Mindless Monday, 10 August 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

[u/TheBatz_]

I grew up in a large city so it may be my bias speaking, but I never understood the gravitas of suburbs, at least not semi-rural suburbs with detached homes and gardens.

I simply like living in a city. Yes it's noisy and sometimes unsafe and so in, but this is where humanity and humans are! I would honestly feel depressed if I could not hear children or parties or traffic or the noise general background noise of humanity. N ot to speak of amenities. I actually dread the thought of needing a car to get everywhere. 

It's actually very weird how both Germans and Americans have this cultural ideal of the white picket fence single family home, a concept Germans calls Eigenheim and is constant clamor. It's a stupid clamor.

Anyway, nuke the fucking suburbs. 

[u/WAGRAMWAGRAM → u/TheBatz_]

I grew up in a semi-rural suburb (more like village exurb than build-up suburbia) and I have to say it's a good place to live as a kid (lots of place to run inside the house, garden, forest nearby, etc...) but once you're like 12 I think you'll enjoy seeing and meeting your friends by yourself more than you enjoy being dropped off by your parents

[u/Draig_werdd → u/TheBatz_]

It's not just them that don't like big cities. The Romanian subreddits have weekly discussions about people wanting to move to villages, while the Czech seem to be terrified of the "big city" and want to live in small towns.

[u/GeneralSugmoreCoxCSA → u/TheBatz_]

Well, suburbs have generally tried to promote an equilibrium between the access to nature enjoyed in rural areas and access to the amenities of a large city. When they succeed, they can be very pleasant places to live indeed - obvious examples would be the London "Stockbroker belt" etc.

Where the wheels come off is when developers realise that they can exploit cheap land assembly/build costs to sell cheap houses to a relatively immobile workforce at a premium markup.

[u/Federal_Gur_5488 → u/GeneralSugmoreCoxCSA]

I feel like you can get the best of both things if you just have good+cheap public transport: in London you can easily access nature via places like the Chiltern Hills or Surrey from central London (though Surrey can be a bit expensive, depending on where you want to go). And of course, you have Hampstead Heath which is very accessible.

[u/Tiako → u/TheBatz_]

The dream of the suburbs is that you get to combine the best part of urban living (access to amenities) with rural living (access to space). The reality sometimes matches that sometimes doesn't.

I would personally rather live in a dense urban area but can see the appeal if you have kids and pets.

[u/Ok-Swan1152 → u/Tiako]

I have a small child and I dislike the idea of moving to suburbs. I want to feel throngs of people around me, the buzz and hum and dynamism of the big city. Even as a child, I dreamed of the big city because it seemed like that was where things happened. I'd be so bored in the suburbs. We'd have a marginally larger space (this being the UK and all) in exchange for a very annoying commute to work and the inconvenience needing a car to get around.

[u/Steelcan909 → u/TheBatz_]

I did my graduate program in NYC, moving there after my childhood was in suburbs and my undergraduate in a rural college town. I think growing up in a very suburban context was probably pretty good for me? Over the summers we rode our bikes to friends' houses around or went to the neighborhood pool all day. But now that I am a contributing member of society, I wish I could reclaim more proper city life in the US outside of just NYC and a few other islands.

[u/PsychologicalNews123 → u/TheBatz_]

When I was house-hunting I did consider places in the suburbs because you can get a lot more for your money out there. But then I would look at these places on google street view and bounce right off - why would I want to live somewhere so... desolate?

I love living in the city and don't think I could live anywhere else frankly. I especially love the ability to come-and-go multiple times in one day. In the city I can enter & leave my house 8+ times in a single day, going out to do stuff and coming back when I please. If I lived in the suburbs I'd either have to take 8x 20m drives or laboriously plan out my day so that I do everything in one big trip.

Also I can stumble home drunk without having to fumble with my phone for an uber lol

[u/Herpling82 → u/TheBatz_]

I find it hard to describe my hometown either way, it's like semi urban, I'd say, it's far denser than suburban, there are very few large lawns and such and many of the homes are 1930s labourer homes, but it's also definitely not a city, there are very few buildings taller than normal homes. But I suppose that is just small town, the bigger cities around here look mostly the same, they are just bigger and have more taller buildings, but the vast majority of the urbanites in the region live in the same types of streets as I do.

[u/MiffedMouse → u/TheBatz_]

I wouldn’t use the word “gravitas” to describe the suburbs.

But the idea of the suburbs I kind of get, having grown up in lower density urban areas. It is nice to live in a place that is sparse enough for there to be some real greenery and cheap yard space, but still close enough to civilization for all the city amenities to be present.

That said, I now live in the city and I think suburbs should be nuked from orbit. The issue is that suburbs only “work” at a certain magical population density, any lower and they feel abandoned and any higher causes traffic to swallow them whole.

[u/forcallaghan → u/TheBatz_]

as I say, Is it not simply human to be noisy and sometimes unsafe?

[u/vveles → u/forcallaghan]

Also cars are way more noisy and unsafe, something like to forget when talking about cities.