Buddy of mine and I were chatting on Discord and we ended up having a conversation about this topic.
Namely imagine you just put two people in a room. One from New Jersey and one from LA and observe
Wild how different cultures can be even inside a country.
What do y’all think? Is it due to the size of the US (geographically)?
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.
Another interesting point!
I suppose it sorta makes sense - perhaps the rich/well off people all chase the same wagons around?
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.”
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.
Why were you and your buddy in the shower together though?
Mind ur business pal
*in America
I’m gonna make the argument that cultures between the us and other countries are also massively different in a lot of ways :)
As an outsider, the us just seems like a different version of europe, culturally
Someone from the UK I once knew told me this:
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.
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…
You sound like you’re from Chicago. “DC is a real city guys! It’s just as real a city as any other city!”
