West Coast baby
Yup, it’s impossible that people have different preferences and experiences than you.
Maybe I’d be less vocal about it if there wasn’t a loud minority of people - I suspect mostly born after 1990 - who have these opinions largely as a result of lack of other experience. Maybe I’d be less pissed off about it if they stopped moving from huge cities to small ones and fucking up the cost of everything whilst trying to convert everywhere to NYC and Amsterdam.
I’m sick of the Zennial/euro anti-car, ultra pro-urban densification, unopposed bandwagoning online, and I feel compelled to speak up about it.
What leads you to believe that they hold these opinions due to a lack of life experience?
I’ve lived in a lot more places than most people, with a lot more diversity of experience. I certainly can’t guarantee more experience than any random commenter, but it will be more than the vast majority. I’ve lived in several small towns and cities. Many suburbs. A few large cities. I’ve walked to work, biked to work, taken public transit to work. I’ve driven 10m to work and commuted 2.5h to work with a combination of trains and cars - and everything in between. I’ve regularly been to places where you’re within sight of >20 people at all times, and places that haven’t seen a human in 10 years. The vast majority of people live within 20 miles of where they were born, and less than half of gen Z adults have a driver’s license. I’ve owned over two dozen cars and have a pilots license. I live thousands of miles from where I grew up. I have degrees, certifications, or substantial work experience in 5 different fields. I have several hobbies more substantive than many peoples careers. I know things about stuff.
And also, because many, when pressed, will admit to living in a big city, maybe in Europe, or someplace with fucked, hellish sprawl like LA that’s a victim of a half century of compound growth, or some insane new construction suburb in TX or FL that was designed to enrich a real estate developer at the highest possible profit margin. Either urban hell (from my perspective) or a strawman of hellish sprawl that isn’t very similar to older suburbs and the original “American dream” - not having tried much else.
Edit: in one case I was talking with someone who thought the travel distance to a normal suburban grocery store was 500% the straight line distance due to some comical maze of roads. I have to drive/walk/bike 25% further to my suburban grocery store than its straight line distance, and it’s been the same in the last 4 suburbs I’ve lived in, in radically different places. It tells me that a lot of people don’t know WTF they’re talking about.
