...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!
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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.
Planning a city or even just a neighborhood is a large-scale project, if there are better ways to do one spreading knowledge about what to do and what not to do is part of getting your epic mixed use urbanism realized.
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