Buddy of mine and I were chatting on Discord and we ended up having a conversation about this topic.
Namely imagine you just put two people in a room. One from New Jersey and one from LA and observe
Wild how different cultures can be even inside a country.
What do y’all think? Is it due to the size of the US (geographically)?
Like most things there is a book that looks into this. Take a gander at the Wikipedia if your interested (the author argued that there are 11 ‘nations’ in the US). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Nations
Ur fuckin awesome for this thanks for the share!
Living in the Washington, DC area, it was always frustrating how outsiders would treat us like our city was exactly the same in makeup, attitude, and general culture as New York City, and would then judge our stuff based on that. First, no, New York City is not like DC. Second, no, the main difference between New York City and DC isn’t that DC is a bunch of government drones. There are other jobs. It’s a whole ass city? It has local economies, artists, food places, software firms, everything you’d expect. Third, New York City pizza isn’t good. Stop acting like because a pizza deviates from that standard, it means the pizza is bad. AND I KNOW WHAT I SAID, FITE ME. Finally, we don’t have a subway. We have a metro rail. And it’s well laid out and easy to navigate, and when you reach your station stop it’s easy to get a bus for the final leg of your journey. It’s a superior metro scheme because the trains can operate at 60 mph, whereas the top speed for the subway where the trains must act both in place of the trains and the buses is 40mph.
Now to wait for the angry hate comments to come in…
reading through the comment and nodding along peacefully… Then we get to the pizza comment…
DC is gorgeous and so walkable/bike-friendly. Amazing food, people are nice, architecture is great. How could anyone dismiss DC?
Not to mention that I don’t feel like I’m going to get hepatitis by sitting on the DC metro seats. The new cars are very nice honestly. New York’s subway is a disgrace and absolutely disgusting.
Oh and the pizza comment is on point. My all time favorite is in 1) Virginia (I can still taste it) and 2) Colorado (place is sadly closed). Neither were your typical this is a pizza pizzas. One is owned by a Greek family and the other was the finest brick oven pizza ever.
Whats the spot in Virginia called?
George’s Pizza
Oh nice ill definitely have to try it next time Im down there. Thanks!
I was in DC for a week back in 2017. Stayed in a suburban kind of area a bit outside the city center. It was super easy to get to from point A to B via the metro. Will visit again one day.
DC got that jumbo slice
You sold it to me, seems a very nice city, might visit one day
You sound like you’re from Chicago. “DC is a real city guys! It’s just as real a city as any other city!”
“Come for the national mall. Stay because you got a job and you never actually made it out to the national mall. You were too busy. Its fine. You’ll make it next year for the cherry blossum festival, or the kite festival, something, definitely”
Why were you and your buddy in the shower together though?
Mind ur business pal
To save water, of course.
You don’t shower with your discord homies?
I mean, I DO, I didn’t know everyone else did too.
It’s not gay if you say “no homo” after softly caressing the homies
Born in the south and moved to Philadelphia in my early twenties. It was more culture shock than some other countries I’ve been to. Folks in Philly don’t hold back. If they don’t like you they tell you, to your face. They also don’t feel the need to add all the extra and often unnecessary pleasantries to every social interaction. Honestly for a “well mannered” southern kid it was pretty liberating to get to drop all that.
Growing up in the South is learning to be mean by way of looking nice.
Bless your heart!
Proudly have never had that said to me lol
That’s a really good way to put it that I’ve never heard before.
It took me a while to figure out. Like I knew Southerners can be mean and judgy, but I didn’t think about how until I traveled to other places and saw how much more straightforward people are. It’s nice when kindness is kindness and there’s no underlying meaning.
I can never tell when people are doing this, and it’s really confusing to me. I wish more people would just say things outright!
It’s a subtly, yeah. There’s a lot of reading between the lines along, which is annoying if you’re not used to it.
One big difference I’ve noticed: Well mannered Northerners do not often say Ma’am or Sir, unless they’re being snarky or work in the hospitality or food service industry (and even there it’snot all the time). I have rarely met a Northern child that ends a sentence addressed to an adult with Ma’am or Sir… It sounds almost sarcastic from a Northernkid because it is hardly heard… Or indicates a very strict upbringing. They are way more likely to call an adult by their first name, even. If a Southern kid tried that, whew. I’ve known some Southern children, teenage and adult, who always address their parents as Ma’am or Sir.
As you mentioned, there’s no direct insulting to the face, at least none that I’ve encountered. But there sure are a lot of faux kind comments like “Bless his heart.”
ETA: I edited this comment a bit upon reflection.
“even” you say. I live in a not small but not that kind of a big country and you get out of the coastal cities and you end up in whole another culture. I don’t know the exact reasons but where sea exists, I feel home. 150-200 kilometers outside is completely different. I guess in my country, where people originally came from has to do with this topic. Coastal areas generally has people from Europe, other areas from Eastern countries, etc.
Damn that’s another really good point I hadn’t thought about. I wonder if bordering areas of countries (with land masses on the other side instead of an ocean or sea) also have pretty significant cultural differences compared to more inland areas
I think you’d be surprised about how much of a cultural difference there is in NJ in itself
It’s pork roll.
Culture and societal constructs are wild. I always just chalked those words up to buzz words used by progressives but the more i learn about them and the more I think about em the more flimsy and random everything seems to be
Neat stuff - don’t recommend if you have disassociation problems
Almost like progressives have a point about stuff lol
(I’m a progressive - just to be clear it wasn’t a jab)
Ohh, got it!
I’m from a European country and you can drive 30 miles in the same country but there’s already another language or different dialect that you hardly can communicate and they have 1000years old traditions and celebrations totally different from your own area
The depth of culture is so neat
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That’s also a really good point. I wonder how different suburb to suburb are
Completely agree. I grew up in the Dallas area and spent 3 years in Colorado Springs. The “coffee culture” of the area was shocking to me. I had a roommate sit me down and tell me I needed to stop wearing camo pants because it looked ridiculous, while it was fairly common back home. There’s so many little things that are different that you don’t realize until you’re in it.
I’m with your friend there, wearing camo is weird, unless you’re trying to hide in some snow/shrubbery/desert.
Anything can be camo if you try hard enough
When I wear camo pants my husband asks me where my legs are.
Camo clothing is associated with hunting and slaughtering wild animals for sport, and bootlicking military cosplay. it doesn’t fly well outside the South.
Yep. Colorado Springs is the start of the American west culture. Texas is the end of the south.
If camo pants are good enough for ole Stone Cold, they are good enough for you. Be yourself.
That was my take as well!
Yeah screw the haters. Wear full on camo and they won’t even be able to see you anyway.
I saw a thing with Hugh Laurie not too long ago and he said something like, “America is too big to even know itself. Someone in Georgia has no idea about the day to day life of someone in Oregon.”
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.
Im obsessed with that idea 💡
Can you imagine if humanity was indeed planted by alien drones and cultivated to evolve via early adoption of morals via religion? There would be thousands of other humanities on different planets
Idk information theory overall is neat. All these patterns we love to fall into haha
Why would this be surprising?
You can get wildly different cultures between neighbors living on the same street in the same town.
My memory of foreigners on Reddit are that they all believed the US is just a big Texas and everyone has the same opinions about everything.
I don’t know about that, but few foreigner understand that the US is more diverse than just about any continent. Demographically, politically, geographically. Only some pockets of the US get any press, so I could see why some think there is only California tech bros, Texan oil men and Florida druggies.
That’s an interesting point but I’d say that most of the time, people in a neighborhood who have been living there at least for a couple generations are likely to be pretty similar as opposed to east vs west coast
Also because sometimes people don’t have the same perspectives as each other or knowledge and thus can be surprised when you are not
*in America
I’m gonna make the argument that cultures between the us and other countries are also massively different in a lot of ways :)
As an outsider, the us just seems like a different version of europe, culturally
I think there are some easy social cognates for sure but I think there are also lots of differences in attitudes and speaking styles. Social expectations, public considerations, govt expectations, etc etc
Someone from the UK I once knew told me this:
I woke up in my quite used to be a farm town exoburb, went to the shuttle to JFK through Manhattan, got on a flight to New Orleans, drove two hours to go visit my swamp living inlaws. So I am sitting on their boat and it just occurs to me that this is all one country.
It sometimes gives me mild existential dread thinking about how you can never really know that many places. I live in New York City and in 15 years I still feel like I barely know the surface. If I wanted to know Chicago or DC or Houston or Portland, what chance do I have? What can you learn in a week or a month? And even if I moved there now I’d never know what it was like as a kid, a teenager, a young adult. I doubt I could really know each of their subcultures, too.
I think the differences between a wealthier, urban individual from different parts of North America (ie LA/SF vs NYC or Chicago) are smaller than the differences between someone who lives a rural life in California or Oregon vs someone who lives in upstate New York or rural Pennsylvania.
While there are definitely cultural differences related to the history of an area and the peoples who occupied it, money and privilege that come with an urban life tend to blur those lines a bit more.
Another interesting point!
I suppose it sorta makes sense - perhaps the rich/well off people all chase the same wagons around?
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