I recently moved to California. Before i moved, people asked me “why are you moving there, its so bad?”. Now that I’m here, i understand it less. The state is beautiful. There is so much to do.
I know the cost of living is high, and people think the gun control laws are ridiculous (I actually think they are reasonable, for the most part). There is a guy I work with here that says “the policies are dumb” but can’t give me a solid answer on what is so bad about it.
So, what is it that California does (policy-wise) that people hate so much?
It’s endless soulless suburbia interspersed by twelve-lane traffic jams, what’s there to like?
It’s not “endless suburbia.” It does end — the state is just huge!
You can hop on a bike in downtown San Francisco after breakfast, and end up in the middle of nowhere in the Mt. Tam watershed before lunch.
And if that’s too urban, go hike the Lost Coast. Or check out Yosemite.
Yeah but in the end I still have to go back to suburbia.
Granted pretty much the same applies to the whole of the US and Canada, either you’re in the wilderness or suburbia but CA is especially egregious because you’d think with that kind of density they would’ve thought about building, you know, a couple of four-storey apartment blocks or something somewhere. The kind of density that enables public transport to work.
I can go surfing in the morning, hike beautiful mountains in the evening, and experience the TJ nightlife, all in a single day. The next day I can go offroading in ocotillo or take a stroll through a park bigger than NY’s Central Park. idk, my section of California is heaven.
The fucking ridiculous natural beauty everywhere? I live in the most soulless of the soulless suburbs of Los Angeles and if I left my house right now and didn’t stop for anything I could be standing beneath the biggest tree in the world in just 4 hours. Or if I want to see the oldest trees in the world I can go roughly the same distance and do that instead. I could be at the trailhead to climb the highest peak in the contiguous US in 3 hours and on my way there I would see an ancient basalt waterfall where obsidian litters the ground, the Grand Canyon of the Mojave where semiprecious gems flow out of the mountains, lakes, rivers, the Sierra Nevadas, Death Valley, it’s ridiculous. Every fucking state has traffic and suburbs but I’ll go to my grave arguing that we can’t be beat for scenery.
What if I want to walk five minutes to a cafe? There’s trees there, too. Fuck biggest and oldest and grandest if I can’t be there without incurring one of those twelve-lane traffic jams.
