A YouTube tale: The Seattle Freeze

The video below, created using YouTube / Google's searchstories application, tells a story of a California marijuana addict who seeks to start a new life in Seattle. Along the way, it seems that person ran into something called "The Seattle Freeze."

If you recall the Super Bowl Google ad, it was essentially an introduction to Youtube.com/searchstories and told the tale of a man who meets and marries a French girl. Well, this video, shown below, is in that sprit:



What's interesting about the YouTube Seattle video is what it says about Seattle through the eyes of the video maker who's channel's called RyanNoir. Is it that hard to find love in Seattle? Is is easier than finding a job or an apartment? Why?

What's the Seattle Freeze? According to a video that could not be embedded here, an action which is a kind of social network freeze itself, so here's the link, Seattlites are described as being, well, cold. One woman says she doesn't give hugs to friends or family. I'm thinking, what the hell's wrong with her? That's just plain weird. Moreover, it's neurotic because of the weird misunderstandings it creates. People like that become their own worst enemies.

On Yelp, the Seattle Freeze has its own forum, where people write their experiences with what The Seattle Times calls "Our Social Disease" that for some on Yelp seems justified...

The Seattle folks seem passive -- but they're not -- they're cautious because of all of the apparent nutjobs out there. I've observed that these people don't respond well to being confronted on any level;, hence the incidents you read about in the Seattle papers about the "after the bars close" violence in this area that starts over very minor shit.

Learning more about The Seattle Freeze, it could just as much apply to San Francisco or Atlanta. I hear similar stories from transplants to Atlanta, and San Francisco has changed such that there's a large problem of anti-social behavior. I do find that people in Atlanta reach out far more than they do in San Francisco, but not as much as in Los Angeles or New York or Chicago.

The Seattle Freeze also applies to race. While there's no discussion of The Seattle Freeze from a racial persective, observation by this blogger is that people who practice this "freeze" in many cases have a few friends, and all of the same color. There's an indirect correlation between freeze behavior and diversity.

Perhaps that's why there's no "freeze" in Los Angeles or New York or Chicago.  People who exhibit that kind of fear of others in the end are the last to get good jobs or be really good friends to anyone.   A city's a reflection of the people within it.  The most dynamic and successful cities aren't the coldest ones socially.

Stay tuned.