Culture

"America is mostly parking lots, squat concrete strip malls, storm water retention ponds, refineries, chain link fences, and tract homes made of plastic siding... This is what America is actually like. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Look out your window. Take a drive down to your local big box store. Walk around your neighborhood. This is reality."

— Source: Granola Shotgun

The gap between how we imagine our culture and its physical reality reveals much about our values and priorities.

"Americans tend to put our careers first and move around the country... My parents tried to form a community where they lived, but they didn't really have one. Not one that lasted."

— Jonathan Tjarks

Our culture's emphasis on career mobility and individualism often comes at the cost of lasting community bonds. The myth of easy friendship and portable community falls apart when tested by real crisis.

Modern Parenting & Technology

Our society tends to crank up the volume on childhood, blasting children with noise and stimulation every moment of the day. How can a person ever have any fresh or interesting ideas if they never experience silence?

"Screens are experience blockers... what they're actually doing is protecting the child from the more boring bits of life itself, which seems like a short-sighted decision. Kids are far more adaptable than we often give them credit for, and if you set an expectation for how we want them to move through the world, they will rise to it."

The way we handle technology with children reflects deeper cultural assumptions about comfort, convenience, and what constitutes good parenting.

"I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom."

— Umberto Eco

The most important lessons often come not from structured teaching moments but from the ambient culture we create around our children.

"The lie that society tells us is that our friends can be our family. That's the premise of TV shows like Friends, Seinfeld, and How I Met Your Mother... But life is more like what happened to the actual actors on Friends. Their TV reunion was the first time all six had been together in years."

— Jonathan Tjarks

Entertainment media sells us a fantasy of effortless, lasting friendship that rarely matches reality. Our cultural narratives often fail to acknowledge the hard work required to build and maintain real community.

"By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent."

— William B. Irvine

Our culture's avoidance of impermanence and mortality often prevents us from fully appreciating the present moment.

"Despite these many hours in the car, we have never used screens to entertain our kids... A lack of stimulation can also lead to sleep. I've heard parents complain that their children never sleep in the car, but if you give them a tablet and headphones, what do you expect?"

Modern parenting often prioritizes immediate comfort and convenience over opportunities for growth, reflection, and natural rhythms.

"Not staring at a screen allows a kid to orient themselves in the world, and that is a critical skill we're losing these days. My kids all know how to drive across Ontario to their grandparents' house because they've been alert for every kilometre travelled."

The loss of direct experience and environmental awareness is a hidden cost of our screen-mediated culture.

Cultural Outliers and Market Signals

"Using data from multiple sources, we have shown that the phenomenon of harbingers is surprisingly widespread... Households in these zip codes are more likely than households in other zip codes to purchase new products that fail. Their adoption of a new product is a signal that the new product will fail."

— Source: Harbinger of Doom

Some communities consistently adopt products and trends that fail to gain wider acceptance. These "harbinger zip codes" demonstrate how certain cultural groups can reliably predict market failures through their preferences, suggesting that some segments of society consistently misalign with mainstream tastes and values.

This phenomenon raises interesting questions about cultural alignment and the relationship between early adopters and market success. What might appear as forward-thinking could actually be a reliable signal of impending failure.