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Comment by zw123456 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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