Tim Urban has a similar post on this called “The Tail End”, noting that by the time we get to adulthood we often have used up the vast majority of time spent with loved ones - particularly with parents and siblings.
My brother and I read this and were touched by it; we lived on opposite coasts and since we were kids always loved hanging out with one another. The idea that in our current arrangement we had already depleted MOST of our time together was a bitter pill to swallow.
For years we batted around the idea of living closer to each other. One day we just pulled the trigger and did it. It was enormously inconvenient, took a ton of logistical planning for our respective families, jobs and so on; but we ended up with houses within walking distance of one another and went from seeing each other and our immediate families maybe 10 days a year to 300+. We have accepted going forward it may limit our career options relative to when we lived in top tier American cities but the happiness we gained in the process is more than worth it.
I’m still not 100% sure the experiment will work out, but making the adjustment to live closer to family has substantially increased my mental health and emotional well-being. If you have close friendships and have ever talked about this seriously, I’d encourage you to consider what you might be gaining or losing in your current setup. It’s not for everyone but worth exploring!
Due to unrelated and unexpected events, my mother, my sister, my sister's husband, and my wife's sister have all moved to within a few miles of my family within the past year. Previously they were all living in a different state from us. My father is dead, but having the rest of my close family nearby has made me so much happier. I wasn't unhappy before, but this much better yet.
I realize it's not a happiness booster in every circumstance. My wife moved a thousand miles specifically so she never had to suffer her mother again.
I loved your post because I have been living away from my younger brother (and parents) for over 10 years. We meet about once every 2 years.
Every time we meet each other, I feel - great. Just amazing. We just sit and shoot the shit like nothing changed. We care for each other's lives. Just sitting with beers or staying over at each other's place makes me feel belonged. Our spouses love hanging out with us. We all go on trips together. We explore restaurants, we bash our bosses, we make food/snacks for each other. When we are bored, we just go over to the other's home and watch TV with them. And all this is so much more fulfilling than grinding my life away at work.
I keep wondering if this rat race life in a big city is worth more than the pleasure I get by just living close to my brother. Who knows if we will be able to do all this tomorrow.
Of course it's a real phenomenon, but it needs to be brought up without jumping to negative conclusions about the person one is talking to.
Fortunately nine_zeros gave a nice answer and clarification, but often what happens is that the original commenter feels smacked by the mean interpretation, hits back twice as hard, and we end up with an unfortunate flamewar.
This dynamic is in fact one of the main ways we get flamewars, and HN has that guideline to remind us all to consciously avoid it.
Interesting you bring this up because spouses families don't live nearby either. I would certainly consider my spouse's requirements before we move. That said, spouse and I talk a lot about this and we both seem to miss our times with my brother+spouse because they are of our generation. It just makes us all friendly to each other.
I am far from most of my friends and live in a city for work reasons. There are more activities and everything is a lot more accessible. Definitely more promise in the air. That said, I am living alone and feel it. It's not healthy.
I do want to be nearer friends and (some) family but ironically I think there are fewer relationship opportunities back in the sticks, plus there are attitudes and people in my home town I really don't miss.
I agree with your conclusion - but when younger and single it is difficult to know exactly what to do. Being single being a big problem, and the day to day work from home isolation the other.
My experience is that in a big city you can meet people that better fit into your "tribe", the downside is that they leave town for the higher pay job after about 4 years.
The only solution is to always be adding new friends, at least that the theory. The implementation is tougher.
My wife and I moved to a town of 3,000 in a county of 17,000 during the pandemic. We almost left to go back to a bigger city because we struggled to find “our tribe” — nerds. But just in the last month, we found so many people that we’ve now got three weekly D&D groups running!
Would just like to say kudos for pulling the very complicated trigger on this
This is exactly the kind of thing where 99% of people would like to do but revert to not doing cause the benefits are hard to justify in “traditional” ways (ie financial, career, etc)
Again, kudos!
EDIT: hoping remote work sticks around and makes this much easier going forward
It depends. If (big if) previously both were far from their family, now one of them is not. Net positive.
We live very close to my in-laws, and there are lots of benefits from that, even if my parent and brothers live far away. But some months ago my brother moved close to my home and now we see each other every weekend, we both have small children that now have the time to play together and form new bonds. It's really great.
My friends are now in different cities or distant neighborhoods, we make plans every now and then, but it is really complex to maintain closeness when physical distance gets in the way.
If everyone they are close to also moved to where this guy and his brother live--and so on--they could have quite the 1 easy trick to found a new megacity.
Here's the plan: you and 5 people closest to you move to the same area. Then each of those 5 people moves 5 of their closest people to the same area. Repeat ~13x and we can all finally be together.
So if a mega-city had a billion people. Maybe that's too much, let's say a 100 million people. Let us say this may be possible this century with some innovations in our habitat. So with a 100 million people in this mega-city, how many people can actually live close to each other? Even if you go 3-dimensions (connected skyscrapers), not sure this model will bring people close. Will it?
I’m curious about this too. My partner and I are both from different cities and live in a third city. We have friends and family in the original two cities and friends in the third city. There’s no way to make it work for both of us, and in fact the neutral third city is probably the most fair option despite being far from the best for either of us.
I get your point but the compromise isn’t “suffering”. We’re perfectly happy in the third city. It’s the moving to the original cities that could cause one persons suffering for another maximisation of their happiness.
> The implicit definition of "fair" as "equal suffering" is always a bit concerning to me.
For family peace, it may be the best thing. My personal anecdote:
I'm from city A. My spouse is from city B. We lived in city C. Our parents were fine with that.
My mother-in-law developed a rare disease. She had no children nearby. Now we live in city B, close to her.
In city A, despite having two of my siblings nearby, my parents absolutely resented our move. They were quite hostile at some point.
That sent my spouse to therapy and there's been no contact between them since. I'm fully on my spouse's side, especially given what my parents said and did.
Life gets complicated. We’re in a similar situation - family and friends are mostly in cities A and B (in different countries nonetheless). We lived in a compromise/neutral city C until we needed help with the kids and it’s impossible to choose where to go for the long term.
We pulled a similar move last year - moved back to Europe from North America after living there for 10+ years. It was a very expensive and risky move, and just like you, I’m also unsure if it will work out great in the long term, but I can tell you I feel great, I am finally in the same time zone as my brother and parents, they can visit pretty much any time, and heck even when my in-laws are in town, and I see them having breakfast with the kids on a Sunday morning, I feel like my life is finally complete.
Curious about the kids. I know kids will generally make friends wherever they go, especially when young, but my closest friends have been with me since I started school. 30 years later we’re still very close despite being a bit further apart. I think any significant move after approx age 13 and I wouldn’t have been able to develop those relationships starting somewhere new.
Kids were 7 and 2 when we moved. Probably the biggest factor in timing the move was their age - I assumed that if we didn’t move then, then we won’t ever do it, as the children would grow older and it would make reintegration really difficult.
One year on they are doing well, even learned a new language! And of course they do enjoy and always look forward to the frequent visits of friends and relatives.
I remember reading this when it came out, but couldn't remember the name and was too scared to type "articles about imminent death and our limited time with loved ones" into a search bar.
I've since lost my parents in my 20s, significantly earlier than expected, but found this weirdly comforting on a second read realizing that most of our quality time had indeed been in the first two decades of my life, regardless of what happened. It definitely makes me think about working to stay close / become closer with loved ones I have left.
Thanks for sharing this. Life's short and I admire your effort to live closer with your brother. Congrats on your "experiment" :)
I wish I could somehow evaluate what you're suggesting and understand if the outcome would be worth the effort. It would be SO, SO, SO much effort. I feel good being nearer my family but would that sour if I spent more time than the occasional holiday? Would the support my family might provide be worth the effort of selling our home, changing jobs, changing so how much of our lives work?
Sometimes I long for it but the effort makes it... unjustifiable.
Very nice! I've thought about something similar. Of course that a challenge is when you marry someone from yet-another nationality. Our plan right now is to try to get key members of the family that want to be together to where we're at even if we help them financially to migrate/move, since we have very good financial situation and the people we're targetting are mostly empty nesters or work in similar field.
Weird. I see my brother rarely, like once or twice a year, though we live less than two hours apart. It always seems like it is a big disruption or effort to have to get together. When we do, we don't have much to talk about. After it's over, I feel completely exhausted.
Probably expense and lack of options - housing a single family is already expensive (and often difficult to find), two right next to each other?
Nearly impossible, and definitely prohibitively expensive in any top tier city. Zuck got a lot of pushback and significant difficulty when buying a couple of adjacent lots in Palo Alto.
For most regular foks "tier" is a budget consideration. And of course usually roots (e.g. being from an area) also plays a big role in their personal "tier" ranking of a city.
There's nature all over. You can leave somewhere that's not Seattle but still in the PNW for substantially less money.
My point here is that what matters to a given person is pretty subjective, and, personally, I'd never live in Seattle again if I could help it -- and this is from someone who grew up just 90 miles north in Bellingham. (I'd live in Bellingham again.)
The point of TFA is that you just need to be together with friends, i.e. having dinner or hanging out at each other's houses most likely. You don't need a bunch of amenities.
We seem to be doing life backward: We live alone and expend effort to gather together, as if that’s the healthy baseline
It's easier to make new friends in a top-tier city, especially if you're the kind of person who likes those amenities.
The alternative is staying in some backwater place just because one of your friends is there, and you have absolutely nothing to do there except hang out with that friend, while being constantly frustrated with all the other aspects of life in that place.
My opinion of lower tier cities is that they don’t have a lot of infrastructure (See: public transit, decent internet, etc…), lack certain kinds of development (bars, coffee shops, restaurants that accommodate diets), and they tend to lack diversity.
I've been traveling full- or part-time for the last 10+ years, and I've adopted the strategy of rapidly developing friendships. The person who sells bread, the person I see on walk after walk, the person I'm meeting for the first or 4th time... I'm just open-minded and open-hearted, genuinely curious, generous with my time and attention... and it's awesome. With just a few interactions, I feel like I am with my people, that I am valued, that I am around people I appreciate.
Occasionally I'm met with suspicion (some people don't believe that I am seriously that curious/excited about XYZ that we are doing together), but overall most people seem to appreciate the ready camaraderie. Occasionally I get burned by forming too deep of a connection too quickly with someone who turns out to be untrustworthy, but time has proven that that is a worthwhile risk to take on.
I think of community as a pyramid – there are infrequent acquaintances at the base, and best friends and family at the top. All of it matters. My strategy is basically to respect the entire pyramid, showing up as fully as possible for everyone.
Forming friendships rapidly is not easy – it has taken me many years to learn to soften myself and open the mind, but I do keep getting better at it, for everyone's benefit. It greatly helps to share projects (in my case, mostly rock climbing).
Note that walking (to the grocery store, when bored, when the sun is setting) is a phenomenal way to feel connected with nearby people.
We must have very different definitions of the word "friend". I don't count someone I run into on a walk a friend, and I don't think this would fit the definition for the majority of people.
Sounds like you're being friendly with people, which is of course great, but I highly doubt any of these "friends" of yours would help you move.
The pyramid I described flows upward. Every close friend we have began as an acquaintance, and with time and repeated interactions they became progressively bigger influences, stronger supports, deeper connections.
Many adults stop forming friendships, because they (or their culture) insert mechanisms that maintain distance between acquaintances. I don't do that – my whole strategy is to not do that.
What is the threshold at which point someone becomes a friend? There's no clear line – it's defined by amorphous things like trust, vulnerability, shared enthusiasm. The way we conduct ourselves can make us more or less capable of experiencing trust/vulnerability/shared-enthusiasm/etc. While the person I run into for the third time is not yet a friend, I conduct myself knowing that we can probably get along quite well, if we're both present and open.
You might underestimate the power of curiosity and an open mind. Remember when you were 5 or 10 years old, how suddenly you connected with your best friends? It happened in a matter of days, or in some cases hours. It's not just a phase of life thing (although it is relevant), open-mindedness and curiosity have the same effect in adulthood.
(Finally, I guarantee a large portion of the people I interact with each day would help me move, if I were to ask. Many of them are literally catching me while I fall rock climbing, and vice-versa!)
Agreed. If I read the article too literally, I'd rewrite the headline: "never crawl out of the pit you were born in." The set "your friends" must change over your life. And it's great if you can hold on to people, and even better if you can stay a 5 minute walk away, but that's an ideal and not a realistic goal.
Totally agree with this - almost everyone in my apartment with a dog goes to the same nearby dog park. It's really pleasant to see and talk to them everyday.
Can I ask where are you from and where are you living/traveling? What you describe seems to be just the standard way of living and interacting with people almost everywhere here in Italy. Well, it is more common in smaller communities and in the southern part of Italy. Of course it is a generalization so it isn't an absolute truth. My point is that even with this kind of interaction I find it very very hard to find friends even remotely comparable to the friends I have been growing up with. It feels like the word "friend" is misused if I use to describe people I have know for 30+ years and people I have met in the last couple years both.
serious question but aren’t newer connections that you make in this manner necessarily much more shallow than the ones you’ve started long ago, which does include friends/family from earlier phases in life? how could that possibly give you joy or even call it “friendship” at all if people only know you in a trivial sense? what you described sound more like acquaintances to me.
Yes, the tendency is for recent connections to be shallower than those formed long ago. But connections also open up at different paces. For some people it took a decade (and multiple phases of life) for us to become close friends, others it took just days.
Consider the pyramid of relationships – at the base are acquaintances, 90% of the people we see each day – at the top are our closest friends and family, those few people that we deeply trust. We can let the people in our lives move fluidly along the vertical axis, and if we are lucky more than just a handful will make it to the top.
I try to not know anyone "in a trivial sense" – the whole point is to be present enough to realize how cool people are.
There is a conundrum with the question you are asking. They don't know what it's like to have a friend that goes back, say 20 years. And you do. It's kind of like asking someone who has never ate roast duck, to tell you if roast duck tastes better than roast chicken. The information you seek isn't there.
My childhood was highly itinerant between frequent international moves and boarding school, and adult life has been much the same, and I rapidly learned as a kid:
A) how to form “friendships” fast
B) that “friendship” is usually convenient, transitional, temporary, and disposable
I have zero friends from school or university, and people I would count as friends who I have known more than a decade I can count on one hand - and that’s just fine, as I accept and understand that friends are people who you are geographically proximal to and are convenient to spend time with.
I am rarely geographically proximal to anyone for very long, and as it’s my choice to move on, I slink off to my next destination to never be heard from again, as there’s just no point in trying to maintain a friendship at long distance - the effort/reward ratio is all out of whack for both parties. What possível relevance does what I am doing on another continent have to your life? None. Is it likely to engender resentment and hostility if we keep in touch? Absolutely. It’s far preferable to just let the embers fade than to end up with an explosive decomposition down the line when your values and weltanschauung inevitably drift.
The few friendships that I have maintained over the years are with fellow travellers - people who, like me, understand that relationships are disposable, and are not worth operating at a distance - rather once every few years coincidence will see us in the same place, and we bring the friendship out of stasis for a weekend. As an added bonus, by not keeping in touch, we have plenty to catch up upon when we re-encounter one another. These people usually emerge from the strangest cracks in the pavement - a borrowed cigarette on an icebreaker, a hot air balloon disaster, as a mirage on the horizon whilst stood queasily in the oozing muck of the dried up Aral sea. Because they begin out of utter disconnection, they can be sustained.
Unlike you, it doesn’t foster a sense of connection - rather a sense of deep disconnection, as I realise that to the majority of people, who live sedentary lives and have had the same friends since they were in nappies, this way of thinking is alien - but again, that’s ok, as it’s now of my own volition to live the life I lead.
Hence “friendships” in my points - as I don’t really view this type of interaction as friendship, rather just that the world is better when you are friendly to strangers.
Friendship, in the fecund, smothering way that many seem to view it, is utterly alien to me, and is in my view nothing more than tribalism, as most people have “friendship groups”, within which they engage in cultural drift and mutual ego-massage, usually resulting in poor outcomes for all.
Honestly, I’m not sure it’s even a thing beyond a reified concept that we are taught to engage in from an early age.
This sounds great, but it's difficult to pull off when career and family can pull everyone to different regions. My core group of close friends formed in university. The school pulled us all in from wherever we grew up, and unsurprisingly after graduating there wasn't anything to pull us all into the same area for work. Many left to return to their home city to be close to family, others went further in their schooling, and some even moved abroad.
Even when you live near your friends, meeting up can be difficult. I feel like many of my friend gatherings need to be scheduled weeks in advance because everyone has various other commitments (family events, obligations for their children, hobbies, gathering with other friend groups, etc).
In the US, it's part of the curse of the suburbs: When there are fewer people living near you, going to see anyone involves far more minutes.
I think of where I grew up: A very dense city, where streets are narrow, easy to cross, and pre-teens can move around with not just lack of fear, but major convenience. My mother had 4 siblings: All with their families, living in their own apartments. But every apartment was within a 5 minute walk: I could see the other buildings from our building's front door! So if someone needed babysitting, or just had to run random errand, children could be dropped off easily: Cousins almost become brothers when you see them every couple of days anyway.
This was also great for organizing activities with classmates. Not only we got to see each other on the street at random, as we did different errands, but organizing to meet in some bench was trivial. RPGs in the weekend? No problem, as a 15 minute walk catches most of the high school's families.
Now, in the US suburbs, socialization is more about online gaming, because the number of classmates a 14 year old can reach conveniently is pretty low: You could fit an apartment building with 16-20 families in the space that my suburb dedicates to 2. Access to 10 times the people sure makes living next to a friend much more likely! And since drivers aren't needed to get anything done, a lot of things that are commitments in the suburbs just disappear or are easy to move, as another neighbor can take Timmy to the soccer game, as they also have another kid going to the game anyway, and Timmy can walk himself to the neighbor's door with no hassle.
Transit time, and the total dependence of children, are a curse that can be avoided, but we have to do a lot of urban rebuilding for that.
This reminds me of a documentary I saw about Italian immigrant familes in the 1930's? coming to the US and living in tenements in Newark NJ and NYC. The younger generations grew up, went to college, and moved all over the country. When interviewed, they all said the same things: "We didn't know we were poor at the time," "we miss having the whole family together," "there was always someone around to watch the kids," etc.
It's so compelling selling the picket house with all the land around it - who doesn't see that as idyllic? But then the hidden costs to community can't really be quantified, and the housing developers are hardly going to think of that.
I don't live in the US, but I do wonder what that has done to your social fabric. As well as making much of downtown flattened and made into parking lots for businesses. It is the first thing I notice jumping into any random US town in Street View; such wide spaces between every business on Main St. Who would ever walk there and chance upon a friend when you just dump the car outside and go into the shop or restaurant.
I suspect that something similar is happening with the shift to remote work. You can live in a big house in the beautiful countryside! But now doing anything other than being in the house or the countryside is considerably more effort.
My partner and I struggle with this. They’d like to live a bit further out of the city, have some land and some goats, and I’d love having a creek nearby, but the reality is that we like going out to music and vegan restaurants, and living out of the city would make this much more difficult.
Little to do with suburbs. I grew up in a suburban-like environment. Large neighborhood of single family homes, mostly ranches or two-stories, lots of cul-de-sac streets. I had friends all around, if within a few houses we'd walk, othewise ride bikes. There was a park sort of in the center of the neighborhood, we'd ride our bikes there and hang out, sometimes ride to the closest gas station to buy candy bars, etc. Moms would make arrangements to carpool kids to practices, take kids to the pool, or do other things that were farther away.
At some point we've decided instead to live behind locked doors in fear of our neighbors. I see little reason to blame suburbia or city living arrangements for that.
I just wanted to echo your experiences growing up in a suburb with lots of single-family houses. Even though we were in different classes (slightly different ages) there were loads of kids in the blocks around my house. We'd play games in the green belt (utility corridor) or at the park in the middle or meet up for swimming in the community pool in the summer time. I'd walk or ride my bike to friend's houses all the time to play their Nintendo and they'd come over to my place to play my Sega. You don't need to live in a dense city with massive apartment complexes to have neighborhood friends.
And yeah, I definitely had friends that I mostly only saw during activities (sports, band, scouts, etc.) they were still good and close friends. Spending over a decade of at least one night a week together tends to make people pretty close.
The way I read the article, "live near your friends" means "within 10 minute walk of them", not "20 minute drive". I live 5 minutes walk away from a very close friend of mine, and 10-20 mins from some others. With the closest one, "hey, have you had dinner?" text turns into "cool, same spot, i'll see you in 10 minutes?" at least once a week. That's on top of planned long-term activities.
I understand I am very privileged, but we actually made effort to live near each other. Well, it definitely helps that it's a dense neighbourhood of an actual city and not a suburb. It's hard to plan it out, but worth it.
The way I read the article, "live near your friends" means "within 10 minute walk of them", not "20 minute drive". I live 5 minutes walk away from a very close friend of mine
apologies for being pedantic, but the article literally starts off with a screenshot of the Live Near Friends app which shows that you're doing it exactly right in their terms, because they're talking about living a 5-minute walk away. likewise, that's the goal of the app:
This August, Levin launched Live Near Friends, a site that helps people live within a five-minute walk of a close friend or family member.
A 5 minute walk is only about 500 meters. I don't understand how that's even possible outside of a dense city. I've lived in places where you can't even get to the nearest public road in 500m, let alone to another human being. In a lot of the USA, living within a 5 minute walk of your friends means they are "1 or at most 2 next door neighbors down the street".
As a parent I foresaw that I would make acquaintances with others who go to the park, or live on the street. So far we exchange polite pleasantries but there's just nothing beyond that. It should be unsurprising, the prospect of any change in routine is more uncomfortable and daunting when you're a busy parent, and friendship invites more overhead. There are friends I made after moving to a city that I barely want to see now, mostly because there wasn't enough in common in the first place.
Strategy wise if you're unattached and have free time, making commutes to events and planned activities is still a more effective way to make friends.
You’re probably right, since both of my siblings with children have said the same. That being said, it’s more about “living close to your existing friends” rather than “how to make friends in your area”. The latter deserves its own discussion too, as I think it’s not that easy.
Friendships are overhead. If you don't make regular effort to cultivate them, they wither and die. That takes time, and involves tradeoffs or impositions on other things you might want or need to do.
The question is whether the benefits are worth it.
Hence why less is more. You can have strong bonds with select few friends, but this can be lonelier if social time is limited, as it can be in adulthood.
> it's difficult to pull off when career and family can pull everyone to different regions
I think it comes down to if you live to work, or work to live.
I moved to a small mountain town (10k people) that is bursting with 30-somethings who don't want to live the city grind anymore. People live here because skiing, mountain biking, hiking, camping and paddling are the life priority. Of course also pot lucks, dinners, parties and social events.
Everyone just finds whatever job that enables them to do those things, and the priority is life, not work. Working online is so common place now you can still earn a good salary if choose.
Hardly anyone works five days a week. Tons of people only work six months a year (ski the rest of the year!)
25 minutes from a great ski hill (that has no cell service), 5 minute ride to world-class mountain biking, 5 minute walk to a stunning lake for swimming/paddling.
Houses here cost 1/3 or 1/4 of what they do in a big city.
Think about the kind of life you want to live, and make it a priority.
Where is this town with all of these amenities? Any ski resort town I’ve seen usually has home prices well above $1mm for 2br/1.5ba or so. Unless you’re just saying “well it’s cheaper than NYC” or something.
Upper Peninsula in Michigan is pretty cheap (I've seen nice home listings for under $300k on Zillow), has some ski resorts (not sure how good they are, I've been in the area but not to ski, but there's several up there)
They're no Rocky Mountains, but the Porcupine Mountains are up there and still pretty nice. And Lake Superior is right there also, as well as a bunch of waterfalls. And at night you can see the Milky Way.
The UP is pretty great but I wouldn’t characterize it in the same way the OP did with the ski towns. More of a hunting and fishing vibe. A bit insular as well which is fine if that’s what you’re aiming for.
If they're trying to avoid paying million dollar house prices that those other ski towns have, they might have to look at something that's not quite a dedicated ski town.
Although some places up in the UP seem pretty close to that. Ironwood, MI for example, has 4 ski resorts within 15 miles of it, and doesn't seem to have a whole lot else happening there (we stayed there as a base of operations to go to the Porcupine Mountains though).
From Wikipedia: "While originally an iron mining town, the area is now known for its downhill skiing resorts, including Big Powderhorn, Black River, Snow River, Mount Zion and Whitecap as well as its cross country skiing at the Wolverine Nordic Trail System and the ABR Nordic Center."
Right totally agree. Thanks for the tip on Ironwood as well. Though it would take me longer to get there from Ohio than it would to fly out to Colorado or anywhere out west to ski it could be a cool place to go check out. :)
> Houses here cost 1/3 or 1/4 of what they do in a big city.
And salaries are also lower. People don't move to the big city because they want to live there. They go there to study and then to make money so that they can afford any kind of real estate in their home town.
> Everyone just finds whatever job that enables them to do those things, and the priority is life, not work.
The condition of your quote above is that you already own real estate, which isn't true for but a few from the younger generations. Or that you live with your parents until you're 60 years old. Other than that, the deal is "get the hell out" and you're only welcome back if you can purchase some real estate.
It's true what you say about working online though, but then suddenly the whole world is open to you.
Yes, they are. But it's fine because we've all stepped out of the rat race, and the goal of our lives is not simply to earn more money, or as much as possible. The goal of our lives is to live more, so that's what we do.
None of my friends has a new car, or phone, or even a TV. We all have used skis and duct tape on our clothes. We are not "rich" in the money sense.
We also don't work much, and ski and mountain bike a lot.
> The condition of your quote above is that you already own real estate
Not at all. Of all the 30-somethings I know that live here, none of them lived here more than 5 years ago, they all bought in the last 5 years.
Houses here cost a lot less than bigger cities, and it is completely possible to buy a house on a single income. My partner works 4 days a week and bought a 4 bed/2 bath house less than 5 minutes walk from the main street. She saved for the deposit herself, and met the mortgage requirements on her single income.
> suddenly the whole world is open to you
Well, yes. That's why we choose to live in a quaint little mountain town where we can ski for half the year and work as little as possible.
Something is making our perspectives very different, and I'm trying to understand how. A new phone is less than a months rent, so is a TV. A new car is cheap compared to real estate. So those things are far from a marker of wealth.
Most people aren't in the rat race because they have an insatiable greed. They are there because they are desperate to have a roof over their head. If they can sort it out, almost everybody will be cool with chilling with a barbecue and riding quads in the woods instead of preparing a powerpoint to suck up to the boss.
> Not at all. Of all the 30-somethings I know that live here, none of them lived here more than 5 years ago, they all bought in the last 5 years.
That's what I'm getting at. You and your friends moved in because you could. You either had some real estate money from elsewhere to use to get established, or big city salaries to pay for cheap real estate there. The people born there who don't have real estate have to get the hell out (not because of people moving in), and go to a big city to try making some wealth to one day purchase real estate.
If you're born in a small town you usually have no chance of making enough money in the small town to purchase for a home in the small town you were born. So people move away, and then when they are finally established money-wise some 20 years later, they've lost connection with that small town they were born in, and instead shop around for where to live.
> Something is making our perspectives very different, and I'm trying to understand how
Out perspectives are different because I used to be in the rat race, and I used to believe it wasn't possible to get out, and I didn't understand how or why people could ski half the year and not work much and still make ends meet.
I've been doing it myself now since 2009 (taking years completely away from work to drive around the world even) and so I not only understand that it is possible, I live it first hand every day.
> A new phone is less than a months rent, so is a TV. A new car is cheap compared to real estate. So those things are far from a marker of wealth.
I think this is one of the major things that people don't understand when it comes to saving money, spending less and working less. This is where the whole "Don't drink a coffee every day and you'll be set".
The reason I bring up those things is because I literally don't earn enough money to have them. If I had those, I would have to work more. I'm right on that line. And for me, not having them means more freedom from work, so I choose not to have them.
So do many, many other people in this little mountain town.
> Most people aren't in the rat race because they have an insatiable greed. They are there because they are desperate to have a roof over their head. If they can sort it out, almost everybody will be cool with chilling with a barbecue and riding quads in the woods instead of preparing a powerpoint to suck up to the boss.
In my experience, while that sounds like it makes sense, it is not true. I give talks and seminars about how I'm able to spend less, take years off work and have grand adventures around the world. I go into great detail about the financials of it all, and what a person would need to do to be able to afford something similar.
Then without fail I have ten people tell me to my face they can't afford it, while making car payments, phone payments, using every streaming service, eating out 5 nights a week and whatever else.
People want all those conveniences, and going to work "full time" is the only way to get it. So they do. They don't want to cook their own food, chop their own firewood and buy used things.
> You either had some real estate money from elsewhere to use to get established, or big city salaries to pay for cheap real estate there
No we did not. We had neither of those things. We didn't hack the market in any way. Everyone works a pretty ordinary job for this area, and they can afford an ordinary house for this area. Again, in the same way we don't have car payments, none of us has a big new house either - because we don't want those things.
> The people born there who don't have real estate have to get the hell out (not because of people moving in), and go to a big city to try making some wealth to one day purchase real estate.
That is not true at all. The dental hygienist who cleaned my teeth today has lived here her whole life. She's just turned 40, has a 4 year old, bought a house a few years back.
You're on the outside not understanding how it actually works, and I get that. It made absolutely no sense to me either, and I spent years thinking "I wish I could do that.. too bad I can't". But actually I could.
I feel like this is the standard Reddit meme that is on the front page every day that says "You're telling me I have to go to work, commute, grocery shop, cook, clean, maybe have half an hour to myself and do it all again tomorrow? Shoot me now".
If you choose that life, then yes, that's correct.
But there are other choices out there.
Loved your comment, and I'd reply to it with some thoughts of my own, but since it's been a day it's going to be buried, so I'll just leave it like this.
I just want to say I only saw grecy's comment because of yours showing up on the new comment page and I think it's beautiful and would be interested in hearing a tiny sliver of your thoughts about it.
I've lived everywhere, including in big metropolis cities. In general, people do not want to leave the community they were born in, unless influences and factors beyond their control force them to. Including of course the people who were born in the cities.
> People don't move to the big city because they want to live there. They go there to study and then to make money so that they can afford any kind of real estate in their home town.
Is this in Utah? I ask because most ski towns are really expensive to live in but the SLC/Ogden area is a bit of an exception. I'd love to only work 6 months out of the year and ski the rest, but that sounds like something only a wealthy person could do.
> that sounds like something only a wealthy person could do
My whole point is to seek out places where non-wealthy people can do it. Think smaller, think out of the way, think less development. No cell service at the ski hill, dirt road to drive up there, etc. etc.
Season pass is less than $1000, everyone has duct tape on their ski gear, etc.
I'll buy that, there are certainly small local mountains out there you can find. I don't know that I'd say the skiing is "great" (or even worth moving for) but they do exist.
It may not be popular to say on this site, but there is an issue with living in places like that though... if you're not white, it's going to be really rough going for you, even in "blue" states. I say this as a non-white person who grew up in rural America. The racism is off the charts, you will experience it in every facet of your life, which is really unfortunate because there are a lot of beautiful rural locations in this country that would otherwise be inhabitable if it weren't for that major issue.
The thing about living close to friends is that it's not as much work to meet. Having to travel for half an hour is already a lot since it might not be worth it to meet spontaneously, it is easier to develop friendships to someone close by.
This is the real key. You might choose to live near a particular friend-for-life, but you need to work on becoming at a bare minimum friendly with the people you're near.
I found my dream house: incredible view, 20 minutes to skiing (a lifelong passion), warm enough and with enough space to garden sustainably, quiet, close enough to the city, great price and interest rate.
Unfortunately nearly EVERYONE on the street is 20-30 years older than us, with very different lifestyles and interests. We’re “friendly” with them, but there’s no real community there. Housing costs have skyrocketed and inventory is nonexistent, so even the people who have expressed interest in moving closer are prevented from doing so.
Not really sure what to do. This is the only thing missing from the life we want.
This is why I specifically choose communities that are predominantly two or multistory story homes. Old people hate stairs, and the likelihood of being around younger more spry families is greater.
Couples who are 20-30 years older are also likely to move out in the next decade, with young families coming in. Depending on the build of the houses. Often there comes an age they don't want to deal with stairs, extra space to regularly clean, etc, or they are physically incapable. Of course if the area has no sense of community (i.e. rec centers, parks) then it might not appeal to younger people who want to start a family.
Its surprising that a neighborhood 20 minutes from skiing isn't heavily populated by skiers. But maybe your neighbors are hitting groomers at 10:00 AM on Tuesday while you are seeking out backcountry steeps on the weekend.
I moved into a similar situation. Rising housing costs plus neighbors 20-30 years older meant a lot of them were retiring elsewhere, and my neighbors are much younger now.
> Even when you live near your friends, meeting up can be difficult.
I think this depends on your definition of "near." If it's less than a 10 minute walk to your friend, you can meet to hang out for 15 minutes just because your free time happened to line up. Heck, you can do yard work together and chat while doing it!
One key piece of this that I think it overlooked is how our socio-economy has sold most of us on our difference, we've been very actively individuating and seeking signs of distinction that happen to be items and services we can buy.
This is a reason we should hang onto remote work as a first option. Life is too short to have to choose career over family and friends. We work to live. Having to sacrifice proximity to our people is not something we should accept lightly. If a job can be remote it should be.
I would say that for most people I know well, their life is their work, at least in very large part. The ones who "work to live" are mostly doing non-creative task or service-type jobs. Anyone doing anything creative or impactful seems to identify as their job in a pretty significant way. It will be one of the first things they start talking about, other than maybe telling you their name.
There is some variation between age groups. The older people I know are very much wrapped up in their work. The younger ones not always so much.
My friendship circles aren't at the kids stage yet, but we've got difference way of ensuring we stay in touch. For one of them we have a weekly Wednesday night boardgame hang. It's extremely rare everyone goes, but usually you get at least half a dozen. For another friend circle we have a Discord, if any of us finds an event we're interested in, we post it there and see if anyone fancies joining, usually some do.
I have a group of dad-friends who I like seeing individually, however the 'group hangs' we have put together are no fun for me at all. By hour two we are one-upping each other with wacky stories etc. and I'm eyeing the door.
It may be that we lack strong collective ties but basically all of my good friendships are sort of isolated from each other.
That has always been me. As an adult I have always had just one or two close friends at any point in time. Never really part of a larger group of more casual friends. And I agree, in those situations it seems like most people are just bullshitting to say something. I rarely come away feeling like it was time well spent, or that I got to really know anything about anyone.
Much easier and more rewarding to spend time with one person at a time.
Oh yes. I'm the same! When I am in a larger group, I have a hard time opening up and having meaningful discussions, whereas on one on one settings it's easier.
I have some friends of similar closeness, but they’ve still sort of fallen away after having kids. I think it is easy to over-estimate how robust these sorts of passive “it’ll naturally thrive in a good environment” types of maintenance are. Active maintenance, stuff like scheduling around the availability of the folks with kids, is necessary I think.
People also spend their time on a lot of "commitments" that aren't really important. The things you listed are stuff that can be skipped every once in a while if you don't want to go. Children shouldn't have any obligations, that's just something weird, but I know what you're talking about.
What most people do is have a lot of "commitments" hanging in the air in their future calendars, so that they can pick what pleases them in the moment. If they're expected at another event, they can blame the full schedule. Not meeting an "old friend" because you have to go do your hobby or celebrate your cousin's kid's birthday usually just means you didn't want to meet that person. When there's a will there's a way. You can always slot in some time if you really want. People spend huge amounts of time watching Netflix, scrolling social media and such. Everybody has time, unless they're a sailor on a nuclear submarine.
Yes that's also true. My core group of friends is no longer in my OG city as well for similar reason as me, as aren't most of my cousins. It's more uncles+grand+parents
I am in the process of a breakup (scare) right now and realizing how much of my social support system is gone when it's attached to your spouse and obviously loyal. Not totally on topic but I have learned my lesson to actively pursue friendships from now on and cultivate them - and the place where you live obviously affects this in a great way.
I (M) once got into a relationship with someone (F) who was oddly unfond of my friendships, esp female friends. She in a way isolated me from close friends. When we broke up, it was because she accepted a marriage proposal from her 'friend' whom I kept asking her about.
Anyways, it took me time to mend some friendships, some never recovered.
> Not totally on topic but I have learned my lesson to actively pursue friendships from now on and cultivate them
Yes, spousal relationships can sometimes drain us of other friends because of the exclusivity it comes with.
We sometimes have to be very deliberate in keeping that balance. That includes taking on new interests, getting to know our kids' parents, etc.
I encourage my wife to meet new people, as she relocated across our country, doesn't have a lot of friends around, and stopped working shortly before kids.
I call this the Mike Pence rule. Because as I recall at one point he was in the news due to his alleged behavior of not meeting with other women without his wife present.
I don't adhere to it, but I'm not judging or downvoting you and don't know why others are. I'm surprised other commenters are surprised to be honest.
Surely I'm not the only one who has been subjected to a seemingly endless stream of rom-coms where the protag ditches their SO for their good/best/work friend my entire life? So it shouldn't be surprising that some people are wary after being subjected to such propaganda.
It can be an issue when one person in the relationship has way more opposite sex friends than the other. It's hard for some to admit their insecurities in that situation, so they silently accept it instead of having a fight over it (which probably would have been healthier).
> Surely I'm not the only one who has been subjected to a seemingly endless stream of rom-coms where the protag ditches their SO for their good/best/work friend my entire life?
No, you aren't, nor are you the only one to give inappropriate weight to common tropes of some genre of fiction that exist because it is a convenient narrative framework given the genre in deciding how to deal with real life.
Not being alone in that does not, however, make it a good idea.
>No, you aren't, nor are you the only one to give inappropriate weight to common tropes of some genre of fiction
I'm not the one giving it weight as I don't adhere to the rule in question. However, like I said elsewhere, if you aren't aware that occasionally life imitates art and art imitates life, and some people actually try to idiotically mimic the romcoms they watch, well you haven't been out much these days I guess.
Not to mention the person they were replying to literally had this happen to them.
> I'm surprised other commenters are surprised to be honest.
I'm surprised because I've never met anybody like this, and while I've heard about Mike Pence I'm not sure I really believed it. Thinking about it more, since I don't hang out in any male-only spaces (where would I find such a thing?), almost by definition I'm never going to meet anybody socially who follows this rule.
Also, as other commenters have pointed out, this philosophy completely falls apart unless you genuinely believe that everyone is heterosexual, or you refuse to be friends with anyone who is not.
> Thinking about it more, since I don't hang out in any male-only spaces (where would I find such a thing?)
Going for coffee or having a beer with your male friend?
From your comment it seems you are mixing up friends and acquaintances. A friend is somebody that you spend time with one-on-one and for most people in the world it is unacceptable that you do that with a friend of the opposite sex if you are in a relationship.
Yes but how did I make that male friend? I've met every single one of my friends in a mixed-gender context (college, rec league sports, work, friend's party, D&D group, etc.). I'm a man, I'm in a long-term committed relationship with a woman, and I have plenty of good friends who are women. I've hung out with all of them either one-on-one or with other women besides my partner, otherwise I wouldn't consider them good friends.
I've never heard anyone express surprise about this, I've never had anyone decline an invitation because they aren't "allowed" to hang out with men, I've never had a second thought about any of this.
> if you are in a relationship
I still disagree even with this qualifier, but fyi this is moving the goalposts a bit. The original commenter suggested that mixed-gender friendships don't ever make sense.
> I've met every single one of my friends in a mixed-gender context (college, rec league sports, work, friend's party, D&D group, etc.).
They were acquaintances when you met them there, and later became friends.
> I've hung out with all of them either one-on-one or with other women besides my partner, otherwise I wouldn't consider them good friends.
I'm kind of surprised by that. Do you mean that you are spending time alone with other women in their houses or in your house, and your spouse is fine with that?
Maybe people are far less sexual in different places in the world, but where I live everybody will assume that when a man and a woman spend time together alone, they are having sex. I assume that too. Of course discounting for relatives.
All my women friends completely understood that I couldn't see them outside of in a group setting when I got into a relationship.
> Do you mean that you are spending time alone with other women in their houses or in your house, and your spouse is fine with that?
Yes that is what I mean. I guess more often in public or at some event, but sometimes at one of our homes.
> where I live everybody will assume that when a man and a woman spend time together alone, they are having sex
Here's what I don't understand: if you can't trust your partner to not instantly have sex when you aren't around, then why would you trust them to never be alone with other people in the first place? Does that make sense? In other words:
"You can go hang out with that guy, but don't have sex with him" - impossible, she'd never be able to resist the urge
"I'm going out of town for a couple days, don't go see any male acquaintances while I'm gone" - I trust her completely, of course she'll do as I say
How can you believe both of these things? You either trust her or you don't.
> Here's what I don't understand: if you can't trust your partner to not instantly have sex when you aren't around
It's not really about that. When people are grown up, there's really no reason for people to be one-on-one with the opposite sex unless it is for intimate reasons. And I think people are more sexual here (or people where you live are un-sexual), because most women and men here don't really want to have intimate friendship with people of the opposite sex, unless there is a sexual spark.
This might sound weird to you, but if somebody is so repulsive that you don't want to have sex with them, why would you want to be intimate friends with such a repulsive person? And the opposite: If somebody is so repulsed by you etc.
That doesn't mean people are horn-dogs that are trying for sex all the time. It's just a law of nature that when a man and a woman are together alone, they will sleep together. After all, that's what we were born to do.
But the relationship isn't relevant, this is a philosophy for how to treat everyone outside the relationship. Many of those people are the same gender as you but might still be attracted to you (oh no!), or a different gender but have no interest in you so there's no potential for mixed signals. So the rule a) does not protect you from accidentally leading someone on, and b) does cut off a bunch of potential friends for no reason.
>But the relationship isn't relevant, this is a philosophy for how to treat everyone outside the relationship.
I think the relationship is very relevant. For example, the comment would not make any sense either if you don't assume they're talking about about a strictly monogamous relationship. Worrying about giving "mixed signals" to people when you're in an open relationship would be way less of an issue understandably.
From the context of their post and the post they were replying to, the comment is about how to interact with people you may potentially be attracted to given the right circumstances (or who may be attracted to you) when you are in a strictly monogamous relationship.
> Surely I'm not the only one who has been subjected to a seemingly endless stream of rom-coms where the protag ditches their SO for their good/best/work friend my entire life? So it shouldn't be surprising that some people are wary after being subjected to such propaganda.
this exists of course, but surely we can tell the difference between fact and fiction? I just watched Midsommar last year but I am not afraid of Swedish people or the countryside.
One would hope that having a modicum of life experience would be enough to counter such propaganda, and I don't think it's surprising that people are surprised to encounter this viewpoint in real life.
>this exists of course, but surely we can tell the difference between fact and fiction?
I'm not sure we can? From what I understand, the person was responding to someone who literally had this happen to them after all. Life mimics art. Art mimics life. When you're told you're being left for someone that is a friend they have been frequently hanging out with one-on-one with your full knowledge, it takes a considerable amount of willpower to not introduce distrust to your psyche in your future relationships.
Like you, such a rule would be a dealbreaker for me. But I know people who requested this rule because they didn't either trust themselves or trust their friends for not misinterperting the situation. Why is it ok to say you're tempted by alcohol but not ok to say you may be tempted by the people you may be normally attracted to given enough time, the right circumstances, interactions, conversations etc.?
It's ok to say that about yourself, but it's not ok to force that requirement on a partner ("My wife would never allow me to hang out with another woman solo"). It's also not reasonable to say that since it works for you, it's the most "sensible" thing for everyone.
Huh? It’s perfectly okay. My wife and I have the same rules, and neither of us feel hampered by it. We don’t seek out opposite sex friends, and most events are by sex anyway (sports, board game groups, book clubs, etc.)
Even at the gym, men hang with men and women with women. It’s just how it goes.
I have genuinely never heard of a gender-segregated board game group or book club, and I've attended a lot of both. Sports, sure, but I find that usually only the more competitive leagues are gender-separated. When I join a recreational ultimate frisbee or soccer league, which I've done many times, it's always been mixed.
I believe you, I just want to communicate that what you're describing is definitely not even close to universal. One or both of us (probably both) are living in a cultural bubble.
We must live in very different areas. Most of my friends are either from sports (soccer watching, ultimate frisbee playing, running club, hiking club, etc.) or board game groups, and none of the ones I've ever attended are segregated.
I have seen book clubs for men and book clubs for women advertised, but (especially those for men) seem to use gender segregation as a selling point—which would mean most of them aren't.
that's an extremely poor judgment right off the bat, so i am not surprised by the downvotes. The second paragraph then sounds like they would rather sit in silence with another woman than have the chance of an interaction being interpreted incorrectly
At first I was gonna say "I don't think this is normal," but I'm not straight and so may not be the best judge of what is or isn't normal in heterosexual marriages.
Yeah, queer existence blows all kind of holes in the basic premise behind the logic.
There's a lot that's fundamentally problematic about it, not least of which is the implication that everyone except your spouse should be kept at arm's length, and this is the morally correct thing to do.
I'm straight, I definitely don't think this is at all healthy. If you don't trust your spouse to live their life as best they can with your best interests at heart, let alone just not cheat on you, why are they your spouse?
The problem of potential mixed messages and confusion is two-sided, so if the rule made sense at all, it would require avoiding both people who were either known to be attracted to your gender or of a gender you were attracted to.
The universal heterosexuality assumption makes those two equivalent which is convenient because it makes the rule seem marginally workable
I think the downvotes you're receiving are misjudged. It's a personal opinion to have, and as long as you're not harming or forcing that opinion onto others, i respect it.
I don't share it though. And it's interesting to think what assumptions lie beneath it. If you were bi, would your wife not allow you to hang out with men too? And if she were bi, what would you think of her having woman friends? Do you think this arrangement would also be "the most sensible thing to do" for a non-monogamous person, or for someone who's monogamous and completely at peace with their partner?
Gender isn't the only aspect of someone's 'type'. What if she has an inflexible sexual preference for men over 6ft? Is she then allowed short male friends?
"Safest", I'll grant. But "sensible " to me means actual trust between partners that such friendships are purely platonic - unless of course there's hard evidence that they aren't. It's admittedly rare to see (assuming all involved are heterosexual) but it can and does work.
I take umbrage with the idea that just because it wasn't a nice affirmation or multi-sentence deconstruction of their position that it was a "personal attack".
My comment was a) a genuine human emotional response followed by b) a factual observation that such a mindset is clearly derived from a lack of trust.
Of course I believe you—but you're referring to internal state that the rest of us don't have access to and which you didn't encode in your comment. Intent doesn't communicate itself—especially not in this medium, where all we have access to are tiny globs of text—so it has to be made explicit. The burden is on the commenter to disambiguate this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Since your comment didn't do that, I read it as more of a putdown than it sounds like you intended to convey. Commenting on someone else's intimate relationships and psychological state is exceedingly personal territory. Internet users often, unfortunately, step into that as a way of being snide to others (it's even a bit of a trope, though I'm not saying your comment went this far: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...). And this becomes 100x more likely when the context is an ideological battlefield, which gender issues are.
You're right and that's why hackers are down voting you and protesting against your comment. Part of respect between spouses is that you don't spend solo time with people of the opposite sex.
Also:
– Soccer players aren''t allowed to touch the ball with their hands.
Bisexual people can't have friends at all; gay people can't have same-gender gay friends, but they can't have same-gender straight friends either (because you might be attracted to them!), nor can they have opposite-gender straight friends (because they might be attracted to you!).
It's a little ridiculous. If you don't trust your partner to behave themselves around someone of their preferred gender(s), there's larger problems at play.
> but they can't have same-gender straight friends either (because you might be attracted to them!)
This actually can become a major issue with friendships. Obviously you can't act on the attraction and it can become very frustrating very quickly. I know from experience and I wish I didn't.
A lot of people have very unhealthy mindsets about sex and general emotional closeness. Most people in modern Western society never really unpack their feelings around jealousy, nor do they endeavor to understand their own emotional needs and figure out how to fulfill them in healthy ways.
But gay people can have opposite gender gay friends, but this only works for dyads not friend groups, because X is friends with Y and X is friends with Z implies Y cannot be friends with Z.
Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines in other places too. We've already asked you more than once to stop that. If you keep this up, we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so please fix this.
I've been taught that lesson many times. But it's just too easy for an introvert to be in a relationship and not have to socialise any more.
Over years I've given up on trying to be a social person and I just need to be honest about it: I hate socialising and will only do it when there's a clear and direct reason for doing so. The biggest reason is sex. Once that's not needed the reasons for doing so are very few and far between.
If you are only into sex, I guess it will be way easier to just pay for it, or go to places (online or offline) where casual sex is common. Otherwise friendship is about way more for most people. And if you cannot stand the ordinary (awkward) socialising, which I can relate to, I recommend finding a group that is more to your liking. Then socialising might be fun.. Usually when it is not about socialising, but the activities.
I didn't read it as only being in a relationship for sex, but that it's a motivator for socialization if you don't have it. Once you have a relationship and a sexual partner, there's not much motivation for additional friendships/casual socialization, if you're an introvert.
Oh, no, I can't do casual sex. I require a monogamous relationship. I get much more out of my relationship than just sex (like love, for a start) but the sex has to be there. It doesn't make sense, but that's just the way it is.
"It doesn't make sense, but that's just the way it is."
It makes sense in a way and you are the way you are .. but I think you might benefit from trying to open yourself to new experiences, unless you want to repeat the cycle again and again. (Oh and I don't mean casual sex. Rather something like interacting with people in a way you have not before, which is easiest by going somewhere you have not been before.)
Another way to approach it rather than trying to socialize or make friends directly is to find one or two weekly activities you enjoy that involve a group or collaboration of some kind. Sports, exercise, and boardgames are common ones but it could be anything.
People tend to make friends naturally this way over time, but even if you don’t, at least you are doing something fun and developing a life independent of your partner.
Tried that. I can never be consistent with it; my mind resists it every time. One reason is my natural schedule never seems to align with society. For example, I like cycling, but I'm never going to make it to a Sunday ride at 9am. Another reason is I don't necessarily like the kind of people who are into geeky stuff. I find board game nerds and computer geeks tiresome and annoying. It's better to communicate with them over the internet, at home. I don't think one should have to force themselves to do something they don't want to do several times a week. Nobody else does that.
Instead of friends I rely on my mental health, my skills and the financial system for insurance. It would be a big mistake for me to let my health deteriorate, get married or quit my job, for example.
“Another reason is I don't necessarily like the kind of people who are into geeky stuff. I find board game nerds and computer geeks tiresome and annoying.”
Well my point is to find something you enjoy doing and not worry about liking or socializing with the other people there. You can find the others annoying and they can find you quiet and unfriendly at first, but if you keep going regularly there’s a decent chance you’ll click with some people eventually, even if it takes a year or more.
I get the motivation and timing issues though. There is definitely a hump to get over in establishing a new habit.
I can relate with this. I only socialize for sex and/or money (e.g. networking). I have zero interest in anything else.
From my point of view everyone does the same, but can't deal with the isolating nature of it all and need to decorate it with friendships and similar unwritten rules and then act surprised when they don't work
"can't deal with the isolating nature" sounds like other people do feel a different need/reason to socialise no? People can pretend to socialise for one reason when really it's another, but people need to be interested in meeting this third need at least occasionally for the pretense to be worth trying.
Kind of, but most human relationships are somewhat regulated (marriage, parenthood, etc) so everyone has a framework on what to expect, do's and dont's.
Friendship is when everyone comes with a random set of expectations, all of them differing from person to person, and get disappointed when it doesn't translates to reality.
That's a remarkably sad, pathetic outlook, and one strangely contorted by Capitalism: Why do you want money?
That's the key here. Most people want money because, contrary to the old adage, money buys happiness. People want friends for the same reason: friends are the people who you are happy to spend time with. Pretty much any activity can be made more enjoyable when done with people you enjoy spending time with.
I see this happening again and again, sometimes repeatedly to the same persons. A friend of mine is currently going through this, but his solution to the problem is immediately trying to go into the next relationship, as fast as possible. I am very much looking forward to the next breakup. Another friend of mine just never got in touch with me after her new relationship, funnily we got to know each other from the last relationship to a friend of mine where I know she neglected her older friends to favour her new circle.
To be honest, I am not interested in being friends with a person when I get sidelined the moment someone goes into the next relationship. I have better things to do than to revolve around someone else life. I have my own friends. It's a very frustrating experience because you try to stay in touch and you don't know what's going on. It's not your fault.
I try to balance my relationship and my own, personal life. Breakups happened and rougher times in a relationship happen and it's essential to have your own friends. It is very important to me to not give up my identity and my social life. But it has to be said I also don't really accept too much inference into my own life and I don't think I could be in a relationship where each one doesn't have their own space. I know relationship that wouldn't really work for me because you have to negotiate stuff that is not negotiable for me.
I think in the US cars can increase your time with friends and family. Many people are lucky to live within a 60 minute drive from close friends or family, but without access to a car those trips become an epic trek. This is especially the case for people as they age, have kids, have a tight schedule, etc.
Furthermore, I'd venture to propose that this is not merely the case in the US. My family in Mexico City often use public transportation for work, but frequently drive to visit each other on weekends because that's much easier.
Pretty sure OP's comment assumed city life. In most rural and suburban USA towns, cars are the only thing that enables connection to others. If cars suddenly disappeared, half of America would effectively become hermits (not to mention starve due to lack of access to basic necessities like groceries).
Ending Car Dependence basically means move to a denser city, which you're never going to convince everyone to do.
No - car dependency isn’t a problem in rural areas, it’s a problem in metro areas. Places like Columbus, Indianapolis, Tampa Bay, San Diego, etc. are all completely 100% reliant on cars for transit.
People already live in the cities, there isn’t anything to convince them of for that. Instead we have to build transit that allows people to not rely on a car for their daily needs. Not that you can’t have one, of course. But walking, biking, and rail infrastructure need much, much more funding and then we can reduce how we handicap society with car-only transit.
What is interesting is that there are pockets of car free living even in these examples. E.g. in Columbus you have 45000 undergraduates at Ohio state, the bulk of whom live within a half hour walk of campus and all their friends from college, and might only use their car to shuttle themselves and all their roommates to the grocery store once a week.
I've heard it hypothesized that one of the underlying factors in why Americans romanticize the "college years" so much is that, for most, it's the only time they've ever lived in an environment (the campus) that's not designed primarily for cars.
Many of them have cars and pay for parking or if they live off campus they just park their car on the street. I would guess that 30% to 50% of those undergraduates have a car somewhere close by.
The best thing the university does is add a COTA (regional bus system) ticket as part of the tuition price to get students riding the bus locally instead of driving as they inevitably try to do.
Unfortunately, the bus service once you leave campus is comically bad so everyone just drives, catches a ride, or uses ride-sharing if you ever want to actually do anything not physically on campus. There are a lot of low-hanging fruit that the city and region refuse to take. We could run a tram from the southside all the way up to Old Worthington along the same street and you'd hit all the most dense spots in Columbus and you'd probably eliminate a lot of driving, traffic, and deaths but instead they're spending tens of millions of dollars adding new highways.
In the Netherlands you can bike between suburbs and rural areas. In the US that is hard, not only because of the distances, but also because there are no safe roads for bicycles in rural areas. It's highway shoulder or nothing, basically.
Yes, it does. Go visit the Netherlands and you'll see the remarkable difference. Just because some people are biking on those roads doesn't mean you have anywhere near the bicycle trip share that the Netherlands does.
Suburban USA towns are impossible to live in without cars because they're built with the assumption everyone has one. There's nothing inherent in lower-density housing that prevents it from being walkable, or from having basic amenities zoned to be closer to residential zones.
(Rural is a different matter, but they're usually left out of infrastructure in general)
> In most rural and suburban USA towns, cars are the only thing that enables connection to others.
I mean I suppose this is technically true. But as someone who was raised across a smatter of rural and sparse suburb and who now lives in/near dense urban areas - the urban areas are the ones having much more trouble feeling a sense of connection.
In all of the rural areas, everyone knew each other by first name, greeted each other, dropped by with baked goods. Were they dependent on cars? Yeah I guess. Feels like we missed the elephant in the room though
Even in the city its like this. Pick an arbitrary A-B in any city, e.g. go test brooklyn or chicago. Unless you happen to pick an A-B that is within a few mins walk of the same single rail line (no transfers), the car is always faster and by a good deal. Usually its like you can drive 25 minutes in a car or wait around for two busses that will get you there in an hour and ten minutes.
this hasn’t been my experience in manhattan/brooklyn fwiw. taking the subway is routinely faster. i can see the bus being slower but it’s usually not by much. You also need to deal with parking for a car if you’re not using a rideshare.
That's if you don't need to transfer. Brooklyn/manhattan example I'm assuming you are going into or out of the city into brooklyn. Look at the map, all the lines work for that sort of commute, and pretty clearly don't help you if you have a commute that isn't on this hub and spoke system.
In my city (west coast), public transport is simply not safe anymore (especially as a woman) due to lack of law enforcement or deterrents from crime. In my car - I feel safe. I am taking Krav Maga classes, but man, it didn't used to be this bad.
I think the perception of risk is what is off more than anything. LA metro for example saw about 180 violent crimes on it last year. For a system that sees almost a third of a billion boarding a year, the risk of violent crime happening is so low it doesn't make sense to consider. I expect the crime rate is similarly low on other transit systems.
That said the risk of crazy people ruining your day for no reason is not low. Ultimately the problem isn’t transit (rather it’s part of the solution), the problem is that the US social fabric is messed up.
I encourage you to check the stats, driving is one of the most dangerous things people routinely do, and nearly always far more dangerous than taking public transit.
Here's a case of rationalists misinterpreting risks based on data. Driving is a risk I accept. Being mugged or assaulted by someone on fentanyl with limited police or law enforcement on public transport is a risk that I cannot account for.
> Driving is a risk I accept. Being mugged or assaulted by someone on fentanyl with limited police or law enforcement on public transport is a risk that I cannot account for.
Why the difference? Maybe you feel like you're more in control of what happens when you're driving? But realistically however safely you personally drive, you'd still be at risk of being driven into by someone else (and there's a parallel breakdown of the rule of law where uninsured, unlicensed drivers are everywhere nowadays) and there's not much you can do.
I would rather get raped than die. Most people would.
Edit: Actually, now that I think about it, what cases are you talking about where people get full on raped on public transit? That seems vanishingly rare, if at all extent.
I strongly recommend finding a gym for Brazilian jiu jitsu, judo, muay thai, boxing, etc. They're constantly being testing and evolved through MMA fights, and they'll get you some full-contact, full-intensity sparring experience.
I am not sure I want to travel on the bus with a scared man trained in multiple martial arts. All the stats say that criminality is pretty low, I am safe on the bus, but fearful scared trained dide sounds like someone who will make it less safe for all of us.
You have no idea what you're talking about, but I'm glad you feel safe on the bus. Criminality stats are low, so the chances of being assaulted on our light rail or buses is indeed low, but it only takes one incident to lead to loss of life or injury. I'm not a "scared man", I'm trying to prepare myself for unhinged situations, which we've been witnessing at an increased rate after 2020, when our city/county reduced police and law enforcement presence.
Here's an article about the massive rise in homicides in our county since 2019 [1]. Maybe the numbers are "low" to you, but it's 1000x higher than in countries such as Japan. I won't go further into the reasons why due to risk of being downvoted by people unwilling to accept the new reality of west coast urban life.
I couldn't find historic chart for Seattle but most cities are having a similar spike in crime so I'm using NYC. The rise in crime from pandemic is from historically low numbers. The jump is big but the absolute numbers are still low.
NYC had the same murder count in 2019 as 1948. 2022 was same as 2012. The peak in 1990 was 5 times as much as last year.
You are the one misrepresenting risks. In addition to what other person said, majority of homicides is among people who know each there - people killing their own partners, families, friends, business associates and partners in crime.
I'm lucky enough to have moved, but my last home was 4 miles from the closest store, 3.8 miles from the closest sidewalk. The closest bus stop was at the aforementioned store. These numbers weren't even that big for the area where I was living. If I didn't have a car I'd spend too much time coming and going from the places I'd need to be to engage with my community.
I'd say "everyone should try living somewhere they don't need a car", but that's not feasible for everybody.
It's only not feasible because that's how the infrastructure and town planning in many urban areas has been done, and has somewhat succeeded because the degree to which you'll be dependent on a car to get everywhere isn't a super high priority for most when first choosing somewhere to live. The challenge is convincing governments and home buyers that the pros of less car-dependent cities massively outweigh the cons (which are mostly around accepting being closer to your neighbours and having less yard space/more stairs, plus governments having to focus on more than a single mode of transport when building roads etc).
It depends on the activities. I’m less active in the local outdoors group than I was but basically everyone has a car, even if they live in the city which I don’t, because it gets very old seeking out carpools for specific trips all the time.
It was the same - I just used public transport instead of the car to meet up with my friends. I never knew nor hung out with my neighbours, cars or no cars.
>Reducing car dependency will increase social activity
My social life (and sense of community) took off when I graduated from college, where I was largely living car-free, and started driving 45 minutes to my full-time job each day. How do you explain that?
Living in a car-dependent community, and choosing to go car-free, sounds like adding another layer of social isolation to me.
We bought a two-unit house together with another couple, with the same idea in mind. They have a kid the same age as our youngest (18 months) and also do not have any family nearby to help with childcare.
It took over a year of planning and searching to find a place that we could all agree on. It was also hard to find a bank to give a loan to 4 adults because it is so unconventional.
In my mind, I call it "our modern village". So far, we have only had a couple of group dinners, because we are all so busy with renovations, jobs and kids etc. Modern adult life. So, those are dinners that would not have happened otherwise. Its also great to share chores like organizing the storage shed, mowing the lawn etc.
I am really pleased with our decision so far, although I am really looking forward to these renovations being done.
It intrigues but doesn't surprise me that most comments are "here's why this is hard/not possible/unfeasible". I think that part is obvious, the reason this article needs to be said is because it makes a significant difference. Prioritize it higher. That won't make the difficulties going away, but as you might prioritize being close to your work, a school for your children, other activities, being close to friends or community is important.
I've done both, living alone for long periods of time and living with community houses (which weren't really friends) and living near to close friends. Living nearby to close friends has been vastly more rewarding than any other option.
Nice idea if you can afford it, and few can afford to live precisely where they want. I've made a habit of travelling to visit friends, which is easy for me because I'm childless and most of my old friends have kids. At least half of my trips are to see someone I know. That plus that occasional phone call, video chat and a WhatsApp group keeps me closer to these old friends now than in the past.
But the idea of uprooting my life, finding a new job, finding a new home and then moving near one friend seems excessive and unrealistic. It's not like all my friends live near each other and are waiting for me to join.
Yeah, I also think that unless you are already very close friends or there’s already a group established somewhere, moving somewhere with the purpose of being nearby just one friend could backfire and strain the friendship.
Friendships often fall into a natural cadence where you see each other every month or so, every week or so, etc. If you aren’t already in a near-daily rhythm with someone and move close to them with the expectation of establishing that, the other person could feel that you are coming on too strong, so to speak, and pull back, in which case you could feel frustrated that you chose where to live based on a friend that’s not really on the same page as you in terms of what you’re looking for in a close proximity friendship.
If you do this, it’s probably better to have low expectations and allow things to develop slowly over time (if at all). In the meantime you can try to recruit others to move nearby and establish a group so that all your eggs aren’t in one basket.
While it felt awkward at first, I've been intentionally trying to befriend my neighbors. I've managed it with one couple and am working on a second. Tech helps reduce the barriers between distant friends, but we're wired to value eye contact and physical contact.
I have friends where I live I wouldn't want to abandon, and honestly my newer friends are a better fit for my lifestyle than my oldest, closest friends. But yeah, if I didn't have a social life here I could move easily. But I wouldn't do it just to be near one or two close friends. Maybe if my five favorite people all lived in the same town...
Yeah in your case might make more sense to try and convert your local friendships into close ones… not always easy for busy adults, though. All my close friendships from the last few years were cemented by doing trips together, even just short getaways like a weekend ski trip.
Sorry for my earlier comment suggesting you had no life, reads more aggressive than I intended :)
I can definitely attest to this, when I was in my late 20's, my best friend that I met in grad school bought a house, I was still living in an apartment when she called and said the place next door went up for sale, I put in a full price offer immediately. It was the best investment I ever made. For the next 5 or 6 years we had so much fun, her boyfriend knew me and my girlfriend from school and we all just hung out and did everything together. We had the key to each other's front door and would watch out for each other. We had dual house parties and all kinds of things. It was one of the best times of my life. But they got married we got married, jobs, moving to new houses, life happened. You focus shifts over time to work and family. It gets harder. I wish I could live next door to my BFF again. Maybe someday.
> But they got married we got married, jobs, moving to new houses, life happened. You focus shifts over time to work and family. It gets harder.
Life didn't "happen" here, you designed divergent paths. This is I know largely a semantic nitpick, but I think this kind of phrasing belies the most common sort of problem that keeps people from doing things like what the OP suggests. In a way it often feels like "life happens" to us, and certainly in some cases that's largely true (unforeseen health complications or accidents for instance), but marriages and jobs and houses and friends really shouldn't feel like that. And if they do, it probably bears a bit of introspection and deliberation to ensure you're not just hurtling through milestones that seem age appropriate and are instead deliberately moving towards the best life you can imagine designing.
Note none of this is commentary on your specifics, of course I know next to nothing about you. I'm only attempting to focus on the phrasing there, and how I think it is indicative of a very common trap we can fall into wherein we can tend to relinquish agency and thus without thinking slide away from the things we cherish (such as friends close enough to be a kind of soul mate).
Correct, you do not know me or my friends. You only know what I told you, that we had a lot of fun for a while, but I shortened what would have been a much longer story. It is easy to judge others when you do not know the details, I understand that. The best possible life is often a trade off between a lot of fun and responsibilities, children, family, careers, parents that need care and well, one could explain those things at great length, or one could say "life happens". Caring about others sometimes means making trade offs. I don't know you, so I won't judge you or your perspective, but you might want to consider broadening your perspective about what the best possible life entails. It's not always as simple as you might imagine. I wish you well, and hope you find your best possible life and find a way to understand how others often make a number of complicated calculations to find that, often that is not as simple as you might realize right now.
As I attempted to make clear, none of what I said was judging you or your life or choices or anything of the sort, it was simply a reflection on a turn of phrase (a semantic nitpick as I said, but one I thought worth exploring because of the how often that phrase is used in I think subtly pernicious ways, again to say nothing about you specifically). But my apologies if this wasn't clear enough and it seemed I was judging your individual choices, definitely not my intention.
Of course there are trade-offs and it isn't easy (or possible) to get everything you want. My point was specifically around ensuring we feel responsible and in control of our life, not as though it's happening to us (which again is not a hypothesis about you specifically, just commentary on the language). It's a common trap, one I fall into all too easily, and language is I think an important way the trap gets lain. Perhaps you have not experienced that trap at all, again, was just focusing on the language.
Similar story here. Me and my partner befriended another couple through grad school in our early 20s and the next few years were just the best — we would go to bars, movies, horse races, parties, shows — everything together. And we had so much fun. When I look back on that time it almost feels like I'm remembering a movie.
Then covid happened, they had to move. Most of my other friends moved away as well. I switched jobs and the new job is 100% remote. My life is hell right now in terms of human interactions and I don't really know how to fix it. I feel like in order to establish new relationships I'd have to spend a lot of time with other people doing something together. But between my job and my family I feel like I just don't have time for that.
This is why I love living in the city. I hang out with my current roommate, my old roommate from college, and my sister's current and previous roommates, mostly at or around a local coffee shop.
The magic solution here isn't to get all your friends to live on the same block (heck housing and schools are hard enough as it is), but rather to connect with your local community wherever you happen to live. That's how people have survived since the dawn of civilization. You were born somewhere, and chances were that that's where you'd be for the rest of your life. You had no choice but to play nice with people around you, because your happiness depended on it. The very idea of having friends in different places across the country and the globe is a fairly modern invention. Regardless of how many people you know everywhere else, if you aren't friends with your neighbors then you will always be lonely.
I don't think I'm alone in that I find it impossible to find common ground with most normal people. I am a proper weirdo and my neighbors near my current home are basically randomly selected suburbanites.
I would struggle to talk to them for 3 minutes.
My friends are my friends because they have the right values, priorities, and culture. My culture has almost no overlap with that of the "community" in which I live. They don't know my music, my food, my memes, my values, my lifestyle. We're not even awake at the same time. All we share is geographic proximity.
Pretty much every time I talk to random people in the US for more than a few minutes, they drop inflammatory remarks to see how I respond, to identify which side of the culture war I am on, so they can (based on my identifying responses) either antagonize or befriend me. I ignore these comments, as I am disinterested in the American culture war and its political sports-teamism.
The article is right, and I think yours is a casual dismissal.
> My neighbors near my current home are basically randomly selected suburbanites.
I think that's an understated problem right there - suburbs are awful for fostering good relationships. Some suburbs have gone out of their way to have events like block parties - but most have no real common every-day interaction and the infrequency of common tasks like shifting grocery shopping to a once a week task and minimizing interactions outside of PTA meetings is really hurting our ability to form strong social bonds.
I live in a city so my neighbors are a metric ton of randomly selected folks who I pass often walking on the street and doing life tasks - additionally the population density is high enough that I have multiple different board game events hosted by stores and a plethora of choices for D&D groups to choose from. I think that density makes a very big difference.
Yeah. For all the hate density gets, living in e.g. Manhattan has made it really easy for me to find like minded friends. I live within like 10 minutes of millions of people so it would be weird if I couldn't connect with people locally. You just have to consciously try to speak to the same people, it's easy to float around and never see the same person twice.
In the summers I live in a real city with fair density (Berlin) and love talking to strangers, but even there the people directly in my building are mostly conservative immigrant families who give me dirty looks because I'm a man with hot pink hair.
I am pretty against neighbor relations these days. I spend a lot of energy and money maintaining relationships with my friends from the scenes in which I inhabit, who are in many different cities.
Conformity is not the most important virtue. I’ve been a weirdo my entire life, and if people are judgmental about me, that’s their failing, not mine. I bet most people on the spectrum know what I’m talking about.
Being friends with someone or generally getting along with them doesn't mean you have to "conform" with their views or lifestyle. That is something we seem to have lost as a culture in today's political environment.
99% of people out there aren't looking to get into a fight with you no matter how different you are. They aren't looking to change your views on things or have their own views changed. The sooner you accept that, the easier building new relations with them will be.
I have no problems meeting and talking to people. The person you insulted said that they were getting dirty looks because of their non-conformity. Somehow in your mind that became their fault.
What helped my suburban neighborhood come together was putting in a community garden. We have apple trees, thornless blackberry plants, grape vines, strawberry and blueberry plants, and a raised garden bed for everyone. People talk when they come down to weed, water, plant, etc. It gets people out of their houses in the evenings and gives a gathering place where we also host the block parties.
My opinion is every suburban neighborhood should be planed with a central community garden place.
That's good for gardeners. Maybe also a communal board game space, a communal maker space, a communal basketball court, and so on? We can perhaps put them together into a "community centre".
It turned out that even people who don't want to garden would come out and just hang out and talk around the garden. Most humans just like being around green growing things. Probably from millions of years of evolution.
Have you tried talking to them for 3 min? Your statement is written as if it’s a hypothetical.
When I talk to the parents at my kids school (5min from my house) I’m amazed at how much we have in common. 50% of the dads are computer programmers. I’ve found things in common with most of the other parents.
When I talk to my neighbours the one on my right has a PhD from the same college as me and the one on the left went backpacking to the same places as me.
You live where you do because of “reasons” your neighbours live there for similar reasons. We’re all random suburbanites.
I have tried. There are a lot of career military people around here (the cold half of the year I live not extremely far from Nellis AFB) and people who moved away from SoCal because of rising costs and perceived political shifts.
I think it would be less of an issue in a more homogenous place, but southern Nevada is pretty firmly "purple" and people seem to try to classify you as friend or foe immediately upon meeting.
I'm on the weird spectrum and have a similar experience with neighbors. I suppose the more of an outlier you are, the less likely it is to randomly land in a compatible community, and therefore the harder you need to work to make it happen. Of all the places I've lived, high density residential areas near high densities of colleges were the best at making this possible. The problem is, settling in such areas tends to be expensive (NYC/Boston/Bay Area/etc), so you look further out, and wherever you can afford tends to be majority townies/normies.
Referring to other people as "townies/normies" seems like you're already looking down on them and not wanting to make any effort in getting along with them.
Why do you live where you live? If you move somewhere where everyone is very different from you and find you can’t get along it’s hard to blame it on them. They probably get along with each other just fine.
Not sure how you wound up where you are, but it sounds like you're not in the right place. If you look around and don't see any of 'your people' around, it might make sense to go wherever 'your people' are instead.
Rather than reacting with knee jerk derision, I took a moment to read your blog's "My Context" page, and I think I do have to conclude you're living in the right way for yourself. Someone who puts freedom from coercion first and foremost in their ethical thinking, to the extent that you do, is going to find themselves at odds with the Overton window almost anywhere they go.
I'm not sure you're doing something in your own life that's much different here from what those people in the States are doing to you. You too are dropping hints and observing responses to decide whether to befriend or antagonize a given person. Hence the tone of some of the other comments - you've successfully antagonized a few people by what you've written here. I can't really tell whether you just dislike this "cultural war" you have going on (whatever that is) or whether you also have a distaste for this whole befriend/antagonize mechanism in general.
In any case I'm glad you've got a group of people you can pal around with online. It's good to have friends.
> Pretty much every time I talk to random people in the US, they drop inflammatory remarks to see how I respond, to identify which side of the culture war I am on, so they can antagonize or befriend me. I ignore these comments, as I am disinterested in the American culture war and its political sports-teamism.
Weird. Everyone in my neighborhood avoids politics like the plague.
I think my favorite part about where I live is my neighbors. The thing we have most in common with is our community, kids, and the troubles that come with home ownership.
We invite eachother over for pool parties and BBQs. My neighbor, who I'm pretty sure is exactly the opposite of me politics-wise (I've heard him talking in the backyard before), nevertheless invites everyone over for labor day and 4th of July. We talk house and neighborhood problems. His kids are only slightly younger than me but we still talk kid stuff.
Another neighbor is on a fire safety council (a non-profit) and helps deal with some of the issues with that, and I've helped them with tech stuff before. You wouldn't think it, but he's kinda a nerd himself. This is a 60 year old retired firefighter with a garage full of motorcycles who could probably bench press me but his house is full of legos and star wars stuff.
In general, people are very happy to help with problems and cordial. We have a text message thread with about 15 houses on it.
The interesting part of the whole discussion is whether your response is reasonable.
100 years ago - the blink of an eye on the timeline of humanity - it would have been ludicrous. Now it's become commonplace for the friends you make in your youth to experience a global diaspora out of convenience and personal preference, and to try to maintain a relationship using technology and occasional travel. It also seems reasonable for people to make friends with reasonable success to the small fraction of people geographically scattered over the globe who happen to share your taste in music and all your other hyperspecific personal preferences, connecting again through technology and travel.
The big question is whether this is reasonable. I thought in 2006 that I'd maintain friendships with the friends I made (due to physical proximity!) in my high school classes and athletic teams using Facebook. Instead, Facebook decided to use my attention on their platform due to those friends to sell ads, and the relationship maintenance got harder, and eventually went by the wayside. The handful I still maintain contact with happen to have physical proximity more than commonality of values/priorities/culture.
The friends I have on forums, Discord, Reddit, and in Rocket League/Minecraft due to shared interests are real people, probably perfectly nice, just physically located on the other side of the Internet connection and a screen (or microphone), but if I've never shared a handshake, hug, meal, or home with them are they the same kind of friends as my neighbors, members of local rec leagues and hackerspaces, workplace friends, and other people who live near me?
The big experiment of social media is whether nonconformity to local community, and instead forming virtual communities online, performs the same function to bring a happy, healthy life to the humans who practice it. You may say that it's too early to tell, that present failings are just growing pains, but I think the early evidence is quite strongly pointing towards "no".
I don't use social media, so I don't think this applies. I also think the corporate-mediated friendship model is toxic and disgusting. I'm not on IG or FB and my IRL friends from "back home" I connected with first on interest-based email mailing lists before we ever met in person.
For what it's worth, when I lived in rural Ireland I didn't click with _anybody_. I live near Amsterdam now and have already meet two people who could grow to be good friends.
"to identify which side of the culture war I am on"
I _HATE_ this aspect of casual conversation with strangers in the US (or people in the Irish midlands trying to suss out if I'm Catholic or Protestant) and I do not miss it at all. Will the US have their own version of the Irish Troubles?
If you're interested in finding more of an in-person community (and you may not be! Primarily online might be your preference, and there's nothing wrong with that), I'd recommend finding a bigger, denser city. It almost doesn't matter which; the more people there, the more of _your people_ you'll find there. This is effectively a smaller analogue of finding your people online, since the Internet has the most people—but making a compromise to be able to connect locally. That said, your profile suggests you're in Berlin, which as a complete outsider (I've never been to Germany at all) I would've presumed would be sufficiently urban.
"they might be different to me" is not the same as "they will be actively hostile to me when they learn more about how different I am".
In the US I find conformity to be widely regarded as desirable, and being "weird" to be seen as a negative. I am weird. This lowers most normal people's opinions of me.
On the contrary I think many people desire conformance in themselves because they are afraid to stand out. However, often weirdness is admired when it is observed. This is why 'artists' are a thing. Granted, the specific ways in which you are weird could definitely influence this, no one likes a creepy person.
Sorry to drop an inflammatory remark on you, but you sound like an extreme version of a total snob. I call it “everyday fascist”. Only your way of life, only your values, etc. are superior. No one cares about your weirdness, but also no one likes your holier than thou attitude.
It might be healthy to socialize with people who don't share your music, food, memes, and lifestyle (values perhaps being the exception where you'd still need to align). Living in a bubble and interacting only with people exactly like you seems pretty limiting. There's no reason you can't be friendly with people that live very different lives, but your phrasing makes it sound like you're not even giving them a chance. Perhaps you have more in common than you'd think!
This is why you move to somewhere without the whole culture war bullshit in the local lexicon. Like the "liberal hellhole of california," a statement that serves as a great filter towards a lot of ignorant people spending much time around you there. Not a sure thing you won't see these folk, just that they've been relegated into de facto containment zones in the more rural parts of the state.
> drop inflammatory remarks to see how I respond, to identify which side of the culture war I am on
Very real, and very hilarious. I called a tow truck recently in rural CO, and the driver asked where I lived. Upon hearing NYC, the first words out of his mouth were "I hear that's a real shithole. My phone's been telling me murders and robberies are way up." God bless America.
Cannot emphasize this enough. There has been a lot of discussion of the decline of the "third place", but I know a lot of folks who aren't really involved in anything outside of home/work, so their friend circles (largely built up from school/early working years) slowly whittle away as people move, while not doing anything to create new ones.
Beyond just neighbors - regardless of what activity/hobby you like, chances are there is some group/community near you. Getting involved and showing up on a regular basis will do wonders for cultivating new friendships IME, and you're likely to have a lot more in common with those folks than a random subset of people that you happen to live next to.
I think the underlying challenge is that mobility, work connections and the internet have shown us that there are lots of people with deep similarities to us in the world.
I moved from NYC to Boulder and then more recently to Westchester (just north of NYC). There are some really nice people in the town I live in, and we connect through having kids in the same schools. However, it's not nearly the same as my conference friends from the devrel world. We used to geek out over everything from carpentry to compilers, we had a shared community and interests, and because I got to present a lot and hang out with the other speakers, my "tribe" were geeky enough to be interesting, social enough to be an easy hang, and opinionated enough (they thought they were worth listening to on stage or they wouldn't have been presenters) that they usually had a hot take that was entertaining, enlightening or both.
I'm still looking for the small town where they all live so I can move nearer to them, but best as I can tell they are a nomadic people to be found only in airport lounges, hotel rooms, and occasionally on the side of the stage after their talk concluded :(
This is correct but yet a completely foreign concept to some. In less affluent cultures this is how people conduct their lives because their survival very much depends on it.
But in our modern, increasingly individualistic way of life going through the discomfort of "getting to know" your neighbors carries with it more cons than pros. You likely don't share any common interests or goals & are way too busy from $DAYJOB to build common ground. That same $DAYJOB may eventually pull you to a different city or state causing the weak connection you struggled to make to fade away.
Building relationships with others takes time and effort but the norms we've settled on in society make it very challenging to do so.
The biggest problem with the way modern people live IMO is the way people raise kids.
It used to be an entire village raising the entire village's kids. That was easy when everyone shared a language, culture, and food. You could trust the cooking of your neighbor 5 houses away, their standards were the same as yours. Then around the industrial revolution and later, that trust disappeared and it started to be one parent working 8 hours a day and one parent raising the kid (for the middle class), and households largely not helping each other.
Today it's both parents working for 8 hours a day, instead of a truly fair society in which each parent working 4 hours and take care of kids for 4 hours. They sold it to us as gender equality ("women and men should both work and both take care of the house" -- sounds great) but instead of redistributing the workload of 8 hours to 4 hours each, they (the landlords, the corporates, the shareholders) took advantage of the situation to overwork both men and women to 8+ or even 10+ or 12+ hours per day when we should all be working 4 if we want a fair, gender-equal society. Add on the problem of unequal pay being given to men and women, the result is usually the women having to give up their career in the name of household income because neither man nor woman's company is interested in letting them work for 4 hours each and the man's company is giving him 3X the woman's salary for the same amount of work.
And there's no village to help each other out when parents get sick or want/need to travel without the kids.
This is probably the biggest reason I'm most likely not wanting kids. There's just not time nor community resources for it. It doesn't sound like fun.
I got a dog and now find common ground with anyone else in my neighborhood walking their dogs. Like a parallel community of 20+ dog owners in my vicinity I would have never talked to (I live in a densely populated place)
My team and I are building an app to help guys make friends. Right now it's basically a bumble BFF clone but we're working on adding a new feature that will put people into small, local groups based on your interests (climbing, chess, board games, you get the idea).
FYI the network isn't super big right now, a few hundred scattered across the world. Currently trying to focus on building a network in NYC.
Anyway if anyone's interested you can go to our landing page here:
https://www.olleyapp.io/ (it's in progress)
or go directly to iOS/Android app store and search for "Olley".
Any feedback is much appreciated. Muchas gracias amigos.
I'm glad to see someone is working on this. I spent a good amount of time prototyping a similar idea a while back and decided I wasn't the right one to solve this problem, but I think it is a very important one. I was going into it with a group-only approach, as the 1:1 connections make things feel more serious versus being one person in a group. Though with groups you don't want to feel like you're the stranger in a group of existing friends, so having it create "fresh" groups is ideal (unlike Meetup).
Good luck building this, I'll have to keep an eye on it.
That’s cool! Before even seeing it, my feedback is to make sure no sexual/romance kind of encounters can take place via the app. All other people meetings apps seem to be sexually oriented.
Right now like I mentioned our app is basically a clone of bumble BFF, i.e. you create a profile and you swipe to match with people you want to connect to.
But we think swiping might be a bit of a weird way to make friends so the next major feature we're releasing will help guys find small groups (like 4-6 people) who share a similar interest and live close to each other.
Meetup seems like it _could_ do something like this but in my own experience it seems generally catered to groups that are larger and more formal. Also as someone else mentioned it seems like the quality of the network has degraded a lot.
If meetup is the bar they will probably do fine. I’m not sure if you used it recently but meetup has become an absolute spam fest/useless for actually organizing events (in my experience). At one point it was great but I think it’s lost it’s community.
I live in Europe and have moved to more than 10 cities in my life. It always takes so much time for me to reach the point where I can confidently say that I know a city well. I wish I could make friends with people who have been residents of the city for a longer period. I've tried using Meetup to meet people, but it often full of newcomers.
The friction with Meetup, is that I'm not "a whiskey guy", or a hiker, or a rock climber. I have hobbies, but I'm not defined by them, so meeting up just on that hobby doesn't work. The app needs to detoxify a man going on a date with another man for non-romantic,
non-sexual purposes.
The people on Meetup aren’t defined by their hobbies either. I have had wonderful times on group hikes through Meetup, and I don’t consider myself to be “a hiker.” I just enjoy hiking sometimes. Same with the other people who were there.
If you see something you think you might enjoy doing, I encourage you to give it a shot. Even if you’re not a [that thing]-er.
"Befriend who live near you" is another way to solve for this.
As an adult it's hard, you need a hobby/interest that promotes socializing or has a community around it.
One of my biggest hobbies is being a DJ, I get booked regularly locally and nationally, and that's allowed me to meet and make a lot of new lasting friendships in the past years.
I've seen people make strong bonds over crossfit, martial arts, religious groups, etc.
Only 12% have zero friends? I would have suspected more. As an adult it seems you either have friends from childhood/college or you don’t have friends.
You also make friends with other parents when you have children, especially the first intense childbirth experience, but then also school, sports, scouts, camping, etc. The effect declines as your children get older.
After that, I agree, new friendships are rare, but perhaps also unnecessary, depending on your gender and personality (middle-aged autistic males probably have loner superpowers).
I made plenty friends as an adult well into thirties through a hobby I used to pursue very seriously and now mostly for the social aspect. Now I have a kid and I also meet other people with kids.
You can flip the ordering: live somewhere sufficiently dense and walkable, then make friends there. I’m not sure if this works for especially transient cities (SF, DC), but it’s my story in Denver, and I gather works well in a lot of mid-tier cities (or anywhere you could conceivably buy housing where it’s dense instead of rent forever, always moving).
(Caveat: this is in retrospect and certainly wasn’t my original intention. I thought I’d be here two or three years tops and then leave the states again.)
It's slightly funny to me that this is presented like something that needed to be discovered, and something for which people have to make apps. This is just a basic thing about being alive, people have known this life hack for about a million years. Maybe some people forgot, or were told something else and believed it, I don't know. Maybe not funny, maybe sad.
This comes off like a really arrogant brag that you, the freethinker, have lived in such perfect community and locality that you're surprised to learn there are others who do not. That you can pretend not to know western society was designed to isolate us from birth to death, because you've so effortlessly flaunted it.
Very few adults I know can say that they have some of their closest friends within a five-minute walk. I think it’s quite rare in North America, at least outside of a few dense urban neighborhoods.
What I'm saying is that people have been living close to their friends and relatives since there have been human societies, as a rule. That has been the default for humans. It's the last hundred and fifty years or so in which that changed, and maybe especially the last few decades. It'd be like if people started sleeping during the daylight, and then somebody said "hey, I just realized there are benefits to sleeping at night, so I built an app to help you do that."
Okay, yeah, living near friends is good, but the philosophy behind this project seems broken.
First of all, why would I use an app or a website for this specifically? I already know where my friends live, and they aren't all friends with each other, so I would just use existing resources to look for rentals near friends I would want to live near.
And chances are that I'm only going to get to live near 1 friend, because my friends live all over the city, so it's just going to be a balancing act between which neighborhoods that my friends live in that I would also want to live in. Nearby amenities and transit are going to also play a big role, so even a cherished friend my not be a good match if they don't live somewhere that meets my needs.
Ultimately, if our trend towards further loneliness is to be reversed, we shouldn't be focusing on moving near the friends we have, but making friends in our own neighborhoods, and being a part of our communities. There is a growing antisocial attitude that I think this project helps perpetuate in that people see it easier to remove themselves from their communities to chase existing social connections rather than to build new social connections.
I really don't mind living far from my friends and I'm content with only meeting them a couple of times a year. More than that and it becomes exhausting. Surely I can't be the only one who gets completely drained from hanging out with people.
With that said, I speak with them every day online.
Since moving is not an easy proposition, taking the problem from the opposite end can be useful too:
Make friends with people who live near you.
Even though neighbors (or people in the neighborhood) may not be the "perfect friends" meeting all the common interests, I'm often surprised by really nice people in the area, people who I overlooked because I judged them too fast; cultivating those connections eventually creates new friends.
If you had a say in where you're living (as opposed to be forced to live there out of hardship), there are probaly at least some commonality with people nearby. Cultivate the common aspects and look past the differences as much as feasible. Human connections are rich and highly multi-dimensional.
Yes totally. Join Tennis clubs, Soccer clubs, (other clubs).. have a coffee regularly w/ the ones you get along with.. it's incredible easy to make connections if you put the effort IMO.
In my early 20s I experienced communal living. We must have been around 120 young people, from everywhere, immigrants in a foreign country. The deal was that we took over 2 small empty buildings and made them ours. You'd spend the entire day with other people, everyone did what they could. Some cooked, some did repairs, some played music, whatever. I was a student at the time, was there for about a year before going back to real life. I've never been happier, that's truly what humans are designed for.
I wonder if this isn't "gaming the system" a bit. I think a lot of the findings are seeing the outputs of being happy people, not inputs. Living near people I know doesn't make me closer to them any more than maintaining friendships make me happier. Being happy makes closer friendships and closer friendships make living close more valuable. A lot of my friendships faded not because I wasn't working on them but because I wasn't enjoying them anymore.
Neither the words "housing" nor "cost" appear anywhere in this writeup. It reads like "just buy a house and have a community, bro!"
It's like the author never considered that the reason people might be isolated is because any community ties get ripped up and scattered to the winds with every rent hike or eviction or job change. After a few cycles of this, why bother making connections? You'll probably never see your neighbors again 12 months from now.
Nathan Shelley: "Well, that she laughs in my face and says no. And that I scurry away, humiliated, never to be allowed in my favorite restaurant ever again. So that the next time we have some kind of family celebration, I'll just have to... you know... sit on the pavement outside eating take away fish and chips watching you through the window like some Dickensian street urchin."
Uprooting and moving with work and family is hard and expensive.
So, as the Stephen Stills lyric goes...
If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with.
My best friends may live hours away but it's all upside to still befriending those who are physically nearby every day when you walk out the door. You never know where it'll lead.
I used to live near friends, and commuted by car 20-30 minutes each way to work. I actually enjoy driving and enjoyed the commute, generally, but recognized it was a chunk of time out of my day. (Granted, once I lived closer to work, I bike commuted instead, so while it was a shorter-distance commute that was healthier for myself and the environment and my wallet, it didn't really save me a ton of time)
So, I reasoned, why not live closer to work and only "commute" on those occasional times when I gather for dinner or other social events with friends? After all, it's far less frequent, and happens off-hours sometimes.
Of course, what actually happened was socializing and maintaining those connections felt like a LOT more of a chore. (You want me to drive WHERE? At rush hour? Just for dinner?)
Turns out, the obvious incentives tied to one's livelihood are stronger than the obvious incentives of friendship/socializing.
I moved away from my friends and we lost touch over time. I picked the right time to move though, because all of them started having kids around the same time and frankly as the only single dude of the group I was expecting those relationships to fade eventually anyways.
Being in my 30s with no kids is a bit isolating because it feels like everyone else my age is either a parent, or has a friend group already. Hard to convince a person to spend time with you over other friends or their families, which is understandable but lonely.
I do have my wife, we're not planning to have children. But I don't think 100% of your social life should come from your partner, and she agrees. But she grew up here and has friends, I don't have many here.
I moved to Tokyo several years back and got married here, and have come to appreciate the effect of being in a city that isn’t a revolving door in a country where most people intend to live in the same city. My spouse’s friends all live here, so does her family across multiple generations, and the city is well connected so by default she has plenty of friends around all the time. Coming from a US flyover state where practically nobody who I know except for my parents still live there, it makes me not want to raise my future children in a place like that nor in a US big city where most people only intend to stay for several years max.
Are there tools, processes or organisations that could make this easier? For example, I could imagine:
* a blog of success stories
* a guide on how to do things like coordinate breaking leases, getting leases aligned, etc
* maybe advice on housing searches, etc
This blog is about co-living with others. It seems a little more connected than you're looking for, but might have some insight nonetheless -- https://supernuclear.substack.com/
I did this, but instead of friends I chose family. Moved away for years for work, career, and a girlfriend. Then realized my depression worsened, and this was exacerbated when my girlfriend and I broke up. The catalyst for me moving back was my uncle dying and realizing I had only seen him three times since I had moved away.
I moved back, and now see my parents and siblings on a weekly basis. Housing is more expensive, but I find it infinitely worth it to be able to spend time barbequeing with my dad or taking my mom to the beach every week. Needless to say, my depression became far more manageable.
I feel like this should be inverted: make friends with those who live near you. I understand we can’t be friends with everyone, but chances are there’s 3-4 people in your immediate area that you’d get along great with. I think it’s a failing of community that we aren’t closer to our neighbors. Sure living close to high school / university friends would be great, but as many posters have noted, circumstance isn’t always that convenient. We need more events that promote socialization amongst neighbors in the hopes that some of those interactions will result in meaningful friendships.
While it's difficult, I fully agree with this idea. Most of my friends are slowly moving to one neighborhood and it's been fantastic. This neighborhood also happens to be one of the few walkable neighborhoods in my city, which helps massively with feeling more connected too.
I think while living close to friends is important, we really just need to regularly see friends. It's easier to do so if you live close (or if your city has good public transport like metros or trams).
This is a classic case of "easier said than done."
I live in a transition neighborhood and I take care of my elderly mother, who is rather entrenched. Neighbors come and neighbors go. I made friends with the couple next door and then they left. A long-time friend used to live a scant six miles away and I would walk there on some nights just to visit. Now, he is at a fifty-minute drive. Another friend is about a hundred miles off.
There’s something to be said for having a “local.” Lots has been written about having a “third-place,” though I can’t remember who coined the phrase.
There’s a bar and grill near where I live, I pop in frequently and almost always see someone I know. There’s a coffee shop next door that is about the same.
Something about a handshake, a hug, a “How was your day,” etc. goes quite a long way. That’s especially true for one living alone, as I do.
The last thing I'd want to do is to throw cold water on this.
On the other hand, there are far more families than you think where two or more members are permanently estranged. "Overcoming your upbringing" is the pertinent struggle for lots more. And "spending more time with family" is a good way to destroy their mental health.
Oh well easy. In a city like Berlin, because even if you are a high income professional the housing market is so Fubar that you cannot decide where you end up living in the city. You take what comes your way and be done with it.
This is true for most other big cities in the world.
I guess the answer is don’t live in cities?
Spending my 20s in city, where I could walk to a bar/friend's house/restaurant/ball game, was a wonderful experience. When I talk to young people who live in some generic suburb I can't help but feel depressed. And for older folks too - the isolation is real.
It's a shame so much of our built environment reduces socialization.
> Spending my 20s in city, where I could walk to a bar/friend's house/restaurant/ball game, was a wonderful experience.
For many, living in a city like that can be just as isolating, if not more. Because being surrounded by so many people and not having any real connections is a different kind of hurt. It's sort of a cosmic joke at that point.
taken me a couple of years to figure this out. moved to a medium-large city post uni with a grand delusion that i'd simply make friends and find my wife due to the virtue of living in a denser environment.
after a while, it didn't work out like i thought it would. surely, it had nothing to do with me and my inability to socialize properly? nay! i came to the naive conclusion that the city was at fault, or that we were mismated: "it's not big enough and there's not enough to do, or places to meet people. it's really far from the things i like to do, like the ocean or hiking spots." so, i moved to one of the most dense, socially-active cities in the world.
been here a while and yeah, it sucks. i think you put it best, feels a bit like a cosmic joke. there's only a few places in the world where so many people are crammed into such a small place. yet, i have no one.
i had enough and dished out some $$$ to spend 2 months in a rural town. a real quiet place, one of those towns with a single coffee shop. no whole foods or any amazon shenanigans. i miss some things, but the only times i've felt this at home have been... at home, with my parents. i think i'll move back in with them and give up on the city dream.
In my experience moving from a tiny town to London after graduating, is big cities take way more effort on your part, but reward you more for it. Like yeah, in your hometown you'll probably run into people more and gradually get to know them better. In a big city that won't happen nearly as much.
But, a big city has _scale_. You wanna give D&D a go? There's probably a club within a mile or two of you. Fancy doing martial arts? You've got a choice of half a dozen with 20 minutes. You're a long-time hobbyist in an obscure type of Japanese figure painting? You might have to travel a bit, but your city has one of only three clubs for that hobby in the country so you win!
Basically, put in the effort. It could easily take a year or more. But get out there, be social, take initiative, and you'll find your people.
The people who are "naturally social" will be social anywhere, but in a small town you can be the most antisocial person ever made, and people will get to know you, simply because you're one of the only thousand people they ever see.
> When I talk to young people who live in some generic suburb I can't help but feel depressed.
On the other hand, I grew up and spent about the first two-thirds of my life in an extremely rural area. Socializing happened only at school, and when your nearest friends are a thirty minute drive away, you learn to effectively spend time alone.
I read, I wandered through the woods, I played video games. Activities I still enjoy.
It was nice spending my 20s a few minutes walk from my friends, restaurants, my office, etc, but it certainly got overwhelming. People were inviting me to do stuff nearly every night. I frequently wondered if people just live like that and when they found the time to just do normal alone stuff.
Having grown up in a rural area, I share your experience. I'm very comfortable being by myself and get drained when I have to socialize. I honestly feel pretty lucky to be this way. Most people get incredibly stressed when they have to be alone. Finding joy with yourself leads to a pretty high quality of life imho.
I quite enjoyed my rural upbringing, but there was a massive lack of specific stuff to do. Like, I wanted to do martial arts for ages as a kid, and I had zero options. Not a single club within an hours drive. That was real annoying.
> but it certainly got overwhelming. People were inviting me to do stuff nearly every night. I frequently wondered if people just live like that and when they found the time to just do normal alone stuff.
The realization that helped me here is that people don’t think about you as much as you think they do.
So, for example, if you ignore most events, and just join these events once every few weeks, it’s not like people will think any less of you.
I decided to skip a lot more of these events and instead meet smaller groups of friends for last moment smaller hang outs instead. Maybe just grab a 30 min walk after work or grab a coffee or a couple of drinks a weekend morning.
The other thing to remember is that if YOU do an event, and invite 10 people, that is ten invites. Everyone will receive more invites than they can accept, it's normal.
If meeting up with a friend every few weeks instead of nightly means you no longer want anything to do with that person, I doubt the friendship was that strong to begin with.
Also, there's a difference between having a friend turn down a one to one meetup versus turning down a party of 30 people, 20 of whom they don't really know.
> When I talk to young people who live in some generic suburb I can't help but feel depressed.
It's easy to hole up in your suburban home and never socialize, but I know a lot of people who live in dense cities and never leave their house unless absolutely necessary either.
Living in a suburb doesn't mean you're isolated from friends, as long as you live within a reasonable drive. It does mean everyone has to plan ahead and allocate a little more travel time, but that's not really a big deal when people are in their 30s with more obligations, work, and possibly kids.
Living in the suburbs actually creates a different set of opportunities because now you have more space and likely a yard, too. Cramped parties in someone's apartment are fun when you're in your 20s, but in my 30s it's much nicer to head to someone's backyard BBQ or house that comfortably holds 40 people inside. There's also room for kids to play, room for outdoor games, and other things that weren't happening at parties in my 20s.
If you're trying to project your exact current lifestyle on to suburban living then it's going to be disappointing. If you instead look at it from the perspective of being different rather than worse, you start to the possible upsides.
I think there's a real difference depending if you "fit" where you are. In a city, no matter how weird your interests, you'll likely find a group nearby that is also interested in that.
In a small town or suburb if you're the "odd man out" it can be much harder.
But when I "lived in the city" as a younger man, I was often traveling out to the suburbs where friends lived as they had the space and the things to do.
> When I talk to young people who live in some generic suburb I can't help but feel depressed.
I see this with the youngest workers at my company. When I was their age I moved to the city for $750/month and got a cheap apartment and lived in the thick of things, a 15 minute bike ride to the office and walking distance to bars and restaurants. For them to do the same as I did, rent would be $2500/m and so they've been forced into continuing to live in their parents basement way out in the burbs. Remote work has been a godsend for not burning half their day, but they're still resultingly isolated from the vibrant urban social life that I enjoyed.
I'm sure there may be a few that prefer the burbs, but it's clear that there's no real actual choices being made here and it is economic conditions that are forcing their living conditions on them. It's really sad that we've allowed this to happen through our inaction and reluctance to allow new homes to be built.
Absolutely. The decision gets worse and worse as you progress, as well. We spec'ed out living in a city, just about any city, and economically it is such a hit for a family, on top of safety concerns (not just from crime but also just traffic in cities is atrocious in the US), school quality concerns, etc.
I'd love to live somewhere walkable but I just don't have the budget to do it without putting our family on a knife edge monetarily.
In cities things are more balanced like you’ve mentioned but our suburb design is so crushingly isolating. The suburbs that get built now are almost designed to be lonely: here’s 100+ houses all right next to each other so there are no real communal spaces for socialization. We’ve zoned it in a way so that if someone wants to open a pub or salon or whatever they will be refused from the start. If you want that experience you will almost inherently have to drive because the suburbs are often so large that walking is impractical. You either make friends with your neighbors, which most adults only do casually at best, or you just be lonely.
This gets into the concept of “third space” or community space, which we often critically lack outside of cities. Living near friends is great if you have them but if you don’t you need some place to make them. Culturally we are in a weird spot for a lot of people. There are church related communities but that’s not helpful if you’re not religious. There’s the bar and club scene but that can be more focus on sex, can be expensive, and is also not for everyone (especially if you don’t drink alcohol). There’s niche interest groups like d&d and board game clubs, figure drawing classes, etc, but these can be hard to socialize in because of things like the group is already tight knit and not accepting of new faces, the class is focused and there’s not much time for socializing thus requiring another social space (eg let’s get drinks after class) which you may not have time for, etc
It’s tough, I guess. The articl is a good suggestion but an oversimplification that glosses over these big systemic issues (especially the lack of community spaces that don’t constantly drain us of cash or expect us to be intoxicated). If you can live near your friends you should. But at the same time that’s way tougher than it sounds most of the time. I’d love to live near my friends but we’re all pushing 40 now. Everyone’s everywhere. We were once all in the same city but work took us all over the place and now we live all over the country. It’s hard enough to just stay in touch.
Interesting...spent 20s in city also but now live in suburbs and don't feel isolated at all. We know all our neighbors, our kids play together etc. I didn't know any of these people before we lived there obviously.
Would argue it's less about "where you are" and more about "how easy it is for you to make new friends" but that's purely anecdotal.
I guess if it's about going to bars to make friendships then yes there will be less of that in suburbs (assuming U.S. here). But as you age going to bars is a "need" that seems to generally decrease for most (not all of course) people.
It varies enormously - but some ‘burbs are described as being all 1-2 person McMansions, where everyone has a lawn service, to make sure they can’t meet anyone else while out doing yard work.
My suburb has houses crammed together so close I can see into my neighbors kitchen if the blinds aren't close. When I do go mow my lawn I have the alcoholic on the one side come out and complain to me about his life and an old retired lawn obsessed guy on the other side come tell me how my lawn is shit and I need to take better care of it.
And I'm just thankful I'm no longer in apartments where I have to deal with neighbours screaming matches at 3am, people having parties above me every single weekend, crappy landlords, and all the other shit.
>It's a shame so much of our built environment reduces socialization.
i don't think you can really blame the built environment, when that's the whole reason people built the environment that way. not being forced to interact with anybody other than the people you specifically choose to interact with is the whole reason people move to the suburbs, or avoid public transit. the isolation is the point.
And yet so many of us turn to social media to avoid feeling isolated. Urban, suburban, and rural life all have their pros and cons. Having lived in all three at various points in my life, I'm uncertain which lifestyle to choose as I begin to plan for retirement.
I used to feel this way too, but I'm older and have literally moved on - my perspective has changed. SF has walkable neighborhoods without community, and the one doesn't flow from the other.
THIS
Earlier this year, my dad passed away. We got to spend the last few days together. It taught me what is MOST important in life: time spent with loved ones.
We went back home to visit for a week in August. Had more fun in Chicago one week than we did in over a year in a “tourist mecca” (Orlando).
I strongly feel that VR will help mitigate this problem. Location wouldn’t matter as much, and neither would busy schedules when “meeting up” would be as instant as a phone call. In fact, I was just playing VR ping pong with one of my best childhood friends who moved to Canada the other day. While not perfect, the sense of presence is way better than FaceTime or an audio call.
Prior to Apple’s vision reveal, VR’s largest problem is that most adults refused to even try it for both strange and valid reasons (“it’s stupid” “it’s too expensive” “it’s too complicated”). A lot of those reasons have been invalidated with meta’s quest. Standalone VR is the NES of our generation where you have a device that children just intrinsically understand while most adults either scoff at or ignore it. (This is apparent if you ever play an online VR game. Most of the users are children.) Of course, this was reality prior to Apple entering, so we’ll see what happens in 2025-2027 once Vision has more developers building for it and more units available to everyday people.
I used to never talk on the phone, but with a friend's help, I'll now call other friends and "hang out" on the phone with them after work, while I'm doing my dishes or on the treadmill. Sometimes I call them and they're not open to chatting, other times we talk for hours and just catch up. But that didn't just happen. I had to push through some really uncomfortable stuff, and my friends did as well.
VR is going to be another step, but Facetime is pretty great.
I’m not sure what the problem is. VR isn’t limited to “casual friends”. I don’t call my acquaintances either. I only use it with family or good friends.
I swear there was a study in this same vein a few years back that looked into the effects of having siblings in close proximity and the effect it had on your mental health, even if you never visited. I can't find it for the life of me now though.
How would you achieve this with most apartments being unaffordable? We are currently living in a time where you simply have to survive. Sacrifices to live close to friends aren't easy to make.
That is why we need the metaverse, so we can live together in our custom-made one-of-a-kind world. Life is all about safety and feeling good until death releases us.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html
My brother and I read this and were touched by it; we lived on opposite coasts and since we were kids always loved hanging out with one another. The idea that in our current arrangement we had already depleted MOST of our time together was a bitter pill to swallow.
For years we batted around the idea of living closer to each other. One day we just pulled the trigger and did it. It was enormously inconvenient, took a ton of logistical planning for our respective families, jobs and so on; but we ended up with houses within walking distance of one another and went from seeing each other and our immediate families maybe 10 days a year to 300+. We have accepted going forward it may limit our career options relative to when we lived in top tier American cities but the happiness we gained in the process is more than worth it.
I’m still not 100% sure the experiment will work out, but making the adjustment to live closer to family has substantially increased my mental health and emotional well-being. If you have close friendships and have ever talked about this seriously, I’d encourage you to consider what you might be gaining or losing in your current setup. It’s not for everyone but worth exploring!