Culture and societal constructs are wild. I always just chalked those words up to buzz words used by progressives but the more i learn about them and the more I think about em the more flimsy and random everything seems to be
Neat stuff - don’t recommend if you have disassociation problems
Living in the Washington, DC area, it was always frustrating how outsiders would treat us like our city was exactly the same in makeup, attitude, and general culture as New York City, and would then judge our stuff based on that. First, no, New York City is not like DC. Second, no, the main difference between New York City and DC isn’t that DC is a bunch of government drones. There are other jobs. It’s a whole ass city? It has local economies, artists, food places, software firms, everything you’d expect. Third, New York City pizza isn’t good. Stop acting like because a pizza deviates from that standard, it means the pizza is bad. AND I KNOW WHAT I SAID, FITE ME. Finally, we don’t have a subway. We have a metro rail. And it’s well laid out and easy to navigate, and when you reach your station stop it’s easy to get a bus for the final leg of your journey. It’s a superior metro scheme because the trains can operate at 60 mph, whereas the top speed for the subway where the trains must act both in place of the trains and the buses is 40mph.
Now to wait for the angry hate comments to come in…
I was in DC for a week back in 2017. Stayed in a suburban kind of area a bit outside the city center. It was super easy to get to from point A to B via the metro. Will visit again one day.
“Come for the national mall. Stay because you got a job and you never actually made it out to the national mall. You were too busy. Its fine. You’ll make it next year for the cherry blossum festival, or the kite festival, something, definitely”
Not to mention that I don’t feel like I’m going to get hepatitis by sitting on the DC metro seats. The new cars are very nice honestly. New York’s subway is a disgrace and absolutely disgusting.
Oh and the pizza comment is on point. My all time favorite is in 1) Virginia (I can still taste it) and 2) Colorado (place is sadly closed). Neither were your typical this is a pizza pizzas. One is owned by a Greek family and the other was the finest brick oven pizza ever.
It sometimes gives me mild existential dread thinking about how you can never really know that many places. I live in New York City and in 15 years I still feel like I barely know the surface. If I wanted to know Chicago or DC or Houston or Portland, what chance do I have? What can you learn in a week or a month? And even if I moved there now I’d never know what it was like as a kid, a teenager, a young adult. I doubt I could really know each of their subcultures, too.
I saw a thing with Hugh Laurie not too long ago and he said something like, “America is too big to even know itself. Someone in Georgia has no idea about the day to day life of someone in Oregon.”
Can you imagine if humanity was indeed planted by alien drones and cultivated to evolve via early adoption of morals via religion? There would be thousands of other humanities on different planets
Idk information theory overall is neat. All these patterns we love to fall into haha
I’m from a European country and you can drive 30 miles in the same country but there’s already another language or different dialect that you hardly can communicate and they have 1000years old traditions and celebrations totally different from your own area
Like most things there is a book that looks into this. Take a gander at the Wikipedia if your interested (the author argued that there are 11 ‘nations’ in the US). en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Nations
I don’t know about that, but few foreigner understand that the US is more diverse than just about any continent. Demographically, politically, geographically. Only some pockets of the US get any press, so I could see why some think there is only California tech bros, Texan oil men and Florida druggies.
That’s an interesting point but I’d say that most of the time, people in a neighborhood who have been living there at least for a couple generations are likely to be pretty similar as opposed to east vs west coast
Also because sometimes people don’t have the same perspectives as each other or knowledge and thus can be surprised when you are not
Born in the south and moved to Philadelphia in my early twenties. It was more culture shock than some other countries I’ve been to. Folks in Philly don’t hold back. If they don’t like you they tell you, to your face. They also don’t feel the need to add all the extra and often unnecessary pleasantries to every social interaction. Honestly for a “well mannered” southern kid it was pretty liberating to get to drop all that.
One big difference I've noticed: Well mannered Northerners do not often say Ma'am or Sir, unless they're being snarky or work in the hospitality or food service industry (and even there it'snot all the time). I have rarely met a Northern child that ends a sentence addressed to an adult with Ma'am or Sir.. It sounds almost sarcastic from a Northernkid because it is hardly heard.. Or indicates a very strict upbringing. They are way more likely to call an adult by their first name, even. If a Southern kid tried that, whew. I've known some Southern children, teenage and adult, who always address their parents as Ma'am or Sir.
As you mentioned, there's no direct insulting to the face, at least none that I've encountered. But there sure are a lot of faux kind comments like "Bless his heart."
It took me a while to figure out. Like I knew Southerners can be mean and judgy, but I didn’t think about how until I traveled to other places and saw how much more straightforward people are. It’s nice when kindness is kindness and there’s no underlying meaning.
“even” you say. I live in a not small but not that kind of a big country and you get out of the coastal cities and you end up in whole another culture. I don’t know the exact reasons but where sea exists, I feel home. 150-200 kilometers outside is completely different. I guess in my country, where people originally came from has to do with this topic. Coastal areas generally has people from Europe, other areas from Eastern countries, etc.
Damn that’s another really good point I hadn’t thought about. I wonder if bordering areas of countries (with land masses on the other side instead of an ocean or sea) also have pretty significant cultural differences compared to more inland areas
I woke up in my quite used to be a farm town exoburb, went to the shuttle to JFK through Manhattan, got on a flight to New Orleans, drove two hours to go visit my swamp living inlaws. So I am sitting on their boat and it just occurs to me that this is all one country.
I think there are some easy social cognates for sure but I think there are also lots of differences in attitudes and speaking styles. Social expectations, public considerations, govt expectations, etc etc
I think the differences between a wealthier, urban individual from different parts of North America (ie LA/SF vs NYC or Chicago) are smaller than the differences between someone who lives a rural life in California or Oregon vs someone who lives in upstate New York or rural Pennsylvania.
While there are definitely cultural differences related to the history of an area and the peoples who occupied it, money and privilege that come with an urban life tend to blur those lines a bit more.
Completely agree. I grew up in the Dallas area and spent 3 years in Colorado Springs. The “coffee culture” of the area was shocking to me. I had a roommate sit me down and tell me I needed to stop wearing camo pants because it looked ridiculous, while it was fairly common back home. There’s so many little things that are different that you don’t realize until you’re in it.
Camo clothing is associated with hunting and slaughtering wild animals for sport, and bootlicking military cosplay. it doesn’t fly well outside the South.
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