Saw a TikTok about some woman asking why men have to disturb the peace of a Saturday or Sunday morning by mowing their lawn or using a leaf blower, and you would’ve thought she went on a bigoted rant by the comment section. Like damn she was just talking about how it would be nice to enjoy a peaceful morning and random commenters took it as a personal attack. Shit you not I truly believe some suburbanites would go to war over their lawn the way they treat it like a fortress to a castle.
Is this not extremely silly when you type it all out? Time is a circle and I feel like I’m a peasant under feudalism watching kings, nobles and knights protect their land like it’s under some type of threat
Lawns are ugly as fuck and an ecological atrocity
The absurdity of an outdoor carpet made of plants weekly denied the singular purpose they exist (bearing seeds) is enraging to me
Green concrete. Not even plants, just one kind of plant with little diversity or any animal life.
When homeless, would look at open spaces, abandoned buildings, and think what a waste. I would understand about homeless encampment, more understanding, found self getting way more tolerant. More forgiving. I actually got excited when seeing homeless people on streets being resourceful, building communities.
This year, finally got an studio apt. Rent controlled, many people here, including me working to recover from homelessness.
My case manager came to my apt to fix my window. I'm on the back apt building. Love location cuz it looks onto a fenced in property, undeveloped, just trees.
He looked at the space. And said what a waste, so many homeless people could be housed there.
I said, no way, then it'd get crowded, filthy, crime. It'd ruin my peace. Then I stopped. Realized, how little it took for me to go to the darkside.
it's kinda scary honestly. we gotta be vigilant every day that our hearts don't harden against other human beings.
Happy for you that you're in a better position now.
Yeah, all the awful stuff I've been thru in recent years, overcrowded slums, surrounded by drug addicts, pedophiles, abusers. So much anger, misery, hatred, everyone tsking it out on each other. each time I got yelled at, swung at, bedroom door kicked in.... I could feel the hatred, anger building in me. The pressure, overwhelming desire for retribution. Wrestled with it a lot, had to actively work at not letting it consume. To retain open-mindedness, compassion, desire to be a better person.
I can see now how hard it is for people to escape poverty. It claws at you, surrounds, at times can seem inextricable.
we also don't need to sacrifice more undeveloped green spaces to house everyone. that lot should be expropriated into a public space and the "filth and crime" should be averted by meeting the material needs of people so they don't do antisocial things like litter or have to steal.
the littering would be especially easy to deal with as you really only need to provide convenient public bins around. It's like how public defecation is a lack of public toilets. These are both such basic problems to solve
america has the disease of Jeffersonian individualism where the imagined ideal is a self-sufficient lord of the manor, the unexamined part of which is free land and enslaved labor
"noise pollution" is a thing. and yeah people shouldn't have to tiptoe around but I don't feel too friendly to people's "right to make noise" when I'm suffering from migraines. We need to work on finding solutions that make our world more peaceful and less noisy in general
First of all, it’s TikTok. 99% of the people there are unable to detect sarcasm and satire and believe in every outrageous thing related to sex and relationship some random girl says on a podcast and get angry. The entire thing is meant to piss you off so you talk about it.
Second of all, real life people do not like waking up to the sound of a lawn mower no matter how burbbrained they are.
Third of all, social media in general have a habit of taking something innocuous and interpreting it in the worst possible way. People are raising their heart rate for no reason other than to feel something. It’s essentially self harm in another way.
The thought of being a bother to other people makes me feel sick and panicky. I cope with this by reassuring myself that I'm doing my best and they probably aren't that bothered anyway.
I'd someone actually told me I'm bothering them I'd consider jumping into traffic. Just put my head in the mower blades and fucking end it.
At least my electric mower is quiet. Much better.
I'm the exact same way. Almost went mute as a kid because I was so extremely socially anxious, the fear of doing or saying something wrong was absolutely paralyzing.
I had an elderly retired neighbor who was all about chemical treatments for his lawn, mowing patterns and all other sorts of curb appeal stuff. I could generally get along with him about most stuff and liked helping him do gardening or shovel snow. But he would get unhinged about our lawns. This guy would act like the dandelions in my yard were an abomination.
I’m all for hating boomers and their lawns, but tbh her argument sounds like those boomers complaining about kids playing outside or “my ethnic neighbors are playing loud music.”
There’s respect, but there’s also the recognition you live around other people and they’re allowed to live their lives too. A lawnmower is an extremely common sound in the suburban auditory landscape, it’s not like he’s shooting off guns at 6am.
just because something is common for a suburb doesn't make it acceptable. suburbs are horrible. you can commonly find monstrously sized trucks in suburbs, it doesn't mean that those vehicles aren't still horrible for the environment and people. extremely loud, unnecessary sounds like leaf blowers can lead to worse health.
I’m not arguing for suburban living, but if we’re gonna get upset about sound, then all cities are gonna have to go.
Lawns are bad, but why are we singling out lawns. Entire tracts built around single family detached housing are bad, cars are bad, American “towns” with no downtown are bad, there’s so much that’s horrible about suburbs that focusing on your neighbor mowing their lawn in the morning is missing the forest for the trees. At one point you have to accept that this is where you live, no matter how hostile to human life it is, and focusing your energy on your neighbor mowing their lawn in the morning is just an extremely useless squabble over what the op seems to characterize as a pretty minor annoyance for this woman. The original tiktok doesn’t even seem to be part of a larger conversation on lawns, which even if it was I’d say the same thing - getting bogged down in some useless squabble about what time your neighbor mows their lawn when it seems, at this point, to be a minor annoyance, will just be a detriment to both your lives while tens of hundreds of thousands of boomers across the country continue to mow their lawns every Sunday.
As far as I can tell the tiktok is not even about lawns but about what time the lawn is mowed. So we’re focused on whether or not you should mow your lawn in the morning or not when your living in the suburbs, your entire lifestyle resting upon a mountain of human suffering that makes such a life in the imperial core possible. She doesn’t even seem mad that he’s mowing the lawn, it’s just a minor annoyance he doing at a time when she wants perfect quiet. Who cares.
Right, and a single lawnmower which you are not operating but hearing from who knows how many houses over is not anywhere near the level of noise you get in an average modern day city. The birds by my window are usually just as loud as a single lawnmower operating down the street.
Which gets back to my original point, which is we are so daily assaulted with massive amounts of noise, in most cases much more than a lawnmower I’d argue even a single house over, and there is so much wrong and hostile to life about the suburbs that this extreme focus on what time your neighbor is mowing their lawn is a useless conversation. You already live in the suburbs, your life already rests atop a mountain of human suffering, suburbanization has already taken over this country’s landscape, who cares what time your neighbor is mowing their lawn as if somehow getting some quiet on a Saturday morning is gonna alleviate those three things I listed.
Not to mention the point I made a bit more succinctly in a different comment - this tiktok, based on op’s description, is not about lawns, not about the suburbs, nor is it really about noise pollution. A lot of hexbears using it as a jumping off point to voice their own valid grievances, all of which I agree with, but when you get down to it this seems to be two reactionary people - one lawn boomer and one lady who doesn’t want to be reminded other people live around her - neither of whom has any issue with the suburban lifestyle, in conflict about what time the lawn should be mowed. Not about noise in general, not about lawns, not about the suburban lifestyle, but whether a lawn should be mowed in the morning or not (whatever she means by “morning”). Therefore I classify this as a minor annoyance and come down on the side of accepting that you live around other people and sometimes you have to deal with them living, which unfortunately in the suburbs in 2023 that means they’re gonna mow their lawn.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
suburbs are horrible.
agreed, but then all the lawn mower sounds only annoy other suburbians, so why care
But also a lawnmower is an unnecessary sound. The world would be a better place with we just covered every lawn with gravel.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The original tiktok does not seem to be about lawns but about what time someone mows their lawn - this boomer mowing their lawn in the morning causing what seems to be a pretty minor annoyance for this woman. Who cares. You live around other people, sometimes you have to deal with them living. We can talk about lawns and I’d agree with you, but my understanding is that this is not about lawns, this woman has no issue with the suburban lifestyle, she just wishes suburban life would conform to her expectations of what it should be which, sorry, it doesn’t.
Leaf blowers should bee fucking outlawed. The most pointless and obnoxious tool in existence which pump vast amounts of pollution into the atmosphere. I genuinely am bothered less by the people doing burnouts and shooting off guns at like 2 am in my neighborhood (equally productive activities to leaf blowing imo), because it may be louder but it's less annoying.
Death to lawn care. (Yes, I did formerly work for a landscaping company, how could you tell)
I read recently that a leaf blower running for an hour emits roughly the same emissions as a Toyota Camry driving across the U.S.
I'm listening to a wonderful sound of a leaf blower right now. My building manager has somebody hit the back steps every Monday, probably more so nobody slips on a leaf and sues them, but it's very annoying.
It does get at the heart of the problem here, the legislation around this topic is fucking insanely stupid and fallen out of times but it does mean it's not the states problem (or bill) so it's kept on the books. I could rant about this topic for fucking hours
i never understood leaf blowers. they just move the shit to the neighbor's yard. who'll then come out with his leaf blower and blow it back to yours.
rake it up, bag it, compost it, i dunno. but just pushing it around? weird shit.
It's so landscaping companies can have their workers spend as little time at each house as possible.
from that perspective, fair enough. it's a nice grift, where you can blow stuff down the street and collect payment at each house. hustle culture's gonna hustle.
Isn't it just an electric motor with a fan that plugs into the wall? It's no worse than a vacuum.
A lot of leaf blowers are gas powered, IIRC usually with the engine and fuel tank in a backpack so it's like someone's wearing a lawnmower in order to push leaves around.
Ah I guess the industrial landscaping ones are. Mostly what I see is the electric ones though. 2 stroke motors are pretty bad emissions wise
the peace? you mean the spooky silence? not even the forest is that quiet. suburbs are creepy as fuck. a lawn mower would be a relief from the oppressive deathly quiet.
i don't really get being so bothered by other people doing stuff. then again, i just expect outside to be kinda loud. sirens, fireworks, children screaming, birds chirping, &c. silence to me means bad stuff is happening.
have you heard how loud those ride-on mowers and leaf-blowers get? listening to some dude next door run one of those for 1-2 hours straight makes you go crazy
they're kinda loud, i guess, but I don't live in a sensory deprivation chamber.
I agree, that woman has no respect for the desires of those early morning leafblowers
Honestly shocked to see so many people here demonizing people doing their outdoor physical labor in the summer during the coolest part of the day.
"They could just do it in the afternoon."
Motherfucker, we have released so much carbon into the atmosphere that it's 103 degrees with 75% humidity, at 3pm, I'm not getting a fucking heat stroke so that you can exist outside in perfect silence at 9 in the morning.
It's the idea that the labor is unnecessary. My mother loves staying with me because the elderly community she's in hires a landscaping crew that comes through at the crack of dawn and wake her up. When coupled with the fact that plants and grass do best when cut in the evening it really drives down the idea that suburban lawn people can be a nuisance and aren't considerate of anyone else.
What constitutes a "suburban lawn person," anyone with a lawn? So anyone with a house (i.e. almost every person close enough to hear another "suburban lawn person" mowing)? I don't want to mow my lawn it's a chore that I have to do to avoid having all my neighbors mad at me and to avoid fines from the city; I'm not a "lawn person."
I'm not sorry that the underpaid lawn servants who indirectly work for you mother do their physically intensive outdoor summer work when it's safest for them and not when it's most convenient for her.
Yeah, I think your idea of suburban lawn guy is pretty close to what I was saying. I have a tiny patch of lawn because I live in a dense city.
This is the real issue, even if someone WANTS to be totally silent, leave their lawn to grow wild, towns and HOAs don't allow that in many areas. Why is it so necessary to have a prim and proper lawn as long as it isn't interfering with other people's lawns? Sure they have to look at it, but I don't understand why natural growth should be seen as ugly.
Yeah it's absolutely horseshit. I'd like to replace it all with clover because it's supposed to require minimal care and I believe it's better for bees, but it also spreads on its own apparently and again, don't need neighbors yelling at or suing me.
Perhaps this is a poor example, but it’s for sure a microcosm of a much larger issue and probably should’ve been posted in the urbanism community
This is very silly but also a problem that central planning could totally solve. Imagine if every lawn used native plants that required minimal upkeep, and then there were specific times for caretaker tasks that create a lot of noise pollution (like mowing, preferably during a time when most people are at work). This is the sort of thing a HOA could conceivably do to make everyone's lives better, instead of colluding to keep black people out of the neighborhood.
Burb brained?
