The Washington Post profiles Virginia suburbanites who, fed up with the upkeep needed to maintain their lifestyles--and by extension, suburbia itself--are clamoring for simpler lives:
Jennifer McNelley's life felt like one big errand -- an endless series of Target runs and school drop-offs and commuting to two jobs from her Loudoun County home....
"That's how I feel . . . like we're squeezing in everything," said McNelley, 33. "My daughter has cried about it. She feels like we're always rushing. She asked me the other day, 'Mom, how come you never laugh anymore?' All I can think about is what needs to get done, laundry and everything else. It's affecting us hugely."
Turns out, many of McNelley's Ashburn neighbors were struggling with the same question: Is there a way, a slower way, to eke out more meaning in one's daily life? Now, they are all letting go of something so they can do more things that really matter.
The attendant pressures of life in suburbia--financial success, material comfort, the well-being of children--are compounded by the parameters of the built environment itself: the importance of mowing the lawn; the difficulty of driving everywhere (and arriving on time); the feeling of isolation in a privatized landscape. It's an indictment of suburbia itself, wrought in spiritual terms. McNelley turned to her church for answers:
It's not just suburban life that can leave people feeling like each day brings more of the same: commuting, work, errands, chores, pressure to pay the bills. The quest for more and bigger can breed isolation and stress, leaving some in the region to question their lifestyles.
David L. Goetz -- whose book "Death by Suburb: How to Keep the Suburbs from Killing Your Soul" inspired the discussions McNelley attended -- said such searching is universal.
"The struggle is: How do you view the world in a deeper, more mystical way when you're living in an environment that sucks you in with more shallow goals -- bigger house, better body, perfect kids?" he said.
In a broader sense, Goetz's question seems to be: how do people transcend their surroundings? The discussion evokes classic images of suburbia-as-prison (Stepford Wives, American Beauty), made all the more ironic due to the underlying idea that suburbia would liberate (Levittown), or attune us to the earth's rhythms (an idea that stretches from Hampstead Garden Suburb to Broadacre City). It recalls the moment near the end of the recent documentary Jesus Camp where one of the film's central figures (the organizer of the camp in question), gesturing to the suburban commercial strip outside the car she is driving, states that while she likes the environment we've constructed for ourselves here on Earth, she would not hesitate to destroy it in order to get to (her conception of) Heaven.
It's kind of amazing how we can "read" the built environment, isn't it? Is it what's really to blame for our malaises, or is it just what's most convenient and visible? How much does architecture really prescribe behaviors and emotions, anyway? Alain de Botton, for example, would say a lot.
Wholly unrelated, though in line with being alienated from one's surroundings: I'll be on vacation for the next couple of weeks before moving to a new city, and so Brand Avenue will take a mini-rest too. Cheers!
Would it be crass to point out that if a family is well-off enough to live in a suburban subdevelopment on a single income (presumably, if what's keeping Mom busy is going to Tar-jay rather than working night shift at the local ER), then that family probably also has the option to NOT live in soul-crushing suburbia; or that if they did find their souls in such danger from the pointless people and things they surrounded themselves with, they might try getting some different friends and hobbies? After all, mobility is the privelege of the middle classes.
Just a thought.
Posted by: Joolya | 08/31/2007 at 22:39
Not at all crass! An excellent point.
Posted by: Chris | 09/03/2007 at 20:01