On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

What a bunch of self-aggrandizing drivel.

> ...humility is one of those words, like authenticity or (lately) resistance, that serves mainly to advertise the absence of the thing named...

Humility is having a realistic view of your own abilities and worth while being OK with it. It's not a vacuum of self-worth or something. We have other words for that.

To illustrate, it's not humble for LeBron James to say he's bad at basketball. It would be humble for him to claim his ability while internalizing his limitations, both on the court and off.

So, to bring this back to Midwesterners, a Midwestern might say, "Yeah, I'm a great programmer, but it's not like I'm going to change the world through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility. Pass the green bean casserole, please."

Speaking also as a Midwesterner, I would disagree. I was born and raised in Michigan, and have not really left much other than to couch hop and envy the lives of my friends who've moved out to the coast. I feel that the contempt the author descends into is self-inflicted, and may representative of the culture and authors midwestern upbringing. From what I've observed, midwesterners are brutally humble, almost to a fault, probably stemming from the deeply rooted conservative values. Being midwestern, to me, is not its own identity, but rather a lack of the other negative identities of the regions. Speaking in terms of stereotypes I hear here (not trying to discredit these regions) the vibe is: I'm NOT a no-patience jerk like on the east coast, I'm NOT lazy and pretentious like on the west coast, I'm NOT shallow and two-faced like in the south, therefore, as a midwesterner my strongest identity is defined by a lack of those negative associations. Midwesterns choose not to be defined by what they are, which I see as no-nonsense and generally pretty authentic and genuine, but rather by what they are not. "We are not all of those bad things those other people in those other places are, and that's our best quality." But through my travels I've learned that not all people in those places are like that, and not all midwesterners are nice, but in general they prefer to be viewed as collective lack of bad things, rather than a collection of good things. This, plus an underlying more conservative and humble perspective, I feel gives light to the lack of regional identity that is perceived by people both inside and outside of the Midwest.

Just moved out of the midwest.. I was originally from the East coast and moved back.

I'll just say this, being a minority, I was shocked at how much contempt people had towards middle-easterners and black people. On numerous occasions people have said they've been "dirtying up the neighborhoods which is why they moved to another burb... they need to take better care of their lawns, etc". Out of all the companies that I've worked in the midwest, I've ever had a co-worker that was a black software engineer. People are put down in unfortunate ways. it's really fucking hard to climb up the corporate ladder than either coasts

Pay is crap.. people have been clamoring that the midwest is going to be the next silicon alley.

There's a reason why Chicago was the only major city to drop in population the last couple of years. There aren't that many interesting projects happening, it's not conducive to start-ups. i've had more arguments in the midwest with people that think tesla is a POS company for not following the rules. there's a lot of people averse to change.