Letters to the Editor
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They bought the house "late last year"!?!?
Oh, for Christ's sake. This is first-time homebuyer's anxiety. I experienced it myself, and I've seen it several times in other people. If the house wasn't new, he'd be agonizing over his purchase because of cracks in the plaster and when to repoint the chimney. Furthermore, unless you are one of those "arrive and conquer" types, it takes well over a year, and more like 2 or 3, to get comfortable in a new community (geographical or social) and make your place there. The LW is mistaking perfectly understandable and temporary discomfort in his new and unfamiliar surroundings with a life crisis.
As for career choice, if his soul was being crushed at his job, he'd know it, and he'd have said so in his letter. I say this speaking as a restless jobhopping contractor who is now 17 months into her first permanent (unglamorous, but satisfying) job in 11 years.
I also notice he doesn't talk about his neighbors or a social life at all when he talks about his unhappiness. If "hell is other people", find different people. (LWs to Cary who have this sort of problem never seem mention social or artistic communities when they talk about their lives.) Again, it can take like two years to build a new social or extracurricular life from scratch. If he wants drama, he can join a community theatre. (If he wants a lot of drama, he can serve on the board.) If he wants meaning, he can volunteer someplace, or find a church. If he wants growth, he can take a class or music lessons, or, as someone else much much earlier said, he can have a garden. If he wants to make a difference, he can get involved in local politics. In the meantime he and his wife can take advantage of being kid-less by exploring what their new community has to offer on their own terms in their own schedule. Music festivals, local fairs, coffee houses, historical sites, nature centers, small town centers, cultural offerings at the local community college or satellite campus--I cannot believe that his surroundings are as stultifying as he makes out.
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I think you picked the wrong kind of 'burb
I'm just fine with suburbs that have character, the kind where all the houses look different to each other. But I react the same way you do to those places where every house is one of 4 models and a little wall around the block complete with home owners association. Stifling and isolating as hell. Short answer is, move to a less ritzy suburb, they won't give you such heebee jeebees. The cost difference will probably make up for the $50k too.
But I don't think moving back to the condo area is really an option. Life is choices dude. Every choice has pros and cons and you can't resent the fact that the cons will still be there to be dealt with once you've picked which choice to go with. You moved for a reason, if you go back you'll probably have that feeling of living in the past, of picking up the confetti while everyone else left the party to grow up and live in the burbs. It won't be the same. Its just time to stop resenting the facts.
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save the environment and flee
There are good reasons not to live in a McMansion in the suburbs. For one thing you use a lot more of the world's natural resources heating and furnishing a big house and buying lawnmowers and pool supplies. I guess it's nice to wander from room to room. Still big houses are wasteful unless they are filled with people. I raised my kids in a small apartment in Manhattan. They went to superb public schools (nothing wrong with Bronx Science.) My kids' friends were a diverse bunch. I didn't have to worry about them driving around the suburbs with drunken teenaged drivers..they took the subway. We never had or needed a car. We lived briefly in the suburbs..when they were little. I fled and am glad I did. I never once heard a kid complain that there was nothing to do. Flee.
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gardening and grown ups
Three points from these letters - It's really offensive for pro-suburbs people to tell those who don't like that lifestyle to "grow up". Growing up does not mean you have to live in the suburbs. That kind of thinking - that your suburban lifestyle is the ONLY choice for a real grownup, is exactly the kind of small-mindedness that is probably stultifying the letter writer. There are all kinds of lifestyles - the LW chose one that is not for him, and is trying to deal with it. To say that to be a proper adult you must live in the suburbs is absurd. I also hear proponents of suburban life calling people who hate the suburbs "smug". Smug to me is thinking that your lifestyle choices are the only valid ones for a real adult.
Second, WHY do you have to live in the suburbs if you have kids? Millions of kids grow up in New York City, and become much more well-rounded citizens of the world because of it. You don't HAVE to live in the suburbs if you have kids. You just don't.
Finally, if one more suburban letter writer mentions gardening, I'll choke on my organic soy latte. Gardening gardening gardening! That's the mantra. Not everyone enjoys gardening, and yet, "kids and gardening" are the 2 positive points of the suburbs that so many letter writers cited.
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Be an alien
I live there, too. I also feel like a foreigner here. But I read an article by a British guy who was living in the burbs for the first time. He was seeing it from the outside and viewed it as a new idea about how we live in a clean and enviable private environment but with other people living their private lives just a few feet away. Joseph Campbell described it as living the myth of the little king. It's all right living here with new eyes, at least for now.
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WTF, Cary?
Have you run out of LW's with real problems? "My house is too big! I make too much money!" Fuck off.