...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.
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.
I don't think the near north side is producing very many kids at all. Well, maybe in the carnal sense. Varying both poverty and density at the same time is not a good experiment.
It's this wide access that is the very problem! Why put down deep roots with some person when you're constantly exposed to new potential, and more importantly those people you'd never be able to find in the suburb also see you as one in thousands or millions. Maybe you'll share a drink at a bar with some famous person, I've had this experience myself, but they won't remember your name. This strikes me as am incredibly shallow experience.
You can start by recognizing that there is an equivalent of you in the suburb corner. They describe people like me and you as bug people, rootless and many other things. I don't think they're right, I think they're seeing a lifestyle they've never experienced and pathologizing the other. I think there are merits to different housing configurations and if you can't see what could cause some huge proportion of the population to choose one over the other then you lack either perspective or imagination.
From my understanding you hail from a Russian style of block housing. I hail from the suburbs and we've both lived in or near the Chicago urban core. We should be able to hash this out.
Not going to look up the exact numbers, but with ~100k inhabitants, I'm pretty sure it's not going to be behind most suburbs.
This point I genuinely don't understand. Why is that a problem? Do you really need to have the desperation of inability to get away from someone on your side to make an actual friend? If they find someone else they're exposed to more to their liking - great! It wasn't meant to be.
Sure. But the great thing about being in the big city is that they have designated areas where they find each other intentionally. And it works just fine, because one in thousands still yields a few hundred easily.
I can see what would cause that, intellectually, but it's not particularly flattering and most certainly not what they believe is causing them to do so.
The block housing part I feel would lead us into an entirely different conversation which I have found to be incredibly unproductive in the past. They aren't great architecturally, granted, but simply looking at them in isolation is silly. Their advantages lie in absolutely incredible access to vast networks of public infrastructure, which is, unfortunately, entirely lacking in American cities. Primarily because the actual city part is squeezed into a really tiny area by the immovable bulk of the proverbial lawn.
As I said, many a kid is likely incubating there and maybe spending some baby years there before their parents relocate to where the schools are better but I've lived nearby and despite the density you really don't run into local kids very much. Lincoln Park would be a better example but is not all that dense.
The knowledge that you're locked into proximity with a financial obligation that has a duration measured in decades encourages investment in the relationships. The other extreme is something like a fellow passenger on a flight where both of you live in different cities. I've had fine conversations on planes with strangers before but there is always the knowledge that the relationship is fleeting.
I think this enforced proximity for forming friendships is underrated, most people I know still keep in contact with high school and college friends precisely because they were stuck together for years and years. I've made a few more friends since then but not with nearly as much ease.
It's not particularly talked about, because being insecure is an insecurity, but there is an incredible natural insecurity in this model of relationship, where the ability to jump ship to a different, "better", one is such an easy option. I've said before on this forum that one of my favorite things about marriage is that you're able to close the whole book on the sexual relationship rat race. And with that book closed a tremendous amount of stress and insecurity have left my life. And it is such a weight gone that is difficult to express. I do not want my relationships to be a competition and that might mean that the people I spend my time with won't be the most perfect match possible, but the fine details of the match are so much less important than the depth of the roots.
I think you probably have very little idea of what motivates them really. The number one motivation is school district. I don't think it's controversial for me to say that, at least in Chicago, the urban public schools are simply unfit and it's not a matter of funding. You cna argue they wouldn't be unfit if not for the flight of anyone able to leave to the better suburban schools but parents are not going to sacrifice their kids of the pyre in the hopes it works out. This doesn't really have anything to do with lawns or aesthetic criticism, just a schelling point and incentives. If doing whatever is best for your kid is unflattering let me be the first to make clear that what you think of me is not even on the same plane of consideration as what is best for my kids.
If you're not going to propose/defend an alternative then I'm not sure where this discussion could go.
That area is at the price level where accessibility of private schools is of a larger concern - and the best ones are unsurprisingly all clustered around there (and north to Lincoln Park, yes).
There definitely are kids there.
That's kind of sad. While it's perfectly valid way for children to form bonds (they aren't extremely particular) it becomes somewhat less appropriate for adults, who typically look for something other than just any random person who happens to be nearby. In any case - nothing at all is stopping you from doing that in a huge block house. The problem you're describing lies in transient nature of housing which is overwhelmingly rental in American urban areas. But that's a consequence of American middle class idiosyncrasies, not a cause.
Intersex relationships are going to be somewhat of a competition due to simple biology, we can't really do much about that as a species or society, outside of weird stuff like arranged marriages, which carry a huge amount of their own burdens.
But you misunderstand my point about regular connections. These aren't meant to be competitive, they simply select for compatibility. Surely you've had friendships that faded away over time, right? Not necessarily because you lack physical access to someone, but simply because either you or him (or both) have, over time, found someone else they choose to spend time with. It's not about someone winning or losing here. And trapping you both in a close proximity without any alternatives would hardly be a better outcome...
Okay, well here we go to the crux of the matter. Just as before - this isn't the cause of American middle class behaviour, it's the effect of it. There is nothing inherently bad about schools located in dense urban environments. Ability to quickly and easily walk to your school could hardly be considered a detriment by any sane person.
But yes, when a large proportion of people with the means to do so - do, in fact, flee to a lawn - the ones that don't - are quite strongly pushed to do the same. Overwhelming majority of above-average schools in, say, continental Europe are in major cities. Some Parisian schools have great reputation, while their suburban ones are widely considered to be dogshit. This follows the exact same indicators as it does in America, by the way.
So yes, you have discovered yet another extremely negative externality of lawn worship. It fucks up the urban livability in yet another way...
This is definitely not important but according to this page near north is dead last of Chicago neighborhoods for 0-17s at just under 5% of the population and I would hazard even that skews babies and infants. Your modal near norther is someone somewhere in the pattern of moving there as a transplant after college, working some ~six figure job in the loop for 5-10 years, meeting a partner and then moving to a different neighborhood when kids cone along.
https://statisticalatlas.com/place/Illinois/Chicago/Age-and-Sexist
It's the consequence of many factors. One of which is inertia, which can't reasonably be resisted and which you seem to heavily underestimate. As you're sneering at the people themselves and not just their circumstance it's enough to show that there simply aren't great options for young professions starting a family to satisfy non-negotiables like school quality and safety outside of the suburbs. We can perhaps have an interesting discussion on why that is but you'd first need to disarm your contempt and understand the actual choices on the ground that these people have.
"Compatability" contains much here. It's maybe worthy of a whole effort post on the different types of things it can mean to different people. To some I suspect it means trivialities like having similar tastes in music or politics. To other it's deep values that need to be aligned or there will be strife. But here in this conversation it just seems to signal anti-diversity. In a swarm of millions people seeking compatibility are able to form weak bonds with people just like them and then proceed to treat each other as the perfectly replaceable social cogs that they are. "anti-capitalist Billy is leaving? Darn, guess I'll call up one of the dozen anti-capitalist Billies I've had on the bench". I reject that these are stronger bonds than can be forged with less "compatible" material placed in the furnace of forced proximity.
It's both. The environment shapes behavior and behavior shapes the environment. Your proposal is not something any even large group of people can will into existence, let alone individual families. If all goes to plan I intend to have a kid something like 2 years from now. Not one of the options available to me is to move to a block of stable families proximate to a good school district and parks. It's urban Chicago, at best Lincoln Park, or the suburbs and for people not as fortunate as I am in the financial depart Lincoln park is no an available option. We can discuss why that is and how society might bring alternative about but holding people poorer to me that want to do what is best for their children in contempt like some kind of mysterious animal is not going to get you anywhere.
And finally the lawns, the classic symbol of middle class contemptability, the desire to be surrounded by green space? It's been hashed out elsewhere in this thread but you seem to have a very outsider view of what it's like to live in a well designed suburb, which I'll freely admit is not all of them. The intention is for it to feel like you're inside the park, complete with larger park areas that have all the classics like sports fields and jungle gyms.
The "darn kids, keep off my lawn" trope is not supposed to describe all suburbanites, it's a critique by suburbanites of a particular type of suburbanite that takes their lawn status symbol too seriously and losses sight of its purpose.
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