...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 -
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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