Hah, or you can be me. I grew up in New York City with the ability to go pretty much anywhere unsupervised and I never did - I spent all my free time either reading books or playing videogames anyway. I had almost zero interest in the real world (I think it’s pretty boring even now that I’ve been an adult for a while) but I still feel like there was something wasteful about not bothering to experience things that so many other kids would have really enjoyed.
The worst part was college. I attended a famous party school but went to zero parties, zero dates, etc. At least I managed to graduate in three years with a double major. (By the time I got to college, I did want more social interaction but I thought that I was incapable of it so I didn’t try.)
It actually hasn’t been bad overall. Those were my missed opportunities but there were also other opportunities that I didn’t miss.
(I do live in New York City again and I do still think it’s really boring here. There’s nowhere to go and nothing to do that doesn’t involve a crowd of strangers which ruins it for me. The main reason I’m here is to be close to my family but even visiting them requires a miserable two-and-a-half-hour round trip on the subway. I got to live in a small town for a while and I liked it a lot better - having a house with a big yard, being able to drive everywhere, and easy access to nature were great.)
As someone who’s had a teenagehood like this, what should I do? I have friends abroad and I travelled to visit them by myself a few times. It doesn’t make the other 350 days of the year any less boring though
Study for college. Seriously, just allocate many hours a day for it. it’s boring at first but gets better after a while. You don’t have to go to an Ivy League, any mid-range state college will have cool people and walkable infrastructure. If you don’t have a lot of money, do the first couple years at a community college and talk to counselors to make sure the credits transfer. Once you’re in college, be proactive and seek more advice.
I already posted, but this post bothered me so much that I wanted to say my peace. You can tell that OP and everyone resonating with them is from Canada or the US a country with car dependency. How? Because our urban environments are uniquely awful, since they’re built for cars, not people. The suburbs are far from anywhere you’d like to go, and even if you had the gumption to walk or bike a mile or more each way, the infrastructure to do so is flat out dangerous or hostile in a lot of cases. The suburbs keep a low population density, and there’s no real cause to meet anybody else ever since they have no third spaces, so unless you hit the neighbor jackpot, the suburbs are a super lonely experience. Big box stores, chain pharmacies, and chain restaurants being the dominant businesses in your area is also a car-centroc urbanism thing, since if you have to get in your car to go shopping, you’re just going to go where you’ll only have to make one stop or where you won’t have to leave the car. It’s even in the meme: parents too busy to teach [them] how to drive, which matters because the city is fucking inaccessible otherwise.
I live in a city of 90,000 in California and, while California is generally head and shoulders above the rest of the US in bike infrastructure, it’s still goddamn hostile to try and get across town on a bike or on foot, and that’s assuming the weather isn’t miserable. I’ve had five exchange students from different countries (Japan, HK, Russia, Netherlands, etc) and they all found the suburbs / US urban design to be isolating. All of them were used to just being able to bike/tram/bus/train across the city and even between cities completely on their own and it was no big deal at all. It’s easily the hardest thing for them to cope with.
It’s not this way in the rest of the world, and it hasn’t even been this way forever. It got this way due to decades of deliberate policy choices, and it can be changed. Your local city and county government has a shocking amount of power over this kind of stuff, and those are levels of government that, unless you live in a big metropolis, are actually accessible to laypeople. Start organizing, get your friends together, make some noise, let them know what you want; local politics can actually be pretty responsive to this stuff.
Edit: in case you want more information, there’s several really good channels about this stuff, but I’d recommend NotJustBikes and AlanFisher on YouTube for a start.
Edit 2: OP is not, in fact, from the US or Canada. Took a gamble and lost.
Crap, took a calculated risk on that one, sorry. I know England is getting rough with car dependency, but I wasn’t expecting Ireland to be that way. Derry Girls lied to me.
Another swing and a miss on my part. I was trying to make a joke at my expense by being an American who got his knowledge from TV shows. Anyway, that’s not an apology. I’m sorry for making that assumption.
Australia is, to my understanding, not as bad as America, but roughly on par with Canada. I believe NZ might also be very car-dependent. It’s definitely not just those two countries
this was my youth, we still fucking walked / biked everywhere, even in the deep south’s 100+ degree temps. people who think europe is an non-automotive utopia: this is a recent trend - it took time to build out the infrastructures (PLURAL) that replace driving everywhere, and even then it’s taking time to get the cars out of the cities.
Ha. I grew up across the road from the beach so just surfed every daylight hour not in school. No friends, no cool things around, no games, no hobbies, but didn’t care at all because surfing trumped anything you could offer a kid.
I live in the middle of nowhere in Europe and all is true except the outside picture and the fact that there isn’t anything to walk to (except if you want to take a 20km hike trough a forest to get to the city, and then do another 20km back)
I’m In middle of nowhere north east amarica and replace walking through a forest your climbing hills steap enough to be considered cliffs, and you have my childhood. It amazes me that I biked all that just to visit a ice cream stand.
I live in central europe, I could travel across the entire continent in a day for not that much money and could go anywhere in the eastern part of my country for 60€/year, I could go to any western part of my country in 5h for less than 20€
this dark magic I could use is called a “train system” also reffered to as “good public infrastructure” by many
goddamn. i live in western europe and i have to spend upwards of 100 euro just to go for a 3 hour train trip. i have to spend 500 for a yearly transit pass to get around my (relatively small) city.
No, that’s a myth. America had extensive train networks – both within cities and between them – and deliberately destroyed them because of a combination of misguided modernist city planning and corrupt lobbying from corporations from oil companies and car manufacturers.
There is nothing special about America that makes it inherently unsuitable for trains.
yes and no, we also HEAVILY subsidize roads via federal grants and until recently passenger train infrastructure didn’t have any kind of federal backing.
This means elected officials with tight budgets will ‘address’ transportation with new roads even where its a bad solution because its cheaper and it looks like they’re doing something. By the time people realize it didnt fix anything the elected official has moved on.
We’ve also built cities (and especially suburbs) around cars which means that they’re not very centralized, especially in the Western half of the country. In most places this means busses are a more practical form of public transportation than things like subways or light rail.
as somebody who has worked in the field, the word is not as much “design” but “attempted to design” but the problem comes down to sprawl and effeciency, and we have many places in the US that have passed the maximum density that cars+ parking can effeciently accomodate even in small cities. This is one of the reasons that economists see big box stores (wal mart), strip malls, etc as net drains on local economies.
One of the reasons the US is stagnating economically is the lack of medium density infrastructure that is simply not built because roads, oil, and cars are so heavily subsidized
Take out those subsidies or match them with similar subsidies for trains and similar, and you’d see a shift where trains become cheap to small cities which would ease pressure on large ones.
Forgot most of it because how boring it was, and then I talk with people I knew from those years and it’s always the same topics, the same histories, like they are stagnant on memories because their life peaked at highschool.
It does not matter how windy or straight burb roads are.
What matters is that they aren’t culs-de-sac for pedestrians/cyclists, allow mixed use zoning(!!), and are dense enough to support a diversified economy.
I’m sorry to hear there were folks who did that. I just chose this server because I wanted a general purpose one that seemed to have a decent chance of sticking around for the long term. I have no interest in harassing people or getting into server wars.
It’s not server wars, it’s a server designed to spread authoritarian propaganda behind a veneer of communism. But maybe you’re not part of that… if so good luck.
Add comment