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The biggest socio-economic failure of the past 50 years is the insistence that the environment you grow up and live in is unimportant to your day-to-day living

The biggest socio-economic failure of the past 50 years is the insistence that the environment you grow up and live in is unimportant to your day-to-day living and your ability to conceive of the choices you have, much less your ability to actually choose them. That was the conclusion I came to after thinking about the bigger implications of this article for a bit.

pchristensen 18y ago
I always knew that I preferred cities to suburbs but couldn't explain why. I wasn't much more social when I lived in Chicago, I didn't actually go to most of the events and places there, but it was somehow ... better. I only recently realized that it's so much richer in information, and when I moved to the burbs, I get so much less information that I feel starved. That's also overlooking the fact that I meet fewer people, fewer kinds of people, and spend more time commuting.
- lief79 18y ago
  So, what is the best way to over come this? If I already have a career in the suburbs and a family, how do I emulate this environment? That's the general case, which might be the easier one to address. In my specific case, I have a career in the suburbs, and I'm about to get married and probably start a family. How do I go about finding/creating a more stimulating environment? What do I look for in recognizing the highly stimulating environments? I feel like I'm in a medium environment now, and outside of the suboptimal online contact, it seems to be moving in the wrong direction.
  - pchristensen 18y ago
    1) Carefully pick your suburb - all are not created equal 2) Ditto for location within suburb - an older home near the town center usually offers more convenient stimulation than a larger home 15 minutes out. 3) If you can't do those, try to locate convenient to train station or interstates so commuting is faster and external events aren't so hard to get to.
    - nihilocrat 18y ago
      There are some satellite hamlets that are attached to larger metropolitan areas that I feel sort of achieve this. I am specifically thinking of Carrboro, NC. I spent some of my childhood there and I feel it had all the good qualities of the suburbs (I have lived my entire childhood in them) but mitigated a lot of the bad ones (alienation, etc.) because it was in an area that is denser and much more progressive by Southern standards (Carrboro/Chapel Hill). A negative example would be Cary, NC. A small one-block 'downtown' surrounded by vast urban sprawl and conservative values all around. It is a malignant growth attached to Raleigh, NC.
      - pchristensen 18y ago
        That sounds exactly like what I had in mind. The Chicago equivalents would be Naperville, Downer's Grove, or Oak Park for the good ones. I don't want to call out the bad ones specifically.

pchristensen 18y ago

I always knew that I preferred cities to suburbs but couldn't explain why. I wasn't much more social when I lived in Chicago, I didn't actually go to most of the events and places there, but it was somehow ... better. I only recently realized that it's so much richer in information, and when I moved to the burbs, I get so much less information that I feel starved. That's also overlooking the fact that I meet fewer people, fewer kinds of people, and spend more time commuting.

lief79 18y ago
So, what is the best way to over come this? If I already have a career in the suburbs and a family, how do I emulate this environment? That's the general case, which might be the easier one to address. In my specific case, I have a career in the suburbs, and I'm about to get married and probably start a family. How do I go about finding/creating a more stimulating environment? What do I look for in recognizing the highly stimulating environments? I feel like I'm in a medium environment now, and outside of the suboptimal online contact, it seems to be moving in the wrong direction.
- pchristensen 18y ago
  1) Carefully pick your suburb - all are not created equal 2) Ditto for location within suburb - an older home near the town center usually offers more convenient stimulation than a larger home 15 minutes out. 3) If you can't do those, try to locate convenient to train station or interstates so commuting is faster and external events aren't so hard to get to.
  - nihilocrat 18y ago
    There are some satellite hamlets that are attached to larger metropolitan areas that I feel sort of achieve this. I am specifically thinking of Carrboro, NC. I spent some of my childhood there and I feel it had all the good qualities of the suburbs (I have lived my entire childhood in them) but mitigated a lot of the bad ones (alienation, etc.) because it was in an area that is denser and much more progressive by Southern standards (Carrboro/Chapel Hill). A negative example would be Cary, NC. A small one-block 'downtown' surrounded by vast urban sprawl and conservative values all around. It is a malignant growth attached to Raleigh, NC.
    - pchristensen 18y ago
      That sounds exactly like what I had in mind. The Chicago equivalents would be Naperville, Downer's Grove, or Oak Park for the good ones. I don't want to call out the bad ones specifically.