I don't want to live in an empty box surrounded by strangers where I have to drive to do anything. I don't want to live like this. 
This isn't even a good article, but we all kinda know it. The suburb, the detached single family home, the kitchen, the laundry room, the garage, the car, they're all anti-culture weapons designed to destroy human beings and make consumers out of their bones.
Like ha ha ha I am detached and ironic but god it hurts so much having to live in this fucking anti-human nightmare society knowing that fascists turned the whole country in a labyrinth with the express purpose of creating exhausted, lonely, isolated, helpless people. It's a nightmare. It's a nightmare.
One of the reasons so many stories from college sound like a summer camp is college dorms, or at least older ones, are still built for human habitations. Dozens of people share one laundry room. Living spaces are tiny but there are tons of common areas. Instead of each atomized individual cooking an atomized individual meal there's a big efficient kitchen where a dozen people feed hundreds of people. You don't have to fuck around with your artificial gasoline powered cow for hours every sunday so you don't get ransomed by your HOA because the school has a small number of really big, efficient gasoline powered cows and they have a very small number of people take care of all the lawns and gardens and shit.
So students who live in dorms and don't need to hold down a full time job or raise kids or whatever have SO MUCH FUCKING TIME that would otherwise be taken up doing all the stupid single family detached atomized nightmare house shit. And there are people everywhere to do stuff with! And places to do stuff! Shitty bars, college green spaces and libraries, little shitty restaurants, little shitty theaters and whatever the fuck. You're not communiting two hours a day, you can walk to all the places you need to be. YOu're not living in a tiny consumer storage unit, you're living in a shitty box with shitty furniture from the seventies next to dozens of other people. You know the people having bed breaking sex in the hex dorm room over because you see them in the halls and cafeteria and showers and everywhere teh fuck else every goddamn day.
"middle class" kids go from suburbia hell where they spend most of their time at rigidly controlled schools and the rest of their time lost in the center of suburbia hell (Any point in suburbia hell is the center of suburbia hell), to a pro-human environment designed for humans to live in, and then 1-3 years later depending on how long they spend in the dorms they go back to suburbia hell and spend the rest of their miserable fucking lives driving from office/factory/retail hell to suburbia hell.
And people who do live in multi-dwelling dwellings don't have pro-human dwellings designed for humans. They live in smaller, shittier, even worse suburbia hell. Small shitty apartments have to have small shitty kitchens and bathrooms and living rooms shoved in to them. Instead of having small living spaces and lots of shared communal spaces apartments reproduce all the problems with single family detached houses BUT SMALLER AND WORSE
I HATRE IT HTASEPOtgjpraedsskgnaer;leagjkhln;aveds klnjh;avdsfrkjln';bfsadjlm;k'msbfadjk]pollbvadfjkopl]vfradsjkop[]grefadpjoik []fgerwasIP ]JOKGRFADSKJOP[]EGREAJP[KOR
You know the people having bed breaking sex in the hex dorm room over
Is this a Freudian slip? I'm calling the volcel police just to be sure
After 3 years in a dorm, I seriously considered trying to find a commune to join after graduation. I absolutely loved living that way, even as an introvert.
I've seriously been chasing after a living situation like that for 20 years. I feel you.
My friends and I joke about moving into the same old folks home someday.
Wtf so that's why I was happiest in college.
This must also be why every time I try to find actionable solutions it's always written for cities and people who live in cities. I'm always like, what about us rural people??? Wtf am I supposed to do? Ah, it's because it's aggressively designed to be immune to those types of actions.
But I feel like this way of life has me permanently broken. I could move to a city where it's easier to organize. But I can't handle it. It's too much for my senses and I miss the green of nature. But out here is atomized, alienated isolated hell. Also because of the well-off whiteness of home ownership, it's primarily fascistland with Trump flags everywhere too. Even if I tried to do something I'd probably be chased out of town.
The ideal for folks like you I'd expect is a suburban distanced commune structured like a college campus. Big central building, lots of greenery, some housing and amenities but otherwise walkable and community focused. Like a little microcity with ideally a train running to and from the more quiet and green commune to a larger space with more urbanized environments
That's my dream. Huge, dense cities, and then outside the cities small communally focused villages spaced regularly, connected by arterial transit systems to the big intercity rail lines. Lots of bikes and very compact electric trolleys.
- Show
But I feel like this way of life has me permanently broken
I've had that same thought multiple times.
In some places, like medieval europe, the rural town had everyone's houses clustered together, often around a sizeable commons. And then the farm fields would be all around the town. Of course the scale was very different, but from what i understand it mostly wasn't like america with isolated farmhouses a mile apart.
One of the reasons so many stories from college sound like a summer camp is college dorms, or at least older ones, are still built for human habitations. Dozens of people share one laundry room. Living spaces are tiny but there are tons of common areas.
TBH, I had an absolutely fucking horrible time living in a dormitory-style arrangement when I was trying to pursue a trades education ~4 years ago, and I think it was a major part of what caused me to fail out of the program.
I can't deal with being around that many people all at once, all the time. I feel an extreme degree of social anxiety, and pressure to succeed in that kind of environment, and it's caused me to engage in some moderately concerning self-harming behavior in the past (e.g. ramming my head at full force into a concrete wall as a form of self-punishment, and running off campus into the woods during a severe snowstorm just to get away from it all).
I never got to live in a college dorm and I'm insanely resentful about that fact for all of those reasons. I've never known a life that wasn't living in an atomized box.
People asked me after two years in my detached home how my neighbors are.
How the fuck should I know? Bro with the snowblower is a real one. Besides him and the trouble that moved in down the street (cop) I have no idea who these people are beyond the fact that one of them has 3 identical 3/4 ton pickups for god knows what reason.
Our lives are so atomized that I have closer relationships with the tellers at the grocery store
If suburban homefulness is capitalist indoctrination then if you think about it, no one being able to afford one is liberation
(i hate this country)
:Siddarthano: Suburban living
:Siddarthano: Revolutionary homelessness
:Siddarthamiddleway: Decommodifying housing but also definitely blowing up some McMansions on late night TV after the Rev.
Khrushchev: In Russia, all you have to do to get a house is to be born in the Soviet Union. You are entitled to housing...In America, if you don’t have a dollar you have a right to choose between sleeping in a house or on the pavement. Yet you say we are the slave to Communism.
I don’t even know if it’s the single-family house in and of itself, but more the way they’re laid out in the larger urban planning scheme. There’s been single-family houses in political economies before capitalism, but the layout of them in the community was optimized for, well, strong communities. The suburbs are laid out so that each cookie cutter house is its own little fiefdom, an estate cut off from everyone else and removed from the sort of businesses and institutions that could foster greater community cohesion.
Nothing is stopping you from being a mountain man and living out in the forest, or living in an apartment, or living in a homeless shelter. The world is yours, OP. Don't let your memes be dreams.
