Reviewing Las Vegas

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-263/comment/12758016

So Las Vegas ranks around the middle of the pack for me. I like the Strip and the logistics but the suburbs, the place you’d actually live, are pretty ugly: just an endless suburban sprawl.

I like the Strip, I know a lot of people don’t like, it’s famously soulless and empty and vapid and makes you think about Moloch, but the Strip has one, great, true virtue which I adore: if you walk out your front door with money, you will have fun. Say you’re walking around Vegas in July, because you make wise life decisions /s, and you’re getting hot so you duck into the Coca-Cola store to get something to drink. And you look at the menu and you could just get a boring old Coke OR you could try a sampler tray of 24 different sodas from all over the world, which, duh, you do, it’s awesome. And that’s the greatness of Vegas; it doesn’t require friends or knowledge or skills or anything to have an awesome time, you just need money, start walking down the strip with $100 in your pocket and I guarantee someone will find a way to get you to spend that money and have fun, whether it’s sodas from around the  world or 50 Kit Kat flavors or a rooftop party with Lil Jon or a UFC fight or a giant giraffe made of flowers, no effort, no planning, you don’t even need to know where you are, uber to a random spot on the Strip and you will have fun, guaranteed.

And you can have fun elsewhere, and probably get better value for your money, no doubt, but there’s like a spiritual vibe thing to the Vegas Strip that I love, that I am all in on, which is that almost all of us are way “too online” and Vegas isn’t. Vegas pulls you into reality, Vegas demands that you interact physically, Vegas…isn’t on your phone. Like, I can’t imagine staring at my phone in Vegas, I can’t imagine scrolling through my phone in Vegas. In Vegas, a phone is just a phone.

Like, I don’t want to argue that Vegas is good or healthy, it’s not, but…there’s like a weird looking glass moment. Like, and it’s worth going to Vegas just for this, just watch the slot zombies, the people mindlessly sitting in front of the slot machines, pulling that level for hours. And then go to a food court in a big casino and you’ll watch a few people on their cellphones, waiting for food, just swiping. And it feels the same, like the exact same. I don’t know how to describe it but your monkey brain is really attuned to people’s “vibe” and it’s scary when your monkey brain parses the slot zombie and the person on their phone the same way.

And then you’re through the looking glass and, ya know, I don’t like all the sports gambling, it’s everywhere, but I like it a heck of a lot better than Draftkings, brought to me by my favorite NFL influencer. And yeah, Vegas is fake but…nothing on Netflix is real, no one on there even acts like real human beings. Or..

There’s something really, really wholesome about strippers. Like, you can walk along Fremont St and there will be strippers out there with just pasties on trying to get you into this casino or that club and you’ll stop and just reflect on how long it’s been since someone tried to sell you something with, like, real human boobs. And it’s just really quaint and…wholesome, like a scandalous thing from the 50’s? I mean, my generation was the first to be raised amidst free, widespread, hardcore pornography. And I look to the next generation and…there’s something called “vtubing” where girls attach motion capture devices to themselves so they can superimpose an anime girl avatar over themselves. Then they play video games on Twitch while horny boys send them hundreds of dollars an hour.

Allow me to state, unequivocally, that it is healthier and more wholesome for everyone involved to spend hundreds of dollars a month on strippers and whores than donating money to anime avatars.

And the best thing, the true greatness of Vegas, is that I didn’t go looking for boobs. Vegas shoved them in my face. Vegas pulls you into its demented reality, it demands it. Tired and exhausted after a long day, haven’t showered and want to do nothing but curl up on the couch and watch Netflix and scroll your phone? Vegas isn’t just available, it demands, it cajoles, it pulls you to visit. That’s the true greatness. It is so, so easy to just stay home and every city I visited had great stuff to do but Vegas does everything it can through lights, through sound, through ads and billboards to make you visit stuff, make you do stuff.

Vegas is the stripper pulling you away from porn, that’s the vibe, and I very much appreciate that.

Alright, pseudo-spiritual event over, what about the rest of Vegas? Well, there’s a few highlights, but overall its bad, like the worst parts of Phoenix and LA rolled together. Maybe that’s unfair but it’s got that same endless suburban sprawl and corporate shopping “villages”. Broadly, there’s no culture and nothing to do outside of the Strip because the rest of Vegas isn’t built for people to live, it’s built for people to stay for 3-7 years before they move on somewhere else. What really kills Vegas isn’t the Strip, it’s everything around the Strip because they can’t imagine that anyone would actually want to live there. From Sutherlin to Henderson it is, at it’s absolute best, a generic suburban sprawl. And that’s a problem if you want to make, ya know, friends or date or anything like that. At its worst, suburban living has a real isolated, “pod-life” feel and you absolutely feel that in Vegas proper and it kills it.

So, before I wrap this up, a few things in Vegas outside the Strip I really recommend:

Mount Charleston is awesome, it’s a great drive, about 45 minutes and fun, with a lot of nice, cool hiking even in the worst of July. There’s also a lot of interesting looking desert hikes in the area for the winter. I wouldn’t say Vegas is built for the outdoors but I was surprised by the availability and quality.

The Red Rock Rotary Club is unambiguously the best meetup I attended in any city and changed my mind on charity in general, especially the importance of doing things in person. One of the best events I attended in Vegas was passing out food to the homeless in a shelter with this group. If you’re in the area, I cannot recommend them highly enough: https://www.meetup.com/redrockrotarylv/

Finally, I didn’t fly in or out but the airport looks amazing and, well, it offers $100-$150 round trip flights to basically everywhere in the western US, basically every hour. No joke, there are plenty of people in SF and LA who would like to move but they’re scared of losing their social circle, and you could genuinely fly from LV to SF every single Saturday, meetup with your friends, and fly back for less than you’d save in income tax.

Which kind of leads to my final thoughts on Las Vegas; that it’s great for a temporary stay or, like, a hub/home city if you’re trying a digital nomad thing but you don’t really want to live there and put down roots. Las Vegas is a very easy city to get into but there’s…sigh…there’s no depth, there’s no connections, it’s not built that way. The great thing is that you can “plug into” Vegas within a week and it will make you plug in, the downside is that there’s just not that much to plug into, just an endless assortment of one-trick amusements. I dunno, I don’t want to overstate it, but it genuinely felt more sensible and practical to fly back every weekend and stay plugged into your California friend scene than establish a new one in Vegas. In fact, for a while, that was the primary appeal, the idea of living in CA without living in CA, which tells you how bad the non-Strip Vegas is.