It feels good to be validated by someone who's been here so long! Hopefully we can move a little further south in the next couple years or so, just out of reach of the sprawl.
I wish you luck! I’m up here in the thick of the sprawl, in alexandria.
Also— I’ve been enjoying your writing. I don’t have much time to read on here but I’ve noticed that you are reliably posting well-written and perceptive essays. I hope other people are reading your stuff.
Thank you so much! That's so nice to hear. I just passed 200 subscribers, which is not very many in the grand scheme of things, but it's tons for me and what I expected when I got here 😄
I bet I would've liked living in Alexandria better if Covid wasn't overlapping our time there, just for the closer proximity to "DC stuff" like the museums. We had so many plans that promptly got eaten by Covid and spent the next several months stuck in our tiny apartment. That made us look for a house. Since we couldn't afford Alexandria without sharing walls with someone, we wound up down here in the southernmost still-commutable part of the metro (assuming no one sneezed wrong on 95 that day, anyway).
Yes, alexandria is better as a location than as a place, I find. You got burned if you were here during Covid; the museums and restaurants and various other things are wonderful and alexandria is a convenient location to get to all that stuff. But the convenience of the location is what leads to the conformity habit, the stuff you wrote about where people living here expect a certain type of personality and behavior and anything that smacks of bohemianism gets you what I call the “pinched face” look. A creepy related detail— Alexandria was where a lot of January 6 “out-of-towners” stayed when they came to town to beat up cops.
Ahh the security clearance people who have to leave the room if weed is even under discussion😂. Great take on what happens to a region when it over samples a few specific personality types.
If only the influence of these dweebs was confined to a specific region. These are the foot soldiers of American Empire, so their weird hang ups and paranoia impacts the entire world.
I was there, and honestly feel the same way about Norfolk/VA Beach to a similar degree (but they have some small charm when you aren't in the shopping suburbs)
Was a huge culture shock to me after spending my years in Montana, Oregon and the Adirondacks, where my contempt of normies reached zenith and fully metastisized
Those from the interior and rural areas were fun and I enjoyed their company but the blatant materialism, conformity and superficiality of the suburbanites still imprints up on me to this day
I moved to NOVA in early 2020, right before the pandemic.
We came from Baltimore, which is about one of the worst places on the planet. NOVA was the nicest area we could move to without my wife giving up a very good career.
I regret it.
Before 2020, I didn't think politics/culture mattered too much. NOVA just seemed like a nice UMC area that was run really well, the opposite of Baltimore. I was also intrigued by the high fertility rate.
After COVID, the archetype of NOVA went insane.
I still like the place in a lot of ways. It hasn't been an unpleasant time. But I think it's already peaked. We are thinking of moving to Florida in the next few years.
I was a military brat who went to HS in Stafford after spending the bulk of my childhood in Hampton Roads (and a few other base towns). You summed it up well. Now I live in a much more charming corner of the state.
There are so many charming corners of the state, I'm discovering. I try to at least find a new random town to go camping in once a year or so, and when my mom comes to visit, we usually pick one at random to check out overnight. I like RoVA!
I grew up in NoVA. I knew I was missing something, but didn’t know what until I left. After moving to Charlottesville, London, San Diego, NYC, Sydney, Boston, Richmond….I can honestly say that NoVA is among the most suffocatingly bland places in the world. It’s a vast bedroom community for DC. And I think you accurately described the primary reason: the major employer base (federal gov’t and its parasites), which rotates frequently and solves for highly educated, innocuous people.
My grandma lived in one of the DC-surrounding suburbs, though in Maryland, so I spent a week or two there every summer, growing up. I was never able to pin-point or characterize it as having any particular culture at all, so this does a good job of describing it. I don't really think of anything when I think of that area, other than the smell of the summer humidity and the deafening and constant roar of the cicadas (which I bet you don't even hear, since they never stop). Oh, and also The Awakening statue of the giant man in the ground, which was always my favorite thing about DC, but apparently they moved it to a much less cool location.
This does also explain why when I went there a dozen years ago and opened my dating app, there was a never-ending parade of attractive, professional, single, impressive and put-together but bland young men with good jobs. I was used to guys like that being a tiny minority on dating apps wherever I went, and had never seen so many sort of "mom friendly" guys in one place before. Honestly the ratio freaked me out, so I never tried to match or talk to any of them while I was there.
The cicada thing, for real! Nighttime is so NOISY.
It's so funny what you say about the app guys. Since my husband and I moved here together, I haven't had the displeasure of trying to date out here, but I always thought to myself that I was glad I didn't move out here alone, because we've been here awhile and I have yet to meet a single dude that I would have been interested in dating if I were single. The NoVA guys are so dull, and the more country ones from further south are just kinda... dumb, lol.
I’ve lived here for fifty years, and I agree with everything you’ve said in this well-written piece. It’s a very conformist area, in my opinion.
It feels good to be validated by someone who's been here so long! Hopefully we can move a little further south in the next couple years or so, just out of reach of the sprawl.
I wish you luck! I’m up here in the thick of the sprawl, in alexandria.
Also— I’ve been enjoying your writing. I don’t have much time to read on here but I’ve noticed that you are reliably posting well-written and perceptive essays. I hope other people are reading your stuff.
Thank you so much! That's so nice to hear. I just passed 200 subscribers, which is not very many in the grand scheme of things, but it's tons for me and what I expected when I got here 😄
I bet I would've liked living in Alexandria better if Covid wasn't overlapping our time there, just for the closer proximity to "DC stuff" like the museums. We had so many plans that promptly got eaten by Covid and spent the next several months stuck in our tiny apartment. That made us look for a house. Since we couldn't afford Alexandria without sharing walls with someone, we wound up down here in the southernmost still-commutable part of the metro (assuming no one sneezed wrong on 95 that day, anyway).
Yes, alexandria is better as a location than as a place, I find. You got burned if you were here during Covid; the museums and restaurants and various other things are wonderful and alexandria is a convenient location to get to all that stuff. But the convenience of the location is what leads to the conformity habit, the stuff you wrote about where people living here expect a certain type of personality and behavior and anything that smacks of bohemianism gets you what I call the “pinched face” look. A creepy related detail— Alexandria was where a lot of January 6 “out-of-towners” stayed when they came to town to beat up cops.
Ahh the security clearance people who have to leave the room if weed is even under discussion😂. Great take on what happens to a region when it over samples a few specific personality types.
And it happened so often, too! I was so not prepared for that level of paranoia about weed of all things, lol.
If only the influence of these dweebs was confined to a specific region. These are the foot soldiers of American Empire, so their weird hang ups and paranoia impacts the entire world.
All of this is true
I was there, and honestly feel the same way about Norfolk/VA Beach to a similar degree (but they have some small charm when you aren't in the shopping suburbs)
Was a huge culture shock to me after spending my years in Montana, Oregon and the Adirondacks, where my contempt of normies reached zenith and fully metastisized
Those from the interior and rural areas were fun and I enjoyed their company but the blatant materialism, conformity and superficiality of the suburbanites still imprints up on me to this day
I moved to NOVA in early 2020, right before the pandemic.
We came from Baltimore, which is about one of the worst places on the planet. NOVA was the nicest area we could move to without my wife giving up a very good career.
I regret it.
Before 2020, I didn't think politics/culture mattered too much. NOVA just seemed like a nice UMC area that was run really well, the opposite of Baltimore. I was also intrigued by the high fertility rate.
After COVID, the archetype of NOVA went insane.
I still like the place in a lot of ways. It hasn't been an unpleasant time. But I think it's already peaked. We are thinking of moving to Florida in the next few years.
I was a military brat who went to HS in Stafford after spending the bulk of my childhood in Hampton Roads (and a few other base towns). You summed it up well. Now I live in a much more charming corner of the state.
There are so many charming corners of the state, I'm discovering. I try to at least find a new random town to go camping in once a year or so, and when my mom comes to visit, we usually pick one at random to check out overnight. I like RoVA!
I grew up in NoVA. I knew I was missing something, but didn’t know what until I left. After moving to Charlottesville, London, San Diego, NYC, Sydney, Boston, Richmond….I can honestly say that NoVA is among the most suffocatingly bland places in the world. It’s a vast bedroom community for DC. And I think you accurately described the primary reason: the major employer base (federal gov’t and its parasites), which rotates frequently and solves for highly educated, innocuous people.
"Federal government and its parasites" is a much more succinct way to put it 😄
My grandma lived in one of the DC-surrounding suburbs, though in Maryland, so I spent a week or two there every summer, growing up. I was never able to pin-point or characterize it as having any particular culture at all, so this does a good job of describing it. I don't really think of anything when I think of that area, other than the smell of the summer humidity and the deafening and constant roar of the cicadas (which I bet you don't even hear, since they never stop). Oh, and also The Awakening statue of the giant man in the ground, which was always my favorite thing about DC, but apparently they moved it to a much less cool location.
This does also explain why when I went there a dozen years ago and opened my dating app, there was a never-ending parade of attractive, professional, single, impressive and put-together but bland young men with good jobs. I was used to guys like that being a tiny minority on dating apps wherever I went, and had never seen so many sort of "mom friendly" guys in one place before. Honestly the ratio freaked me out, so I never tried to match or talk to any of them while I was there.
The cicada thing, for real! Nighttime is so NOISY.
It's so funny what you say about the app guys. Since my husband and I moved here together, I haven't had the displeasure of trying to date out here, but I always thought to myself that I was glad I didn't move out here alone, because we've been here awhile and I have yet to meet a single dude that I would have been interested in dating if I were single. The NoVA guys are so dull, and the more country ones from further south are just kinda... dumb, lol.
Do you know what western Nebraskans call Omaha people?
I sure don't! Please enlighten me.