Blog/2026-02-08/Nominative Inversion

Yosemite valley would never be called Death Valley, but the latter could have been called Valley of Eternal Rainfall

Have you noticed that famous places with names that City of Joy or City of God are going to be depressing places? No one ever names an actually fun place City of Joy, and no one ever names a truly divine city City of God. Those nice places will have names like Malibu or Monaco or Okinawa. In fact, if someone ever came up to me and said, "I'm going to the City of Endless Happiness" I'd be sure they're going to get murdered. There is absolutely no chance that person is coming back. I might as well say goodbye for the last time.

People like to talk about the Cape of Good Hope or Greenland being rebranded for other purposes but you can be damned sure that if a place is called the Windy City then it's windy, and if a place is called the City That Never Sleeps then it's lively, but if it's called the City of Neverending Peace you can be damned sure that there has never been any peace there.

Cultural Homeostasis

The hedonic treadmill is a hypothesis that we have a personal fixed point of happiness that we return to after some event that shifts us from it. But what if there is such a thermostat at the societal level. In an era where global thermonuclear war seemed entirely possible, where America and the USSR were at each other's throats, and normal Americans were being mobilized into combat, science fiction authors wrote about Mankind conquering space and exploring distant lands.

Now, when life is better than it has ever been in the past, out science fiction mostly seems to be about how everything can go wrong. Most speculative fiction these days seems dystopian, and certainly that is the case for the most popular of spec fi.

This isn't the only possible explanation, or even the most likely one, but I like the idea of self-similarity very much, so it appeals to me that groups of humans have emotional behaviour mimicking individual humans.