less effort-intensive way to anger people. However, today I suddenly felt bored enough to actually remember my prior commitments, so here it is:
Lawns are fucking moronic. Just think about it - if you put like 20% of Cook County lawns together and combine all the land, money, and effort that goes into their maintenance into something actually useful - you'll have a fucking Disneyland with a Champs-Élysées annex. But nooooo, this isn't good enough, because that would be public and not MINE, MIIIINE, MOOOOOOOOOM, HE'S USING A TOY THAT'S MIIIIIINE!!!
Worse yet, if I were to personally decide "fuck this, this is retarded, I don't need this shit, there's a perfectly good park like three fucking blocks away - I'll just grow potatoes or something else actually productive on this plot" - a formless, permanently scowling creature - the dreaded bored HOA housewife - is sure to be crawling out of the woodwork in seconds, with a clipboard and her trademark Karen-y bangs. And she'll instantly begin to shrilly preach about how something so unbelievably ludicrous could not possibly allowed under any circumstances, because, god forbid, other Karens looking for a place to live will drive past and certainly think "waah, waah, this is proposterous! Potatoes?! I can't even! I need everything to be exactly uniform!", leading to her pride and joy, the land value of the lawn containing her shitty cardboard box with fancy beige siding - will go down. Un-acc-ept-ab-le!
This isn't really my main point - it's just an absolutely phenomenal illustration of why the American middle class is the worst fucking socioeconomic group to ever live. They are petit bourgeois to an extent (primarily in their deeply rooted insecurity and precarious status), but their sensibilities are worse than that - they see themselves as some sort of smaller-scale genteel manor lord, whose lifestyle they so artlessly attempt to ape - but they lack the taste, the resources, or the confidence to actually do that. So instead, they ape the simplest bit - a manicured lawn that said gentleman would use for playing cricket or going on mid-afternoon horseback rides or whatever the fuck it is that those inbred bastards do there - but without the space to realistically be usable for that or really anything else outside of serving as a glorified litter box for the family dog.
And yet they do see themselves as above everyone else. They are aggressive about it, too! “Look at me, I have made it, I have my lawn. Mine! MINE! I won't live in a pod like those disgusting city-dwellers, ugh!.. I'm a real American. This is real America! I like my Bud Light Coors Light, my pickup, my Jesus, and my Red Lobster! Oh, and my vastly superfluous rifle collection! My office plankton job makes me inherently superior to those dirty poors, who just lack my good, old-fashioned work ethic, or they’d be able to file regional shrinkage dynamics reports just like me and become productive members of society!”
To sum it up, the only real question is... Why are they like this? Who hurt them? What possible calamity has caused them to become these incredibly shallow, yet exceptionally vain shells of something vaguely resembling human form? Perhaps we’ll never know.
I am, however, interested in your guys’ opinions on the subject!
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
To be fair complaining about lawn aesthetics is just as bad as adoring lawn aesthetics. Same goes for reading all that shallowness and unwarranted feeling of superiority into people you never met, vs being that shallow etc. A house like in the picture is perfectly suited for reading Dostoyevsky in, and that's the important part, no?
I also don't think that there's a problem that warrants a solution, much less a centralized solution. If someone figures out how to use resources more efficiently without compromising much more important aspects of life with their "part and parcel of hustle and bustle", let them try it somewhere! If it works, people will come and other places will emulate it! If on the other hand you operate under an assumption that people are deluded about what is best for them and must be forced into correct living conditions with an iron hand, it's overwhelmingly likely that it's you who are wrong.
On the latter note, in my experience there's an inverse relationship between the quantity and quality of interactions with neighbors and population density, in terms of inviting neighbors to your birthday party or a random bbq, vs not knowing who even lives in the apartment next door. Like, you might think that people living in separate houses naturally become a sort of haughty recluses shunning human contact, while people forced into a sort of human hive naturally form vibrant local communities--nope, for some reason it's the exact opposite in my experience.
I don't know why, maybe it's because a separate house on its plot of land is much more self-sufficient in certain senses, you don't just sleep there, you hang out there in the evenings and on weekends, your kids play there and around there, stuff like that, so naturally you interact with the neighbors all the time. While if you live in a pod and have to go to do all other activities in other designated areas, you just don't get many opportunities to interact with your pod-neighbors.
I strongly disagree with your premise in its fundamentals.
First of all, your view of what an American middle class suburb entails is pervers. Dacha or Rublyovka or whatever are an extremely poor facsimile for it. The former exists fundamentally for spending one's free time in and by its very nature promotes socializing. The latter is an equivalent of an elite social club, with all the baggage that goes along with it. I'm not a huge fan of these hyper-posh exclaves, but their essence is radically different from what the topic of the conversation is here.
On your second point - the idea of interaction quantity and quality is just objectively wrong. For the elderly, the bench in front of the flat block is the primary if not the sole driver of social interaction, for young people - accessibility of trappings of civilization is paramount. Middle-aged office plankton might have an easier time interacting with others of the exact same background and life experience, but that is mostly caused by their failure to attempt to broaden their horizons beyond the lowest of the forms of entertainment.
Most importantly, the point that the representatives of this despicable socioeconomic class like to point to the most - children. In their minds, led by their monomaniacally controlling and fearful nature, the disconnection that these environments provide are a feature, not a bug. But the fact that it is on the parents to control what and with whom their children and adolescents spend their time on is a highly successful vehicle for mass producing extremely sheltered and dysfunctional soys (for the lack of a better term - autists works too, if you prefer). These undersocialized products of isolated plots are everywhere, and they are often the primary cause of a lot of problems facing the society at large.
Finally - your idea that "designated areas" lead to less interaction is hard to justify at all. A common playground is a phenomenal place to force interaction among both parents and children. A nearby bar - for adults. Local football field or a garden - for children. The idea that individual patches of grass separated by wooden fences is better than these is absurd.
Some problems perhaps, but as for violent crimes and abuse... Do you care to hazard a guess what the nature of the upbringing of our very worse has been? I've lived downtown for quite a while now. I make an effort to know my neighbors and find roots but it really is quite easier when the breadth of possible neighbors is constrained to a density more comparable to our ancestral environment. There is a kind of anonymity that comes with dense living, 95% or more of the people who pass by my home are not people I recognize and would not stop what they're doing to share an anecdote.
I'll confess this isn't the critique of the middle class I was expecting for all the invective there just doesn't seem much there that isn't already contained in a scene or two of fight club or office space. That all these middle class people are dead inside is a trick of the light and your ego, a kind of faint hope that all these other people must be wrong, not you, your interesting life with the ever rotating, really in a constant state of disintegrating, group of friends dumping booze soaked trauma on each other must be giving you something that the squares can never have. Or else what was the point?
I do. It's extreme poverty. I am supremely confident that it is a far better predictor of being the "very worst" than population density.
Let me illustrate - which location do you think produces more of these "very worst" - Near North Side or Gary? Once you have an answer, contemplate on what it implies.
Of course. But I have a hard time understanding why momentary physical proximity is supposed to be the ultimate driver of social interaction. It can be - I've had building neighbours I've been great friends with - but it absolutely doesn't have to be. Living in the city puts you in an incredibly easily achievable access to a huge amount and a wide variety of people. Lots of them of the types you'll absolutely never get the slightest hope to see in a suburb.
Well, it was hardly a huge secret that the goal was to be subversive. However I stand by my general assessment. It isn't based on any faint hope or anything of the sort - I genuinely do consider anyone who willingly abandons civilization (at the cost of an extensive daily commute) for the sake of incredibly meager comforts attached to a cardboard box on a patch of grass - to be fundamentally damaged in one way or another. Maybe their career just sucks all the life out of them, or maybe they were simply raised in a way that values uniformity above all else. I don't know, and my attempts to understand have thus far been unsuccessful.
Clearly you haven’t tried hard enough to understand other people. Ever heard of social signaling? It’s pervasive, and it’s important. Lawns and large plots are a premier American status symbol.
Before you mock this out of hand, I’d encourage you to look at your own life and how you try to signal your status. We all do it, there’s nothing wrong inherently in status signaling. What is wrong is when people like yourself try to attack your out group with no real arguments besides “I hate them.”
Maybe if you discussed the environmental damage or societal damage these types of people commit, I could reason with you. Based on your current strategy, I can’t.
Best, most honest explanation yet!
I wouldn't dream!..
Inherently? No. When it takes the form of a watch you wear or the pants you put on - it's fairly harmless, if potentially gaudy as fuck if done by nouveau riche. When it's something that overtakes a highly significant part of your life and affects the entire way a city functions - it becomes inherently wrong.
Think of it in terms of an analogy - chasing some wine with a cracker in a ritual of faux (semi)cannibalism might be somewhat odd to a completely naive observer, but it's not really causing any serious issues. Throwing homosexuals off a high tower, on the other hand, is a bit more controversial and damaging in a very real sense.
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