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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

You know what they say...if everywhere you go smells like shit, maybe it's time to check your own shoes.

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.

:-( that's sad. I wish you luck in finding something that works for you.

We're an immigrant family in the Netherlands and we could do with more colourful hair around here.

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.

Indeed, parks are also a good idea.

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.

I can't be bothered to try and meet people whom I could, because I think they might be different to me isn't the flex you seem to think it is.

If you want to be a misanthrope that's fine, but that's on you, not your local community.

"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.

> 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.

> I would struggle to talk to them for 3 minutes

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.

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.

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?

> I would struggle to talk to them for 3 minutes.

I'd suggest thinking of that as a skill to be developed.

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.

> 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.

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!

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.

Sounds like you're only interested in a clone of yourself.

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.

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.

It's hard to overstate how true this is. Even something as simple as a 5-minute friendly chat a week can make a big difference.

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.

it is impossible to find common ground with common people, when your community of your people is online and you grew up in online communities

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)

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