The American Scream

Suburbia. 9 to 5. Daycare. Lawnmowers. Garage sales. Backyard BBQ. Paved driveways. Pool covers. Cul-de-sacs. Strip malls.

If those words filled you with a sense of contentment, then congrats. You’re either living or working towards the American Dream. For the rest of us who cringed at all of the above, welcome to the American Scream, where our disembodied and voiceless cries to fight an entire industry hellbent on selling you “the perfect life” float into a hollow pit of corporate indifference and negligence.

There’s absolutely nothing more American than spending your weekend taking care of your lawn and then proceeding to grill some sausages in the backyard before a NFL game begins. It’s this kind of “good life” that every industry seems to be colluding together in order to sell it to the average American, and it’s been happening for decades. Pesticides for your lawn, daycare pickup and dropoff services, babysitters on-demand, seasonal rakes, and hardware stores full of supplies for whatever the year’s spin on the build-your-own-birdhouse trend is.

Urban millenials in the US are all aware of this and actively avoid it whenever they can. It fills them with a sense of dread and stagnant horror so bad that it lights a fire in them to strive never to end up with that kind of life. I’m one of them. To me, the whole concept of suburban life has always seemed like a gashing self-inflicted wound that you constantly buy bandages for and then buy even more things to take care of those bandages, convincing yourself in the process that you’re doing great for yourself by taking such good care of your bandage equipment, all while the wound festers in the background.

I’m also acutely aware that this feeling can easily change over time, especially once the concept of family life is in the picture. Even then, cities have forever and always offered the lifestyle that I, and most millenials, are drawn to. Public transportation systems eliminate the need for car ownership, eliminating a good chunk of monthly expenses and contributing to reducing your carbon footprint. Commuting to work by biking, walking, or public transportation has consistently proven to be better for your health and the environment by many studies. Being able to actually engage with the local community as a citizen walking on its sidewalks and using its parks offers a much stronger sense of civic pride than living in a random housing development outside the city named “Walnut Oaks” ever could. Plus, living in walking distance to great coffee shops is something suburban home-owners can only dream of.

Young people are flocking to cities in higher numbers than ever before. In fact, over 50% of the world’s population currently lives in cities and that number is expected to rise to nearly 70% by 2050. And yes, that means young couples choosing to raise families in the city, something that was far less common in the last century. More and more young families are shunning the white flight and are choosing to stay in cities, where the potential for higher incomes and job flexibility is far higher.

The resurgence of urban centers is happening for a ton of reasons. Job flexibility is a big one. Gone are the days where the head of the household earned a “secure” job for the next 30-40 years of their life and kept it. There are no “secure” jobs in 2017. Any and every company is at risk of being disrupted. All startups have a very high chance of failure. Every industry is prone to automation. Without this kind of job security, people have to be more flexible than ever to either switch jobs or move to a different city entirely for a more promising one. This in turn means that their housing situation can’t be a permanent one.

Another big reason is e-commerce. Between Amazon Prime and Amazon Fresh, you can get same-day deliveries for nearly anything and everything you could ever need directly to your doorstep. You don’t need a car to go buy that large wardrobe, tie it to the top of your car, and drive it back to your garage. Just one-click order with free two-day shipping on Amazon. Same goes for groceries. No more lugging eight bags of groceries over six flights of stairs in two trips in your cramped Manhattan apartment complex. Direct-to-door delivery on Amazon Fresh delivers straight to your doorstep and keeps your food cold until you get back too.

The massive spike in home cleaning services, laundry & dry-cleaning startups, and ridesharing options in cities is staggering. The whole concept of owning a house in the suburbs and doing everything yourself seems as foreign to someone living in San Francisco’s Mission Hill today as the pagan rituals of the ancient Greeks did to the civilized English society of the nineteenth century. Millenials are far more comfortable with temporarily renting something, using it, and then returning it. Just look at the rise of streaming music/video versus downloads. With the right technology giants able to capitalize on this turning tide of consumption preferences, the pace of life as we know it in cities is changing faster now than it ever has before.

And yet, despite all this, America still tries to sell you diesel cars every year. It still tries to sell you on the American Dream. It looks at suburban home ownership as an aspirational and somewhat divine goal to strive towards. It shuns the dirty, claustrophobic streets of the city in favor of a clean and well-maintained lakefront property with sprawling backyards and pools. It continues to zone the suburbs as residential and commercial as far away from each other as possible, so that people are forced to buy cars in order to commute between them.

The trickle-down second and third order effects of the above is that it detaches you completely from the true nature of the melting culture pot that is urban centers in America. Minorities’ incomes are rising faster than ever, and there are around 30-40% foreign-born residents in cities. The US cities are one of the few places in the world where you’re able to walk into a meeting with everyone who was born in vast-stretching corners of the globe who eventually made their way here. It’s one of the few places in the world with multiple ethnic restaurants offering wide ranges of fusion cuisine, frequented by people of all colors and backgrounds. Interacting, living, and co-existing with them opens up your worldview up in ways that you could never have expected.

And yet, you don’t quite get any of this in suburbia. You rarely interact with members of your own community. Most of the people who moved out there are of a very similar socio-economic background as yourself. You don’t get to experience the various facets of human life in quite the same way. And this is why I love the cities. This is why I love being able to stay out till midnight and still knowing the way home through the winding streets. This is why I love sleeping in on weekends and strolling out to my favorite coffeeshop on the street on foot. I love meeting people born in far off lands who are here to try something new or take a chance. I love not having to worry about parking or having my car towed and simply ride the subway everywhere. And it’s going to take a lot for me to give all that up.

The country hasn’t realized it yet, but the American Dream died in the 2008 recession. With college tuition inflating to enormous proportions, the student loan bubble about to burst at any moment now, automation disrupting every industry, the current government administration’s pathetic failure to take action on climate change, and increased globalization through emerging technologies, gone are the days of dreaming for a peaceful home on the outskirts of town. It’s a fast-paced, multi-faceted world that calls for actively keeping yourself informed and educated about everything that’s happening. And that’s not going to happen in your suburban backyard as you relax in the pool. Most citizens are catching on and moving to the cities, and I hope corporations takes notice and do something about the nightmare that is the American Scream.