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!
Why were you and your buddy in the shower together though?
Mind ur business pal
To save water, of course.
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…
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.
DC got that jumbo slice
DC is gorgeous and so walkable/bike-friendly. Amazing food, people are nice, architecture is great. How could anyone dismiss DC?
“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’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
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.
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.
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
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!
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That’s also a really good point. I wonder how different suburb to suburb are
I think you’d be surprised about how much of a cultural difference there is in NJ in itself
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
It’s pork roll.
Why would this be surprising?
You can get wildly different cultures between neighbors living on the same street in the same town.
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
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.
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