Will all this obsession with development blow up in our face? (high school, gated)

[ComfortablyNumb]

When did we learn to stop valuing, and enjoying, the world that is actually before us, and to instead get lost in abstract concepts of what can or will be?

The same people on this forum have been lost in the same excitement about new buildings, for year after year. As soon as one is erected, their excitement dies off and they need something else. People who grew up or live in cities which are good in their own regard, feel like unless their city has new sparkly buildings, they are like the kid showing up to school with thrift store clothes. Am I wrong with this perception?

I just know that things are so different now than when I was born ('85). When I was born, community still existed in some way, and people did not trouble themselves nearly as much with comparing city vs city. If they did, it was more in terms of how it could service their lives, and less in terms of some sort of abstract analysis that tries to end at some determination of which city is actually "better." They even break down into little scoring charts, and people, with a sort of frantic ego desperation, talk up the tiniest parts of their towns right to exist and to count.

I just ask because I think it goes in line with a greater problem within the American consciousness, which is an obsession with growth and progress, and a lack of attention to the static silence of the world before us, out of which we build the future that we call "growth."

Is the end-game literally to keep building and building, to make our cities bigger and bigger, until they take up the whole globe?

I don't know... in a weird mood today. Sorry if this just sounds like the psuedophilosophical musings of of a high school Green Day fan.

[11KAP]

They're just trying to make up for 50 years of dumb, basically segregated suburbanization.

[NoMoreSnowForMe]

Whoa, that was philosophical poetry at it's best.

CD is not the real world.

Things will always change. Growth can only happen insofar as there is demand.

Sometimes people get excited about a new building because they were working in the old one - with no air conditioning, lousy plumbing, etc., etc. Innovation and rebuilding can be a very good thing.

There are enough historians who protect our historical buildings and sites to take care of my worries on that front.

Just remember that every generation has pined for the "good old days."

Now for my own philosophical poetry: Nothing is constant except change.