"Anything that's not ancient causes mental illness." ~The Conservative Wannabe.
Anything that separates humanity from their instinct causes some form of mental aberration. Whether these changes are negative is up to actual medical experts to figure out, hopefully without political and corporate interest groups fucking with the data.
In my humble opinion, Suburban and City existences are two ends of the extreme spectrum. In my personal opinion, both a good house out in the middle of nowhere, as long as you've got a family or friends, and a decent apartment that doesn't cost 5 million a day and requires you to work a job that drives you to eventual suicide, if such a place exists, or if you are just rich enough for it to not matter, these are both not what I'd consider extremes but actually pretty good for a modern person. Another such existence would actually be living like a nomad. Suburban living both cuts you off from other people despite it seeming counter to the point, drives conflict between neighbors more than it really should, and it shoulders a lot of debt on the home owner. There are also a lot of social constructs slapped on top of this reality that make living in an average neighborhood hell for anyone that doesn't fit the cookie cutter nature of them, bad for others, and only approaching good for people who actually like to live this way.
Details about what I find negative about the US suburban reality:
How you have to maintain plants, AKA how HOAs suck
HOAs exist. Sure, in some cases, they are necessary. If your local government doesn't actually maintain any part of the neighborhood for you. But even then, HOAs become controlled by the most narcissistic and antagonistic people living within the property limit.
Without HOAs, the regulations imposed by them over the decades of them being the norm have made neighborhoods useless for anyone who just needs the space. You're required to have a certain kind of plant in most of your yard - grass, grass that doesn't even exist within the nation most of the time, grass that requires constant water in a bulk of the US, grass that dies off for a major part of the year and just becomes an ugly joke. On top of this, you have to mow the plant to the point it is basically in a purgatorial state for most of it's life cycle, only being kept afloat by the additional expense and manpower required to fertilize it. But this doesn't even end up being enough if the weather gets bad enough in your area, and eventually you'll have to get it replanted anyway.
As for other plants and garden care, most neighborhoods still limit what you can have, how you can keep it, and even what you can place in your own yard that isn't alive and could never conceivably harm anyone or the environment. This ends up just being completely subjective to the will of your neighbors, the few that are allowed true control of the HOA, rather than anything that would actually benefit the individual.
The general physical set up
Modern neighborhoods in the US have kept with the completely car based reality of the past half century+. So this means, a whole lot of cement. Not only for the roads, but for your access to your own home. Due to the amount of traffic that these roads will get, they will break down. And that cost ends up going back to the home owners, in most situations. then there's the matter of the drive way, which will have most likely been built by the lowest bidder, and be arranged of god knows what and deteriorate maybe even faster than the roads used to traverse the plots. Additionally, neighborhoods, depending on the expense of them and who is going to be expected to live there, can have any manner of 'extra features' that again, most people living there won't give a shit about. This can include a massive area used just for a giant duck pond, and everything that needs to be maintained on that. Some neighborhoods go as far as to set up an entire park or path to travel, rather than a simple sidewalk. I find this better than the lazy nature of the former dated idea, but it still puts more cost back on the people that should be owning their own home rather than everything involved with it.
Lack of access to actual uncultivated nature
In most neighborhoods, your default existence and what you can see is
1. grass
2. cement
3. some trees
4. maybe some flowers that die in a year
This is a poor simulacra of what people easily had access to when most lived a rural life. The world is losing more and more nature. Why should we kill it off in our own backyards?
Without an overbearing HOA, you can turn a yard into a veritable paradise. But with the average rules and regulations they impose? Fuck you, you get turf. I don't doubt this is the main reason peoples issues develop more nowadays. But it isn't the only one.
The modern mental issue, how neighborhoods could cause them
I am no psychologist. I think it is a shitty, subjective science that in most cases is used to line people's pockets and by egotists to attempt to control people's minds. But the actual scientific psychs, the people actually trying to help anyone and not just trying to make themselves feel better, that is good. And I feel like I can say what I would think causes the issues that lead them into their arms. I've already discussed the general existence of the issues I believe connect, but here is the links.
No nature means less comfort. The natural state of all animals is at least having some access to external stimuli that is not artificial. This has been true for humanity if you weren't a high ranking politician, a king or a queen, or their servants, for millenia. And it was true for basically everyone until the last 100-160 years. For the majority of the world's population, 50-40. What I'd say less than a generation until cities truly started becoming megacities. As I said above, neighborhoods generally do not help cure this. You get access to some grass that you can maybe put some flowers on to bring in a few bugs. Maybe you'll see a pond frog that's managed to move a few hundred feet to you. But the more degraded the general environment around a neighborhood and inside it is, the less of this you get. And the more you just fall into the worst of society's artificial existence.
The physical build is another major point. Ignoring the lack of nature, the complete insulation of your reality you can have from when you're a kid can fuck with anyone. I'd argue it is helping breed a disconnect as large as the internet has, but probably less than the formation of shittier and shittier cities with entire apartments smaller than the average suburban living room. With the access to space and being able to conceivably live your entire life within four walls, there is no true reason to go out into the world. You can just get an online job, order things online, but even before this you could do it through phone for several years. Telegram services before that, even. You could get away with being a hermit for a bulk of the 20th century if you had a fortune to your name. The internet has allowed anyone to be.
I'm gonna stop here on this one for now. Might expand if someone asks.
How they change the entire general town or city around them
Neighborhoods are big. This is necessary by their nature. The homes are larger, they come with yards, it's more square feet they need the space. But they don't need everything else involved. Car less neighborhoods could exist for those that want them as we head into a future of more people actively exercising and using smaller transportation options, and as more people want what people used to have all over the world, walkability. But neighborhoods are designed with the car first, and everything else is secondary. Even expensive neighborhoods have shitty sidewalk arrangements. I have seen neighborhoods that even have shit jutting out into the sidewalk, not even making it comfortably possible for someone to walk the whole way around one. They also may or may not actually wrap around everything you should be able to walk to, that you can easily access with a vehicle. It's inefficient, it puts another expense first rather than the owner of property. The worst part though is that they have irrevocably shaped the nature of the land around them. From the car dependency of the neighborhood, we got strip malls, disconnected business districts, etc. But this is getting far from my main point, so let me wrap it back around and go to the positives. This will be shorter because I've already mentioned some of them here.
THE POSITIVES:
The space. while it is a negative in some ways, leading to the reshaping and practical absorption of entire cities, people NEED space. The human brain isn't wired like a rats or a snakes. We evolved from jungle animals that got into tribe wars if they got too close to each other, and we developed as hunter gatherers, into farmers. This is in our DNA. 100 years of living in closer and closer knit communities doesn't rewire thousands, millions of years of evolution and what made our minds tick. We also need access to nature. While yards aren't what I'd call 'nature', they are a cultivated form of it, and each yard, each neighborhood can be cultivated into it's own mini terrarium of sorts. You can get direct access to animal and plant life you wouldn't have ever known if you had lived your life in a shithole city block.
The (relative) freedom of property is a boon in the modern world heading towards a you will own nothing dystopia hellhole. This is where I understand the house = freedom, car = freedom mentality. Even if I think it breaks down in several areas.
I can expand on this, might if I feel like it.
TLDR neighborhoods not the worst, but almost as bad for the mind as the other extreme of ultradense hive hell.
C I T I E S: a new flop aka the negatives
Cities, on the otherhand, are far worse. I don't have a ton of direct experience with them, I would not wish it on my worst enemy, but everyone I know that actually lives in one wants out and the few that could get out moved into the wild. And I have had hands on experience traveling to them when I was younger, I've been to NY as one specific. Cities vary, they do, but these are generally true.
Lack of space
why the fuck does anyone live in a city that has the freedom to leave? I can understand stockholm mentality, but there are actually rich people that think cities are good. I guess they do get a lot more opportunities, but I know 1%ers who can't even afford a space larger than one room of an old house I lived. And these prices, and this continued compression of what the ideal living space in a city is continues to shrink as populations expand and prices soar. Being this far from having a decent amount of space, with your only possible access to nature without travel being cultivated parks with a few squirrels, it is hell. And you have to live in this with other people. Fuck me.
Lack of freedom
As almost the true opposite of suburban life, cities offer you few opportunities despite what they are advertised to be
, make you exist under debt you might never escape from, and so on. Plus you're gonna have to deal with the wealth of others slap you in the face more than if you scroll instagram. Cities in the US have almost reinvented ancient caste systems more than the whole society has shifted (and they've basically caused this regression). In places outside the US, this is far worse. I would choose to be jailed to NYC for the rest of my life if my only other choice was Seoul South Korea or Tokyo Japan.
Politics, politics, politics!
This one may be a doozy. I know, I am biased, I'm a general rightie, with some grab bag stuff that some consider left leaning. I hate the far left, if you cannot tell. But it should be blindingly obvious. And the same is true for cities. Their common trend to making everyone in them more and more left leaning is beyond insanity, and I would love to know if anyone actually has a direct idea what causes it. Is it the rat utopia living standard that most people face and the stockholm syndrome that this generates to thinking your pathetic existence washing dishes for a five star restaraunt you could never afford to eat at then going back to your bug infested bee hive of a 'home' to watch streaming movies the rest of your day is a good life? But it isn't just that they're left leaning. I can tell some of even the most echo chambered far lefties would prefer being stabbed for 200 years to living in NYC, but it seems the overwhelming attitude is quite the opposite. But then you realize a bulk of these people never leave their pods. They don't know anything outside of their Matrix life. They are a prime example of the Plato's fire hypothesis. They see nothing but the shadows on the wall, showing them what might be another life, but they warp it to mean whatever they want it to mean.
Infrastructure falling
Cities of the past at least had something to look forward to. Whether it was pretty architecture, nicer people, areas that you could actually *gasp* reasonably walk to without having a nonzero chance of being hit by a 2000 ton hunk of metal or lose yourself to the grid, modern cities pale to their grandure. Then something happened. Everything had to become a box, then everything had to become less. Cities grew while budgets shrank and everyones lives became worse. Now not even basic infrastructure can be kept up, while the general speed of building and repair has shrunk dramatically. When a bridge goes out, you're fucked if you travel from a part of a city to another, at all. If you live in Brooklyn and want to go to Manhattan to work, say hello to another hour plus of travel by car. And this is only going to get worse.
No way up?
As I see it now, and from the previously personal accounts from some well informed people, Louis Rossman on Youtube for one I can list, property prices will continue to rise like they do for everyone, but only way more dramatically. The average pleb will have no choice but watch the boot continue to crush them. Infrastructure budgets will only plummet, and there are less educated people to build them and fewer people who would ever want to repair them. Though this will continue to be an issue for all of the US and the west in general, cities will be hit the worst by this. And then they'll be taken advantage of by savvy businessmen and crooked politicians as they have for years and as they will continue to be if nobody does anything. I can see why depression and all of it's associates are rotting the heads off of people. And as more people get worse the more it will rub off on everyone else.
TLDR cities are hellscapes and suburbia is still better. The only positivity of their density is somewhat easier travel on foot to urban sprawl, but the negatives of increased crime and crime that will continue to increase, decay of all things concrete, mental degradation of citizens, loss of job opportunities, the existing cities will die and new ones will be born anew. Hopefully we can learn from the mistakes. We probably won't though.
If you actually read all this, thanks for listening to my autism. I am sure I have said some dumb shit, so correct me. Though even if you just read the TLDRs, respond to them.
