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indoor americans
It’s summer. Thus, the annual pilgrimage of affluent Americans to formerly strong-dollar-friendly Mediterranean destinations begins. Per usual, this inspires elite handwringing over superior European public goods and health outcomes with clapbacks from the internet’s lumpencommentariat about 'europoors'. Mississippi, they insist, is wealthier than London: Europe’s richest city.
This year, Chris Arnade of The Free Press throws his hat into the ring: "What Makes Europe Better than America?" The topic is seasonally evergreen. It’s also irreducible.
Europeans look on in horror at our beige strip malls, while Americans are shocked to find out most of the continent lacks AC. Of what use is a great piazza if you can’t climate control your home? As Paul Skallas notes, the United States is an inside culture. Like de-clawed housecats, we are indoor Americans.
Or at least, most of us are…
The long march of automobiles, suburbia, and air conditioning into the plains, deserts, and the swamps as our population’s center of gravity has shifted south and west has created a lifestyle defined by hermetically-sealed bubbles: home to car to office.
White minimalist home interiors are symptomatic of this. Like a hospital, the hermetically sealed home is conspicuously clean, a blank slate. Any outside matter is revealed in contrast to the monochrome. "Shoes off!" There are no persianate patterns to hide what lurks on your soles. Private security patrols in Brentwood bark at you to "Put that cigarette out!" even though you are on a public sidewalk. A gust of wind might blow the noxious pollutant over the hedges and into someone’s home!
COVID-19 supercharged the shift.
Indoor Americans formed pods. They enthusiastically embraced work-from-home, constructing multiscreen rigs for video conferencing, emailing, deck editing, crypto trading, and perhaps, some after-hours, gaming. Amazon Prime, DoorDash, and Instacart obsolesced retail, restaurants, and grocery stores while the ever-expanding cluster of streaming platforms destroyed the theatres. The phenomenon of bed rot became the great challenge of contemporary life. The masturbatory goon cave removed half of all American men from the dating pool. Alcohol consumption has tanked. Weed consumption is surging.
The indoor American is optimizing for isolation.
Even when outdoors, the iPhone’s most prominent use case, as a device of soothing partial distraction keeps the indoor American in a state of interiority. Noise cancelling headphones, compulsive scrolling, entertainment autoplay dull the senses to the outside world and keep the user focused on the screen, the same focal point around which they organize their homes and offices.
Of course there are, as the above post notes, two or three truly urban cities. If we use car ownership as a proxy for urban-ness, there are only three where more than a third of residents (roughly) do not own a car: New York, Boston, and DC. If we look at public transit usage to commute to work, maybe San Francisco and Chicago enter the mix.
Reality in America is chunky though—
Outdoor Americans form a distinct and influential minority across the country.
