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Interesting that the my image is the exact opposite.

Downtown no one talks to each other. They live in fancy apartment buildings and go out to their events.

In the Suburbs, neighbors have BBQs, block parties. I knew all the people around the house when I lived in the suburbs. The Garys next door with their bull dog and their daughter Diane living in a detached apartment above the garage. The Alberas with a farm in their backyard. The Kumbs with their kids Gary and Janice and a pool. The Ryans who mister Ryan would always ask me to rub his back and his daughters Kim and Nannet were both my babysitter at one point or another. The Caldwells with their 5 kids Brian, John, Wendy and 2 too small for me to have played with. The Bargayos with Leah and Laura. I can name at least 7 more families.

Since that time living in apartments in cities I've never made friends with a single neighbor.

For most of my life that's been the stereotype. There are plenty of movies about people knowing each other in an ET/Spielberg movie style suburban neighborhood vs the cold hearted city.

I think you may be confusing being a child/adult (or having kids/childless) vs suburb/urban. We live in an apartment in an urban but not central part of Berlin and we know plenty of neighbours, especially since having kids.

How many childless adults do you remember taking part of these suburban activities/communities?

Not the parent commenter, but in my experience, lots. When we had block parties, the whole block, non-children-having folks and kids alike, was involved. In fact, the parents in particular seemed to really enjoy these BBQ times because they got to have conversations with other adults while the collective kids of the neighborhood ran around doing their own thing. It was fun!

Opposite anecdata. Lived in the suburb until my 20s, never had a block BBQ party, my parents would sometimes have a chat with the neighbour but that's about it. Living now on the subway line in a major city, can hop in to get to see friends all the time, walk to the groceries, community center, etc. Don't talk to neighbour either, but I feel much more part of a community living in close proximity with people.

My experience is exactly the same. I've lived in several urban centers now as an adult, and I'm planning on moving to the suburbs or exurbs once I can afford to buy a house. Honestly the only people I've met in the city are the folks from Church, but all the ones with kids are moving out too. Cities feel super atomized to me right now, where folks really have little in common beyond shared misery in high housing costs.

Obviously this is just my experience.

I work in a family farm a few weeks a year and if you head into town to pick up some things you gotta budget time for making chitchat with people, and it was the same deal when living in a built up walkable urban neighbourhood in Montreal, and in Vancouver, you see and interact with the same people every day.

Now I live in a neighbourhood with many immigrants from Africa, and they're super tight knit, in terms of their involvement in the community they put anything else I've seen to shame, excepting maybe when I was staying in a small villages in Indonesia and Mexico back in my surfing days.

But, like many, I grew up in a generic cookie cutter suburb and it was pretty dismal as far as community involvement and interaction goes. People get in their cars and drive away.

> Suburbs are structurally lonely

My European perspective. I wouldn't blame it on suburbs in particular. I would blame most if not all forms of city living. Most people live in flats where nobody wants to have anything to do with their neighbor and there is no communality. People move in and move out, nobody cares. The less you have to hear of your neighbor, the better. FWIW I would rather have a 'burb castle than a flat where I have to smell and listen to idiots drink, smoke, fight and blast music. And I think I'd rather get to know the neighbors over at the adjoining castle than the scum in these neighboring flats.

Now farms and other isolated & rural towns are a different deal. There you're no longer mass of people. You actually get to know the community around you, and people don't come & go nearly as much.

Thats not particularly a European perspective. Sounds like its just yours.

It is just mine, and I am European. I believe it is informative to spell it out in a discussion that points fingers at the (American) suburb.

your statement sounds like this is a point of view taken by the majority of people who live in Europe. Simple facts about the number and density of cities through out the history of the continent point to the exact opposite.

And they already told you they didn't mean it that way. Maybe listen to them, adjust your expectations, and move on?

Yeah I think it’s not just a suburb problem, they just so happen to be (I think) the most common living situation for Americans. And if not in actuality, certainly culturally we are indoctrinated in a suburb mindset (own a home, go to college, American dream yada yada). It’s one of the reasons moving to a city after college is so exciting for us- it’s usually the first experience we have that challenges that mindset.

You nailed it. I live in a ‘burb castle’. I was grateful to get out of my apartment. The woman in the adjacent unit would burn a dozen candles and stumble in drunk every night. The guy below would scream and break stuff during football games. Another would blast rap music at 4 AM.

Screw apartments. Now I can put up ham radio antennas, have a nice lab, garage for bike, etc.. I could not fathom living in a dense city.

> And I think I'd rather get to know the neighbors over at the adjoining castle than the scum in these neighboring flats.

Don’t worry — I’m sure the scum feel pretty much the same about you.

The language might seem harsh to you, but you'd understand it if you'd ever lived with or near such people.

>The language might seem harsh to you, but you'd understand it if you'd ever lived with or near such people.

I understand it perfectly well, I've lived in densely populated cities my whole life. It's a naked display of something called misanthropy and it's a core tenet of an ethos of self-obsession plus empathy absence that persons in technology AND lifelong US suburbanites far, far too often are afflicted with. Zero mystery here.

Then what is its root cause?

Typically our view of the outer world is a reflection of our view of the inner world, and usually that state is obscured and perpetuated by fear/clinging to an idea of security.

>Then what is its root cause?

I can only guess. I'll be thinking about it.

I will say that fear -- useful fear, wielded as a whip of control in various ways -- is central to any process of de-socialization.

And I know who surely has the greatest interest in de-socialization: the persons at the top of our economy.

> I can only guess.

Then you shouldn't say "Zero mystery here".. or you could trick yourself and become upset later.

>then you shouldn’t say “Zero mystery here”

There’s zero mystery about OP showing misanthropy, but I can’t say where it comes from.

Let me know if there’s anything else I can clear up for you as you struggle to remain current in the discussion.

Lol typical response of someone who wants to believe they know something. You'll find out one day. Meanwhile you missed the answer implicit in my reply.

Yeah, you’ve clearly never had bad neighbors. Be grateful for that, but it doesn’t give you the right to tell others that the real problem is their frustration.

>you’ve clearly never had bad neighbors

No, I’ve had bad neighbors. What I haven’t done is to generalize the experience to seek to avoid neighbors as a class, which is exactly what misanthropy is, as well as exactly what white flight and suburbanism is.

Also, as long as you’re prattling about “rights”, please notice how easily you assumed the right to mischaracterize and invent a convenient and false history for me.

Nope, you clearly stated that there is no such thing as a bad neighbor, and anyone perceiving one has a defective moral character, that there is “no mystery here.” You want to complain about generalization, that’s another thing, but so far the only generalization here is yours, that the parent’s experience can’t be real.

Me:

>I’ve had bad neighbors

You:

> you’ve clearly stated there’s no such thing as a bad neighbor

I wish you luck managing the effects of your wild imagination in the future.

> Don’t worry — I’m sure the scum feel pretty much the same about you.

Quite possible, and that's part of the point I'm making. There's no communality, everyone just wants to have as little to do with their neighbor as possible. Even if it turns out that quite a few of these neighbors (me included) do not throw parties, do not smoke inside, do not drink and fool around, do not have loud kids or animals, do not throw trash around and break things in shared spaces, don't blast music at 3 AM...

There's too many people for people to care, kind of? And a bunch of bad apples ruin it for everyone.

YMMV. I got to know my neighbors in my 5-unit building in NYC, as well as the owners/managers of the restaurants and shops next door. The advantage the city has over suburbia is the density. I don’t have to get in a car to see any of my neighbors, we’re more or less forced to see each other on any given walk.

The reason your city is so bad is in large epart because the families move away to suburbs. In the burbs, you still get disturbances like constant lawnmowers and leaf blowers, at least in lawn-crazy USA.

Also planning laws - apartments for singles and couples are cheaper to build and higher density than apartments for families. If planning law mandates sufficient accommodation for families the dynamics change.

The constant lawnmowers get on my nerves for sure.

But even the families with loud kids and dogs and late night backyard parties never managed to disturb me as much as what I've come to expect as the norm in flats.

> The reason your city is so bad is in large epart because the families move away to suburbs. In the burbs, you still get disturbances like constant lawnmowers and leaf blowers, at least in lawn-crazy USA.

In the USA a lot of neighborly socialization is associated with yard work. The lawnmower is a signal your neighbor is out, and the polite thing to do is to chat when you run into each other. That's how I got to know my neighbors. If you weren't aware, you do shut off the machines when you talk.

The level of contempt you show for lawn work makes me thing you have little experience with it or some idiosyncrasies that cause you to hate it in an atypical way.

But cities provide you with a means to find a community if you really want one. It's a lot harder and/or less convenient to find groups that do what you like to do if you live in a suburb.

> But cities provide you with a means to find a community if you really want one. It's a lot harder and/or less convenient to find groups that do what you like to do if you live in a suburb.

I think there's a problem with equating community with "groups that do what you like." That sounds like a definition that's been infected by the "personalization" the npunt was talking about in his first note.

Real communities have a lot more diversity than that, and they're usually not very personalized. It's often no so much about finding community, but forming communal bonds with the people already around you.

Why would it be bad if things were this way? I mean, I have a very varied social circle but enjoy the company of a select few the most.

"Personalization" as you called it, has existed since immemorial times and I don't think it's something new.

Sure, it always existed and isn't necessarily always a problem. But, as with anything, it can quickly become a problem once we get better at it and turn it to eleven.

Last century, forming a sect was hard work. Now this kinda seems to happen accidentally all the time when someone tries to launch a new social media platform. For those examples the problem isn't preferring a select few, but shielding yourself from others.

But yes, favoring select few can end bad as well. When you network with and thus effectively give positions or contracts to only your select few, you can end up with a self-reinforcing feedback loop and thus quite homogeneous subset of people. And then end up with e.g. woman complain they cannot obtain senior positions or more frequent conspiracy theories about how jews run the world. Having lots of people think they are treated unfairly is generally bad for a society, especially our democratic ones.

Sure, that has historically been the case.

I will argue that communities of space is always inferior to communities of interest. We can see that historically when those communities of interest are big enough, they spend most of their time together, buy in their own shops, etc.

With the current state of society, it is a lot easier to create smaller groups, provided you have a big enough base to work with.

I dunno about that, having grown up in a rural area I can distinctly remember newcomers to the area (especially if from abroad) never being accepted unless they had young kids going to the local school (who would be accepted by the other kids much faster). There was one couple who tried extensively for years going to and organising events but never became anything more than "the dutch couple"

You also get a lot of weirdness where everyone knows a bit too much about everyone else. ...and, yeah, there's a really strong push towards conformity. If you're at all unusual it's pretty isolating. Some people will help you if you're in trouble but you'll never make anything resembling friendships.

If you grow up in the community, your direct family are pretty accepted within it, and there are other people within your age range, it's highly unlikely to be a lonely experience. in my case we had two neighbours that got married around the same time as my parents but neither could conceive, which both resulted in no other kids in the area at all and a kind of strained awkwardness between them and my parents

I lived on a kibbutz after college. It has its own set of problems. The closer you live to people, the more politics enters the picture. The less money there is to go around, the more that politics revolves around the relatively financially trivial. You can't force people to like each other just because they live in close proximity.

The problem isn't finding people with shared interests and values, it's in building real-world (not Internet-based) communities around them.

The kibbutz (or kibbutz inspired) idea my friends and I have discussed is more about finding people you like and then forming it. I can definitely see it having downsides if you’re not actively involved in its formation.

That’s great, but then you’ll start backsliding on the “diversity and inclusion” scale. I think it’s a constant trade off. As individuals with preferences, humans can’t help but form in groups and out groups.

Making everyone miserable is not the kind of diversity and inclusion we want. It's only acceptable in the sense of "if I'm a miserable out group, the happy in group don't deserve to be happy", which is maybe fairness but not a good goal state. D&I means forming good relations across boundaries, not arbitrary relations.

I still have some hope for something like seasteading to do this in the next 10-20 years (before Mars/Luna are viable options). In the interim I'm trying something vaguely like it in PR.

I live in a Christian community focused on in-common living.

Community requires commitment to stick things through. Having a common vision is important. More important is having the commitment to sticking with it, and relationship tools to help keep friendships intact in tough times.

Some key tools:

-right speech: no gossip, slander, or negative humor

-forgiveness: saying I’m sorry when offending or harming someone, and having real forgiveness

-making agreements: specific commitments that, when times are tough or good, the group can rally around.

Where is your community located?

An what happens when someone violates those principles, especially if the violator is the minister or otherwise powerful?

As he said, forgiveness and reconciliation. Sticking with it. I’m sure there’s limits and it’s often easy to tell when someone is sorry and trying to change versus taking advantage.

I second someguydave's comment. More broadly, could you tell us a bit about your community? What principles is it based on? What is the lifestyle there? How is it organized? What do people do there? Is it open to newcomers?

Out of curiosity, is it a community inspired by ‘The Benedict Option’?

People living interdependently in close proximity to one another is characteristic of most people throughout human history. It has never been perfect, but when you throw it out, you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Blaming it on community planning might be pointing to the symptom rather than the problem. I’d hazard that the real problem is intolerance born from individualism. In the American context we have a society such that people both clutch and invent their own rights while insisting that all others respect and maintaining them. This would be fine if tolerance actually existed and the relationship were bidirectional. The relationship has proven to be unidirectional in a lot of cases which has led to the polarity that we are experiencing. Abstracting further, I’d say that these situations could largely be reduced to groups of people misunderstanding the significance of difference between tolerance and affirmation.

Last words: yes it is simplistic and reductionist to boil it down like this. I’m comfortable with staging the problem like this because we aren’t considering an ultra specific case here that requires precision.

My armchair opinion is that the middle ground / something missing is characterized by a few things that used to be somewhat fulfilled by the workplace:

1. Tribal feel: 100-200 individuals not your immediate family.

2. Pursuit of some shared goal. When we were still nomadic hunter-gatherers, this was probably as simple as shared survival.

3. Forced interaction and cooperation. If you can flee at the first sign of annoyance, you're never required to develop deeper bonds with the people from #1 if they are even remotely irritating to you and can just opt out of getting to know them.

Work probably fulfilled a lot of these requirements when people stayed at one place for decades. Even if people came and went, there was some stable group of people that you were stuck with in pursuit of a common goal. I suspect this held even in the face of industrialization and the formation of massive corporations. Now, though, people move around so much that the workplace feels extremely impermanent and fleeting. In some ways I think that may be a good thing. The "community" you get from work has probably always been false. But I believe it did serve a psychological need, and as that's degraded I think you're seeing a lot of unhappiness result.

Good insight, I agree the workplace is that sort of extended tribe, and as people switch jobs more frequently its replaced with a more vague 'industry' concept that is too diffuse and large to fulfill that smaller tribal association.

I've recently been looking for a house cleaner and decorator as I have a hard time keeping up due to working busy hours at my job (and I really hate cleaning & decorating).

I was chatting with a friend of mine who needs a web application for something he volunteers for. We came up with the bright idea that he would clean my place then do the interior design. At the same time he's working on that, I work on his app.

We sort of organically discovered a business contract and so far it has been working great. He enjoys cleaning and design and I like programming and both of us either hate or can't do the other. In addition, it gets us both off our asses as we're generally working on these things at times that we would normally be watching TV or doing other useless things. So far it feels win-win-win and it gets to the heart of what you were talking about - how to fill in that community between hired help and your close family. The alternative was that both of us spent our own money for these services and probably end up not as happy with what we got.

> Suburbs are structurally lonely

I think it's a factor, but not a major one. Look at Tokyo, for example, which is probably very close to an ideal urban living arrangement in terms of density/comfort. Yet Japan also has a huge problem with "loneliness epidemic", from hikikomori to kodokushi.

I think the biggest factor is what grandpa Marx identified hundred and fifty years ago: human alienation is an intrinsic feature of capitalism itself.

There's tons of literature on this, e.g. see links below, but many people seem to be afraid to even read the arguments, let alone engage.

https://socialistworker.org/2003-2/467/467_09_Alienation.php

https://isreview.org/issue/74/capitalism-and-alienation

In my experience cities are vastly more lonely and isolating than suburbs and rural communities.

In rural communities everyone knows everyone. People talk to each other. People help each other.

This is especially true in Seattle. The Seattle Freeze is very real.

The need for and convenience of cars. Public transport promotes community, but cars isolate - in particular children. I daren't let my daughter ride down the lane on her bike, so she's trapped.

I’ve experienced a hell of a lot more community in the give and take of rides across suburbia than on transit, where 95% of interactions are someone asking for money.

I don’t see how the rise of digital media and independence somehow lead to disassembled communities.

A lot of people argue that the internet takes us away from human connection but I disagree. If anything it brings people closer by allowing individuals to join communities that they could never have assembled with their reach in the physical world.

Furthermore if an individual prefers to be on their device over talking to people near them, it’s probably because they wouldn’t talk to those people to begin with. Or that they feel so comfortable in the community they’ve already built that they don’t care to expand (a problem that exists with or without technology).