How can y'all live like this?

I've been working on what will be the built-in bookcases for our dining room. This has had me travelling to my friend's place over in Cannon County, where I can use his assistance, expertise, and fully-equipped wood shop. But this has also entailed travel through and shopping in Murfreesboro. Murf and its surrounding Rutherford County have become the very essence of over-sprawled suburb. With the concentration of all retail in "The Mall" and the Home Despot style Big Chain, there's little escape from this anymore. Cannon County no longer hosts one single adequate lumberyard or retail sawmill. One advantage of living really out in the stix here in Lewis County, where we are not connected to the outside world by any 4-lane highway, is that we still have two pretty good lumberyards, well-equipped hardware stores, and several mom-and-pop and Mennonite sawmills. Not so for my friend over there across the basin in the Eastern Highland Rim. So this leads me to ponder the question that forms my title:

How can y'all live like this??

For me the world embodied by Murfreesboro is an occasional nightmare that I must endure from time to time. But a nightmare it is: parking lots, crowds, exhaust, noise, horrifically cluttered hideously ugly landscapes, traffic all day, waiting through three cycles of every light to get into maze-like parking lots, frustration and annoyance, not finding what you need until the third stop, requiring the navigation of more and more clogged intersections, etc. etc. It boggles my mind that for most people in early 21st Century America this is their every day world, indeed their home. But what astounds me the most is that not only does everyone endure this, most in fact embrace it as The Good Life! The gyrations, convolutions, and tortures that these psyches must have endured at the hands of the Priests of The Church of Consumerist Materialism in order to worship this dungeon from hell as heaven on earth is almost incomprehensible to me.