a lot of "suburban castle" ideology complete with swing sets in the backyard and such is driven not by true fiefdom aspirations, but by the more mundane practical matter of needing to do the dishes and prep dinner while keeping the young kids occupied and within visibility. as for older kids, it is more about steering them away from populations deemed dangerous (whether this judgment is correct, racist, etc is another matter, and of course somewhat subjective).
new suburbs, specifically those constructed after 2014, shy away from the fiefdom design, and opt more for a community playground and small backyards. this is to foster a sense of community, and for the more economic reasons that people are increasingly too lazy to maintain their property and builders want to squeeze in as many houses as they can into a subdivision.
there is a book called _strong towns_ that i think you guys might like, if you are not familiar with. it talks about how suburbs have this "let's build the whole thing at once" design approach, which lends itself to awkward forms of isolation that cities do not have as well as very problematic design pattern in which the whole thing falls apart at once and then all the people with enough money move out, and those that can't stay, and then property values fall, tax receipts fall, etc. the authors argue this pattern will increasingly play out in the USA. the detroit model, as it is sometimes referred to.
I've been to a number of major cities in America the past decade or so. In Seattle I've seen lines of homeless people screaming - not just standing about - full-on screaming in front of Seattle's King County courthouse more than once. Go ahead and look at the street view of 3rd avenue on google maps - chances are you'll see a "clean" version but look at other snapshots from previous years and you'll see that line of people.
In Tucson I saw someone standing on a miserable traffic island in the middle of, like, 6 lanes of the speedway in ~30 degrees celsuis heat last spring somehow begging. There's no grass, hardly any vegetation, all concrete and strip malls. Dust.
Chicago in my limited experience wasn't nearly as terrible beyond the subway occasionally filled with people smoking weed or the beliigerent drunks, and neither was Boston, but both were absolutely teeming with cops to an almost comical degree.
There is a tendency to point to the British stereotype that English people love to be miserable, but I don't think people in the US are even aware they're swimming in misery, putting on a rictus smile throughout.
I really enjoyed these two posts - they articulated a lot of what I felt growing up in the suburbs (in Canada, so a bit different but close enough). The point about accumulating "stuff" is very important: not only is it a status marker, but the accumulation of goods is also a balm for the pain of living such an alienated existence. Like any addiction, though, it's never enough so you've always got to get more money for more stuff etc.
Having said that, growing up poor in the suburbs is the absolute worst because you get the alienation, but you don't even get the "stuff" to make day-to-day life more bearable. In addition, you get to see kids judge less wealthy kids from a very young age - where you go on vacation, whether you wear clothes of specific brands, which toys you have, and so on. It's a terrible lifestyle by any human standard IMO.
Really great post. I was a child of the suburbs and see both my siblings living in the suburbs recapitulating their childhoods as you so perceptively point out. It was the seeming inevitability of your last sentence that drove Dmitry Orlov, a Russian emigre of a previous generation, back to Russia for good or ill. He called the American Dream of suburban house, job and car the iron triangle. Brute economic reality will force us back together as the American Dream becomes completely uninsurable. We won't have a choice.
It's interesting when you ask people to drill down and think about why they want what they want. From my anecdotal experience, most suburban zombies feel terribly uncomfortable about looking outside their bubble of reality to question why they want these things or why they repeat the patterns that seem "natural" when the patterns of suburban life are only 2 or 3 generations old. There is always a lizard brain fear you see if you try to get people to consider that what might make them happy in life isn't a giant house shell to live inside, stuffed full of crap they won't use.
Anti-intellectualism is definitely deeply ingrained. Seems better now than in the past when an intelligent comment often got me smacked, literally, by whomever happened to be nearby. The U.S. also seems especially criminal to me, even with crime at a relative historical low. Some of the amateur detective work might be a result of that, with added dollops of paranoia and racism thrown in for good measure. My mostly white rural neighborhood requires watchfulness which is not just paranoia but the very real desire to stop people from dump old mattresses or burning and shooting everything just for the hell of it. A certain amount of paranoia sets in naturally as times goes on. That's an experience you won't have in any of the countries I have visited or lived in outside the U.S. I've never really figured out why so many people, not fleeing absolute poverty or war, would want to be here. I was born here, but I'd happily live elsewhere in a real city, something we have very few of as you rightfully mention.
Just after reading this, I saw an ad for cosmetic surgery on Fox News that promised to give 59 year old women the waistline of a woman in her 20s. It made me think of Christopher Lasch's writing on America's obsession with youth and its fear of (and inability to imagine) death. I think that a big part of this is that the finitude of death makes us responsible for our choices. Americans don't want to be held accountable for the choices that death makes irreversible. "I lived my whole life asleep, chasing something I didn't really want." For people who have made choices of consequence instead of convenience, it is possible to look back on life with satisfaction and wisdom. Americans, on the other hand, chase youth as a symbol of endless possibility and, ironically and unwittingly, as a symbol of their total passivity and fear of meaningful action. It's extraordinarily sad
I think there is a lot of truth here. A recent legal book, "From Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands
The Transformation of Ownership in the Western World" by James Q. Whitman goes into this a lot about how real property and landowning are fundamental in the American Legal system.
It also has the best solution to the "Feudalism" debate I've seen so far: he observes that the whole problematic has been about tightly connecting a body of law and legal norms to a specific set of economic practises.
However, if you allow those to overlap and diverge as different but related systems, the whole issue dissolves.
Its just like how the Bronze Age started in different places at different times, but many cultures existed on both sides of it for centuries. But this doesn't imply that Bronze tools and weapons had no impact, nor that the culture groups weren't real and critically important things.
After all, Native American, native title, and similar terms directly come from Feudal and manorial laws systematized in the 14th and 15th centuries. You can look to "domestic dependant nations" in Johnson v. McIntosh for the specific American version.
I would also point out that the serf think isn't exactally right for homeowners who have a real shot of paying off their mortage. They more resemble the Yeomanry or Free Peasantry of the English system.
I think the closest Russian historical equivalent is the Pomestie, which does actually resemble the Homestead Act (esepcially when you remember the cavalry and forts with the Homesteads in the west).
Benjamin Franklin is a good specific example, both in his family life and name meaning (Franklin means free non noble landowner).
"desire to replicate their own childhood" - This was the main driver for me. I had a great childhood at the edge of a small, rural town surrounded by agriculture with space to ride bikes, build forts, fish/swim in the canals, and whatever. Trying to raise a family in a big urban city would have been as foreign to me as living on the moon and thus the last place I would choose for it.
Alas, my PMC career would be nearly impossible in such a rural community (off to work in tall buildings), so 60's era suburb on the edge of a state capital city is where I ended up, with the things I wanted (a small downtown main street with restaurants/pubs, train station, community center, library all within walking distance, a garage with tools for trying to be handy like my dad was, a yard big enough to have a garden and chickens, hiking/camping within 30 min drive, etc), with great communities for musicians, gardeners, brewers, sports, etc for people that can lift their ass off the couch. Didn't end up with the spawn despite giving it a shot and that's fine. It does feel like living my dream mostly (and maybe the American dream, whatever that really is). If I had kids maybe it would be not so dreamy, and maybe I'm just brainwashed. I definitely was brainwashed 25 years ago.
The other driver was that house ownership can be one of the critical financial investments a person can make in their life (yeah I know it's controversial for some), and this has been the case for myself. When Obama did a big tax credit for buying a home after TGR, I was going to buy something, anything and I was really lucky to get in when I did.
"this good life has become feasible to fewer and fewer Americans, maybe it’s time to rethink the concept" - I really do agree with this. It does seem unfair that I sort of fell into a sweet setup for myself while so many are simply fucked. Meh, when the water runs out we're all fucked.
Roatan - wasn't that going to be one of those crypto-island places?
Yes, remote work is toothpaste out of the tube, it's forever. Most firms don't even have the office real estate anymore for full return to office and have saved enormous amounts of money reducing their office footprints. Mine requires us in office once a week since 2023 and we have to reserve a spot in advance. The bigwigs calling for full return are liars or, in the case of the dipshits smashing shit up in DC right now, simply out of touch with reality. I think the takes on the latest hubbub about it that it's truly about driving people out to downsize are correct (avoid severance and unemployment from layoffs).
Thanks be to gawd my neighborhood has no HOA (city ordinances only), I always forget about those. Had some bad neighbors over the years, that can really make a place suck. That greater Lake Conroe area has some really nice wooded lots that would be a good place for space without close neighbors and a bit of homesteading lite, but I think I might get lynched there for talking smack about Greenwood and Nugent and sounding like a commie that hates 'Merica.
I'm aware of that Conroe area because my MAGA brother lives outside Magnolia after "fleeing liberal Harris/Houston" and my wife had a retreat at some really cool place nearby on a secluded lot in the pines. I'd be pretty happy with a place like that and a growing season that long, but I would really miss accessible city life, and the mountains. If you're gonna do kids, it seems clear that family nearby is great.
I'm right outside Denver in a modest, working class <2000sqft single-family home neighborhood that's about 20% rentals, not gentrified, ~.1 acre lots like we had growing up. I feel really lucky to have all those perks you mention without any of those downsides. Farther out of the city there are newer fancier subs that are precisely the sort of soulless places and people Evgenia describes, keepin up with the Joneses, as I'm sure you are familiar. I lived in one for a couple of years, never again if I can help it.
The area is really pushing denser housing units and it's converting to that and starting to fill up. I'm a-ok with this, although it doesn't really hit the ostensible goal of "affordable" imo, it's just denser, and naturally there's not nearly enough investment in infrastructure, esp transit, to keep it from creating an unholy mess once it really takes off. Maybe we'll get lucky, at least until the water runs out.
“American dream” is, in its essence, very similar to Russian notion “мещанство” with all its connotations (such as пошлость). It is a bit funny that it moved presently to suburbia (мещанин literally means “city dweller”, just as French “bourgeois”.
Unrelated comment here - i hav a 3 yr old and i’d love to hear you guys talking about the multimillionaire russian & ukranian youtubers who moved to dubai then miami and are basically making money from their kids. Its awful crap and my kids love it. One of their sketches involved throwing brand new toys in their swimming pool and guessing whether it would sink or float.
> and the Perestroika or even Collapse might be looming in the future?
And do not you feel that the second Trump coming is Perestroika? As for the Collapse, the US is cemented with hypocrisy, even more than was the SU of its later years, and hypocrisy is a fragile substance.
a lot of "suburban castle" ideology complete with swing sets in the backyard and such is driven not by true fiefdom aspirations, but by the more mundane practical matter of needing to do the dishes and prep dinner while keeping the young kids occupied and within visibility. as for older kids, it is more about steering them away from populations deemed dangerous (whether this judgment is correct, racist, etc is another matter, and of course somewhat subjective).
new suburbs, specifically those constructed after 2014, shy away from the fiefdom design, and opt more for a community playground and small backyards. this is to foster a sense of community, and for the more economic reasons that people are increasingly too lazy to maintain their property and builders want to squeeze in as many houses as they can into a subdivision.
there is a book called _strong towns_ that i think you guys might like, if you are not familiar with. it talks about how suburbs have this "let's build the whole thing at once" design approach, which lends itself to awkward forms of isolation that cities do not have as well as very problematic design pattern in which the whole thing falls apart at once and then all the people with enough money move out, and those that can't stay, and then property values fall, tax receipts fall, etc. the authors argue this pattern will increasingly play out in the USA. the detroit model, as it is sometimes referred to.
I've been to a number of major cities in America the past decade or so. In Seattle I've seen lines of homeless people screaming - not just standing about - full-on screaming in front of Seattle's King County courthouse more than once. Go ahead and look at the street view of 3rd avenue on google maps - chances are you'll see a "clean" version but look at other snapshots from previous years and you'll see that line of people.
In Tucson I saw someone standing on a miserable traffic island in the middle of, like, 6 lanes of the speedway in ~30 degrees celsuis heat last spring somehow begging. There's no grass, hardly any vegetation, all concrete and strip malls. Dust.
Chicago in my limited experience wasn't nearly as terrible beyond the subway occasionally filled with people smoking weed or the beliigerent drunks, and neither was Boston, but both were absolutely teeming with cops to an almost comical degree.
There is a tendency to point to the British stereotype that English people love to be miserable, but I don't think people in the US are even aware they're swimming in misery, putting on a rictus smile throughout.
I really enjoyed these two posts - they articulated a lot of what I felt growing up in the suburbs (in Canada, so a bit different but close enough). The point about accumulating "stuff" is very important: not only is it a status marker, but the accumulation of goods is also a balm for the pain of living such an alienated existence. Like any addiction, though, it's never enough so you've always got to get more money for more stuff etc.
Having said that, growing up poor in the suburbs is the absolute worst because you get the alienation, but you don't even get the "stuff" to make day-to-day life more bearable. In addition, you get to see kids judge less wealthy kids from a very young age - where you go on vacation, whether you wear clothes of specific brands, which toys you have, and so on. It's a terrible lifestyle by any human standard IMO.
Really great post. I was a child of the suburbs and see both my siblings living in the suburbs recapitulating their childhoods as you so perceptively point out. It was the seeming inevitability of your last sentence that drove Dmitry Orlov, a Russian emigre of a previous generation, back to Russia for good or ill. He called the American Dream of suburban house, job and car the iron triangle. Brute economic reality will force us back together as the American Dream becomes completely uninsurable. We won't have a choice.
It's interesting when you ask people to drill down and think about why they want what they want. From my anecdotal experience, most suburban zombies feel terribly uncomfortable about looking outside their bubble of reality to question why they want these things or why they repeat the patterns that seem "natural" when the patterns of suburban life are only 2 or 3 generations old. There is always a lizard brain fear you see if you try to get people to consider that what might make them happy in life isn't a giant house shell to live inside, stuffed full of crap they won't use.
Anti-intellectualism is definitely deeply ingrained. Seems better now than in the past when an intelligent comment often got me smacked, literally, by whomever happened to be nearby. The U.S. also seems especially criminal to me, even with crime at a relative historical low. Some of the amateur detective work might be a result of that, with added dollops of paranoia and racism thrown in for good measure. My mostly white rural neighborhood requires watchfulness which is not just paranoia but the very real desire to stop people from dump old mattresses or burning and shooting everything just for the hell of it. A certain amount of paranoia sets in naturally as times goes on. That's an experience you won't have in any of the countries I have visited or lived in outside the U.S. I've never really figured out why so many people, not fleeing absolute poverty or war, would want to be here. I was born here, but I'd happily live elsewhere in a real city, something we have very few of as you rightfully mention.
Just after reading this, I saw an ad for cosmetic surgery on Fox News that promised to give 59 year old women the waistline of a woman in her 20s. It made me think of Christopher Lasch's writing on America's obsession with youth and its fear of (and inability to imagine) death. I think that a big part of this is that the finitude of death makes us responsible for our choices. Americans don't want to be held accountable for the choices that death makes irreversible. "I lived my whole life asleep, chasing something I didn't really want." For people who have made choices of consequence instead of convenience, it is possible to look back on life with satisfaction and wisdom. Americans, on the other hand, chase youth as a symbol of endless possibility and, ironically and unwittingly, as a symbol of their total passivity and fear of meaningful action. It's extraordinarily sad
I think there is a lot of truth here. A recent legal book, "From Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands
The Transformation of Ownership in the Western World" by James Q. Whitman goes into this a lot about how real property and landowning are fundamental in the American Legal system.
It also has the best solution to the "Feudalism" debate I've seen so far: he observes that the whole problematic has been about tightly connecting a body of law and legal norms to a specific set of economic practises.
However, if you allow those to overlap and diverge as different but related systems, the whole issue dissolves.
Its just like how the Bronze Age started in different places at different times, but many cultures existed on both sides of it for centuries. But this doesn't imply that Bronze tools and weapons had no impact, nor that the culture groups weren't real and critically important things.
After all, Native American, native title, and similar terms directly come from Feudal and manorial laws systematized in the 14th and 15th centuries. You can look to "domestic dependant nations" in Johnson v. McIntosh for the specific American version.
I would also point out that the serf think isn't exactally right for homeowners who have a real shot of paying off their mortage. They more resemble the Yeomanry or Free Peasantry of the English system.
I think the closest Russian historical equivalent is the Pomestie, which does actually resemble the Homestead Act (esepcially when you remember the cavalry and forts with the Homesteads in the west).
Benjamin Franklin is a good specific example, both in his family life and name meaning (Franklin means free non noble landowner).
"desire to replicate their own childhood" - This was the main driver for me. I had a great childhood at the edge of a small, rural town surrounded by agriculture with space to ride bikes, build forts, fish/swim in the canals, and whatever. Trying to raise a family in a big urban city would have been as foreign to me as living on the moon and thus the last place I would choose for it.
Alas, my PMC career would be nearly impossible in such a rural community (off to work in tall buildings), so 60's era suburb on the edge of a state capital city is where I ended up, with the things I wanted (a small downtown main street with restaurants/pubs, train station, community center, library all within walking distance, a garage with tools for trying to be handy like my dad was, a yard big enough to have a garden and chickens, hiking/camping within 30 min drive, etc), with great communities for musicians, gardeners, brewers, sports, etc for people that can lift their ass off the couch. Didn't end up with the spawn despite giving it a shot and that's fine. It does feel like living my dream mostly (and maybe the American dream, whatever that really is). If I had kids maybe it would be not so dreamy, and maybe I'm just brainwashed. I definitely was brainwashed 25 years ago.
The other driver was that house ownership can be one of the critical financial investments a person can make in their life (yeah I know it's controversial for some), and this has been the case for myself. When Obama did a big tax credit for buying a home after TGR, I was going to buy something, anything and I was really lucky to get in when I did.
"this good life has become feasible to fewer and fewer Americans, maybe it’s time to rethink the concept" - I really do agree with this. It does seem unfair that I sort of fell into a sweet setup for myself while so many are simply fucked. Meh, when the water runs out we're all fucked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWqG1ySAc4g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWqG1ySAc4g
Roatan - wasn't that going to be one of those crypto-island places?
Yes, remote work is toothpaste out of the tube, it's forever. Most firms don't even have the office real estate anymore for full return to office and have saved enormous amounts of money reducing their office footprints. Mine requires us in office once a week since 2023 and we have to reserve a spot in advance. The bigwigs calling for full return are liars or, in the case of the dipshits smashing shit up in DC right now, simply out of touch with reality. I think the takes on the latest hubbub about it that it's truly about driving people out to downsize are correct (avoid severance and unemployment from layoffs).
Thanks be to gawd my neighborhood has no HOA (city ordinances only), I always forget about those. Had some bad neighbors over the years, that can really make a place suck. That greater Lake Conroe area has some really nice wooded lots that would be a good place for space without close neighbors and a bit of homesteading lite, but I think I might get lynched there for talking smack about Greenwood and Nugent and sounding like a commie that hates 'Merica.
I'm aware of that Conroe area because my MAGA brother lives outside Magnolia after "fleeing liberal Harris/Houston" and my wife had a retreat at some really cool place nearby on a secluded lot in the pines. I'd be pretty happy with a place like that and a growing season that long, but I would really miss accessible city life, and the mountains. If you're gonna do kids, it seems clear that family nearby is great.
I'm right outside Denver in a modest, working class <2000sqft single-family home neighborhood that's about 20% rentals, not gentrified, ~.1 acre lots like we had growing up. I feel really lucky to have all those perks you mention without any of those downsides. Farther out of the city there are newer fancier subs that are precisely the sort of soulless places and people Evgenia describes, keepin up with the Joneses, as I'm sure you are familiar. I lived in one for a couple of years, never again if I can help it.
The area is really pushing denser housing units and it's converting to that and starting to fill up. I'm a-ok with this, although it doesn't really hit the ostensible goal of "affordable" imo, it's just denser, and naturally there's not nearly enough investment in infrastructure, esp transit, to keep it from creating an unholy mess once it really takes off. Maybe we'll get lucky, at least until the water runs out.
“American dream” is, in its essence, very similar to Russian notion “мещанство” with all its connotations (such as пошлость). It is a bit funny that it moved presently to suburbia (мещанин literally means “city dweller”, just as French “bourgeois”.
Unrelated comment here - i hav a 3 yr old and i’d love to hear you guys talking about the multimillionaire russian & ukranian youtubers who moved to dubai then miami and are basically making money from their kids. Its awful crap and my kids love it. One of their sketches involved throwing brand new toys in their swimming pool and guessing whether it would sink or float.
Beautifully said
Thank you so much Evgenia for the article!
> and the Perestroika or even Collapse might be looming in the future?
And do not you feel that the second Trump coming is Perestroika? As for the Collapse, the US is cemented with hypocrisy, even more than was the SU of its later years, and hypocrisy is a fragile substance.
This RULED
Thanks and thanks for Ilf and Petrov !