Be a Tourist in Your Own Town: Try a Travel Mindset
Explore your own backyard with a travel mindset. Learn how being a tourist in your own town can help you slow down, notice more, and seize the day.
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Living in Loudoun County: The Honest Version
We have a running joke whenever we pass a patch of woods in Loudoun County.
“What is this—a tree? Get rid of it. We need another soulless data center.”
The joke keeps working because they keep building them.
We moved to Sterling, Virginia, in 2010. I don’t remember data centers dominating the landscape then. Now we live in the data center capital of the world, surrounded by enormous windowless buildings that seem to multiply whenever someone finds a few remaining acres of open land.
Loudoun County is also one of the wealthiest counties in America. There is money everywhere: expensive houses, expensive cars, giant SUVs, new restaurants, and new shopping centers. People are always rushing somewhere to spend money—and frequently driving like assholes on the way there.
Welcome to suburban hell.
Sterling, Virginia: Suburban Hell
Patton Oswalt grew up in Sterling and has a famous comedy bit about how much he hated it. He described a culturally empty suburb built around asphalt, shopping centers, and consumption.
The funny thing is that he recorded it before Sterling reached its final form.
He didn’t have today’s data centers or traffic. He didn’t have a Shake Shack drive-through line that appears to be seven miles long because Loudoun County reacts to every new corporate restaurant like the Beatles have arrived.
And he may never have experienced the Sterling Costco on a weekend.
I haven’t gone there in at least five years. The parking lot is a fucking zoo. The store is a fucking zoo. People push enormous carts down the middle of the aisle like they’re piloting eighteen-wheelers. My wife is now the official LaMedica Costco shopper, and I love her for her service.
That is life here. We have almost everything nearby, yet accessing any of it can be miserable.
Everything is convenient. Nothing is easy.
The Data Center Capital of the World
The data centers are the perfect symbol for what Loudoun County has become.
They are enormous, expensive, productive, and almost completely lifeless. They generate tax revenue that helps pay for excellent schools, libraries, parks, and public services. They may even help keep our property-tax rate down.
But they also swallow land and turn parts of the county into an industrial landscape.
I recently mapped the data centers currently under construction across eastern Loudoun County. The pins cover the map. They cluster around Sterling and Ashburn, then continue south toward Route 50. The family joke about every remaining tree becoming a data center feels less like an exaggeration when you see them all at once.
Current data center construction across Sterling, Ashburn, and eastern Loudoun County.
My wife has noticed our electric bills gradually rising over the past two years as more data centers appear. I can’t prove that every additional dollar came from them. Weather, fuel prices, household use, and rate changes all matter. But it is hard not to notice the parallel: we live beside some of the most electricity-hungry buildings on Earth, and our own electricity keeps getting more expensive.
The data centers help finance some of the best parts of living in Loudoun County while contributing to the feeling that the place is being consumed around us.
That is the bargain. We get prosperity, services, and convenience.
They get the trees.
Crowded Without Feeling Connected
Living in Loudoun County can feel strangely like living in a city—crowded, expensive, and anonymous—but without the sidewalks, public squares, street life, or culture. Instead of a dining scene, we get another burger chain. Instead of museums, we get another T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, or HomeGoods.
There are homes everywhere. People everywhere. Traffic everywhere. Yet many of us know remarkably little about the people living three doors down.
We leave through our garages, climb into our cars, and return through the garage again. We live close enough to hear one another’s lawnmowers, but not always close enough to know one another’s names.
We learned that in an extreme way when we discovered that the man who later carried out the deadly shooting at Old Dominion University had lived in a townhouse one street away. The morning after the attack, police surrounded the house and television crews arrived. Until then, we had never met him or his family and knew nothing about the lives unfolding behind that door.
Sterling gives us proximity without necessarily giving us community.
Most of the good people we have met here entered our lives through places that forced us to keep showing up together: baseball fields, kids’ activities, parks, and the library. Community didn’t emerge because the neighborhood was designed to create it. We had to go looking for it.
A Place Built for Cars, Not People
The traffic and aggressive driving are more than everyday annoyances. This place can be genuinely dangerous for anyone who isn’t inside a vehicle.
Within half a mile of our house, a 13-year-old girl riding a scooter was killed by a car. Outside the nearby T.J. Maxx, flowers still appear where another person was killed after shopping for discount clothing. I previously wrote about those memorials in The Flowers Never Stop Coming.
For years, someone has continued replacing those flowers.
Recently, a mother and her young daughter were walking out of a crowded Shake Shack, holding hands, entering the parking lot. I stopped and waved them across in front of us.
I rolled down the window and told the mother, “I’m trying to build the cars-yielding-to-pedestrians movement here in Loudoun County.”
She laughed.
“I don’t have high hopes, though,” I added.
She laughed again.
My kids were in the car. They saw me stop. They saw that another human being crossing a parking lot was more important than arriving thirty seconds sooner.
Good for me.
The Parts of Sterling Worth Loving
Here is where I have to be fair: Sterling is not uniformly terrible.
We have a great library. We hike at Algonkian Regional Park and Claude Moore Park. We have found good people through baseball and our children’s other activities. Our kids have grown up here. We have built friendships, routines, and sixteen years of family memories.
You don’t live somewhere that long and feel nothing for it.
But the best parts of Sterling are the places where we stop consuming and start belonging. The library gives us somewhere to go without requiring us to buy anything. The parks preserve trees, quiet, movement, and space. Kids’ activities bring the same people together until strangers become friends.
Those places are not suburban hell. They are the resistance to it.
Why Upstate New York Still Feels Like Home
I grew up around the farmland of Dutchess County, New York. Every time I travel back to upstate New York, something in me settles.
The open fields feel like home. The space between things feels like home. Looking out over farmland, trees, and long stretches of land that haven’t been converted into warehouses or shopping centers, I can feel my nervous system exhale.
For the past few years, I’ve increasingly thought: I can’t wait to move somewhere less crowded.
I’m not trying to escape my family’s memories or pretend we haven’t had a good life here. I just miss space. I miss land that doesn’t appear to be waiting for a developer. I want to live somewhere that doesn’t make ordinary errands feel like minor combat operations.
Maybe that desire was always inside me. Loudoun County has simply become crowded enough for me to hear it.
How Not to Become Part of Suburban Hell
We can’t personally stop every data center, redesign every road, or make Costco pleasant on a Saturday.
But we can keep the place from changing us completely.
We can stop for pedestrians. Put down the phone. Let someone merge. Use the parks. Visit the library. Learn a neighbor’s name. Support places that create community instead of merely processing consumers. Show our children that getting somewhere faster isn’t worth becoming an asshole.
That sounds small compared with the forces shaping Loudoun County. It is small.
But the best parts of our life here have always been built from small things: a walk under the trees, a conversation beside a baseball field, a familiar face at the library, a mother and daughter crossing safely in front of our car.
Sterling isn’t suburban hell because nothing good exists here. It feels like suburban hell because the good parts are increasingly surrounded by everything that works against them.
Someday, when the kids are grown, I expect we will leave for somewhere quieter.
Until then, I may live in the data center capital of the world—but I don’t have to let suburban hell move inside me.
“Know what’s enough. Build what matters.”
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