Hacker News Reader

Comment by sjducb | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com