A recent trend online involves social media accounts giving aimless, despairing men advice on how to find the American Dream.
What’s noteworthy about this new brand of advice is that it urges Millennial and Gen Z males to leave the cities and venture into the heartland in search of the now-elusive middle class living and sane, attractive mate. In short, men are now advised to take the small town pill.
Perhaps even more extraordinary, this seemingly benign advice has been met with massive backlash from the young men it was meant to help.
Related: The Pharmacopeia
Maybe telling young men to take a four to eight week leave of absence and wander the land like Kane from Kung Fu is open to reasonable criticism. But what of the larger point? Is hope to be found outisde America’s urban hives?
Has the time come for Millennials and Zoomers to take the small town pill?
The original poster of the screencap above detailed his own small town odyssey, summing it up as: “Insular, suspicious locals will shun you, and rural Boomers will see you as economic and romantic compettition.”
And, oh yeah, all the methheads.
Can’t forget the methheads.
This topic hit home for me because just last week, I went on a trip to a small town in the heart of Flyover Country. The week I spent there gave me quite a culture shock.
Here are the general takeaways from my small town experience:
- People were friendlier in general
- service at almost every business was far better
- ditto the food at pretty much every restaurant, including big chains
- there was much less diversity
That last point lends support to observations we’ve made here about the decline of the American mall. The next town over—which was far larger—had a mall that was thriving by the standards of my struggling local Mammon temple.
Related: The Idea of a Mall
But yes, the town that hosted a flourishing mall and restaurants was also infested with methheads. Which goes to show there’s no earthly utopia.
And being a college town, the gentrified neighborhood around campus had its share of rainbow-haired Cultists and foreign oddballs.
The gist of the milieu dawned on me when I saw that some local girl had pressed her handprints, along with her name and the date, into the sidewalk in front of the local Godfathers Pizza. My hometown once had Godfathers with cozy ambience and a respectable arcade that made it a prime teen hangout back in the day. But ill-conceived renovations done in 1997 precipitated the store’s demise.
Guess what date was written in the concrete outside that small-town Godfathers.
Related: Ground Zero
The presence of thriving businesses that had folded in my town around the turn of the millennium, the 80s rock pumped over most of their sound systems, and the fateful year 1997 etched into the landscape itself …
All of those elements combined to form a place frozen in time right at Cultural Ground Zero.
So if you want the next best thing to a time machine, hop in the car and melt into rural America for a while.
But even when you take the small town pill, it’s hard not to catch glimpses of the incoming shockwave on the horizon.
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