Should more of us be moving to live near friends?
architecturaldigest.com
architecturaldigest.com
A lot of the conversation around modern American youth feeling isolated, lacking socialization and not building strong relationships seems that stem from this drive.
Another thing that’s really weird and related is another recurring theme in the American ethos: the cultural shame that comes with living “at home” or staying in the same small town for your whole life. Somehow they made it so living close to your family and friends for your 20s-30s and maybe forever means you’re a “loser”.
It's a common trope on here to lament on how the Anglo cultures don't value family ties strongly enough. I'd argue not overly valuing family ties has been a big competitive advantage of the Anglo cultures for centuries, eg. moving for opportunity (improved social mobility), ability to connect with outsiders, couple pairing across cultural/geographical boundaries, prerequisite to a high trust society, etc.
What really needs to happen is we need to figure out ways of facilitating friend formation/maintenance in this brave new world of the internet and atheism. We are going to need some new social technologies to really combat this.
One interesting recent social technology out of china https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/china-personalities...
That line of reasoning is just plain sad. It boils down to "everyone might be miserable, but someone else is getting rich so it's good."
What makes it specially sad is how anglo culture's economic advantage spawns from the outcome of WW2, not this misplaced sense of sacrifice.
But it’s more than a single generation thing. If you live for 18 years in a family that has only recently put down roots in a new place, you won’t have family around, unlikely to have as many family friends around, etc. Community will likely be sparse and colder.
You essentially get a generational social debt put onto kids, over and over. It appears that cohesion is lost, pro-social behaviour decreases, focus on less social activity increases, and so on.
Though it's better than what used to happen - which was lots of kids, and high infant mortality, plus poverty driving kids to find jobs in cities, where bad living conditions and factory work awaited them. (And in the 20th century company towns around mines and factories.)
People growing up, flying out of the family nest, and finding friends was a normal part of late teenage years. What's new on top of that is more people are trying to do it again in their 20s after higher education, and again after settling down to have kids, and ...
The good news is that we have the social technology of ... affordable safe high density cities, with parks and high-rises (plus the obligatory blackjack and hookers too!) ... where people can be next to their new and old friends at the same time ... oh my!
Also https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-myth-of-the-loneliness...
I wonder how in your opinion atheism enters in the picture? My first guess (of your reference) is that certain religions frighten people into remaining in a marriage they would otherwise not be in. My second guess is that religion fills a social glue role by virtue of getting people together to worship or do other community things.
In my own opinion, part of the problem is that we are not atheist enough, and we still believe in the god-mandated union of a man and a woman, properly enclosed by walls, to bring forth children, as the only way worth living. Yes, there are pockets of resistance to the idea, but too little and too late. By far and large all parents out there are pressing their children to marry and have kids, so that there are grandchildren to fill those golden years. And there is mass media of course, which by far and large does the same. But I suspect that, left to their own devices, a lot of young people may choose to stick to their childhood friends of their same sex or otherwise, and employ one of the myriad ways humans can achieve sexual fulfillment. And since I'm on the topic, our species had sex for bonding long before it had religion, language, and the Internet. It's a pity that after the agricultural revolution and the newly found greed for land, God declared that technology suitable only for establishing property rights and for growing the military might of the tribe.
In the USA and Europe I trust none of that. I've had cars broken into 5 times, bikes stolen 5 times, car stolen once. Reports of people stealing packages. I know I can't trust people at a coffee shop not to steal my laptop while I go to the restroom. Friend have had wallets stolen stopping to take a picture. etc.....
This means I trust no one in the USA or Europe. So to me, the USA an Europe are low trust societies.
I grew up in a Midwestern shithole.
My older friends leaving, and knowing I was was going to leave too, didn't help.
Often, with these kinds of places, they aren't a place your family has lived for generations, and nor are they a place you have the opportunity to form any good connections in; rather, they're somewhere your parents had to move to when they lost their jobs/went bankrupt/etc, and so could no longer afford to live anywhere with higher land values.
Everyone living in these places encourages anyone who has any potential at all, to get out as soon as they can.
– Mariana Ruiz del Valle
Reminds me of all these older Americans talking about how "people don't want kids these days" when polling shows younger folks want just as many kids as their own parents but can't afford them.
The immense majority of Latin American don’t live in the US neither migrate there.
With that in mind, if Latin America had safety, I suspect at least half of the immigrants wouldn't leave, especially the ones who are able to hold a middle class job.
Most of us would live in a lower standard of life if it allowed to stay close to friends and family. But not being able to walk down the street bears a heavy weight on our anxieties.
Moving in response to this reality is not an American values problems. I find the instinct to blame Americans for their discontent while framing others in the same situation as victims quite odd.
Latin American tends to be unsafe (physically), but the money probably plays a bigger motivating factor. Remittances and ‘doing it for the family back home’ are common themes.
it isn't just that they can't afford them, it's that the standards for "good parenting" have increased. Simultaneously, both partners have less time for raising kids because of economic pressure
But the state doesn't subsidize childcare or offer universal pre-K, so the only real solution is to keep importing people from more "trad" cultures until the whole thing blows up
If you'd wish to make that claim then you'd be awfully wrong.
To start off, you'd be basing your personal opinion on what would most charitably be described as survivorship bias. I mean, try to think about it. The observable sample you're trying to generalize is a tiny subset of a whole population which is the output of a social process subjected to a long sequence of socioeconomical filters.
It would make as much sense as to claim that the average American is excellent at American football by using NFL teams as your sample of the US population.
edit found this https://themortgagepoint.com/2024/08/20/most-americans-stay-...
I lived 7 miles from a close friend. I liked getting to go to his place once a month or so. He lives in a large apartment complex. One friend moved into the same building. They see each other several times a week and his children go over to visit these friends whenever they feel like it. Similarly another friend moved a block away and they see each other far more regularly.
I have noticed that if friends move even an hour outside of the city, you are lucky to see them 4x a year.
It's not much different from moving across the country (typically).
Additionally, 20% of a friend group moving away (1 in 5 people) can be enough to breakup what once was a a solid friend group.
Yes, there's other things at play.
But I definitely think this is the major driver.
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-myth-of-the-loneliness...
To use examples familiar to Americans, I’ve never read a bad word written on Hugh Jackman, Cate Blanchett, Terrance Tao….
The migration is about the different things one wants during the course of one’s life.
Perhaps you could rephrase the concept around “if you stay at home you might miss out on some of the opportunities your peers experienced” if you want to look at both sides you could consider the benefits of community family and friends that those who stay are able to enjoy.
What you're describing is true, but also different from what the original comment is talking about. There is a global trend to urbanization, yes. The original comment isn't talking about moving from rural to urban; what they say applies to moving from one city to another.
Moreover, at an individual scale, moving for better opportunities doesn't mean one has to leave family and friends. For example, my grandma: she was very poor, and moved a few times different cities looking for a better life. This meant moving with her whole family, and/or moving where other family was. After she married my grandpa, he got job opportunities in both Guadalajara and Mexico City. I'm sure they could've done better in Mexico City, since it's the capital, but they chose Guadalajara due to proximity to family. Her mom eventually moved to Guadalajara too.
Another, more recent example from my family: my uncle. He had the opportunity to move for a very good job, but didn't take it since it was far from family. My brother moved cities for college, but specifically to one where he would be close to family.
One thing is moving wherever it takes for the sake of going to a specific school, working at a specific job, living in a specific dream home or dream city. That is very American. Another one is still looking for opportunities, but framing everything in terms of your family and friends; ie, what's the best job, school, home I can find close to my family? That's much more Latin American and much less common, in my experience, in the USA.
Picking up and moving across the country is pretty rare in America as well. More common than Latin America, but still not that common.
That said, I would say the biggest contributor to my economic success is my mobility. But it is a trade off, it certainly has an impact on the family and social unit.
I'm living this now. We moved back to have kids near friends and family after college. The judgment I get from people for being a towny is ASTOUNDING. I have to justify the reason for being here and talk about how I've lived in other places for a few years for people to take me seriously. It's ridiculous.
Why shouldn't I bring my experience back to fix the problems in this area? What's the problem with that?
Root cause is moving for work IMO.
So kids usually have a a choice - either stay where they grew up, and live with reduced economic opportunities (actually very common, but those folks aren’t usually posting all over the Internet about it).
Or move to where the economic opportunity is good, but then be isolated from prior friends and family. Those people talk a lot more, and tend to stick out. That is also more expensive, so those folks tend to have more economic backing and/or stronger ‘resumes’ which correlates to more education, getting more opportunity, etc.
If folks from the second group have issues and need to retreat to a more comfortable economic situation, they’ll also return to where they tended to grow up, usually.
One of those two groups is more often to be called ‘losers’. Which one do you think it is?
Oh, did I say the US? This is actually many countries, minus ease of moving around.
That's the problem. Due to car culture and zoning policies etc.
The older I get, the more I regret moving away from my family and friends in New Jersey. I'm only 3 hours away so still see them about once a month, but I'm very envious of my friends that stayed in our home town and get to see each other every weekend and their children get to spend daily time with their grandparents.
Whenever we consider moving back though, housing prices are always one of the biggest deterrents.
Now we have friends from foreign places that are not so foreign anymore! Friends from all around the world. : )
I consider ourselves lucky.
There’s a parallel to sending your kids off to war. Get them away from their sense of stability, to a place where it’s too expensive to live, for years at a time, to fight for the United States’ GDP.
It’s not just the young adults who are affected. In some cases their family members grieve the separation. And yet it seems like the only way to get ahead for many.
On the other hand, when I spend more than a few days straight with them, I realize that despite how deep our history goes, we've all changed. We don't share as many of the same hobbies/interests. My wife doesn't share a strong connection with them in the same way I do and doesn't have anything at all in common with their wives. I get it. Moving closer to them for the sake of my relationships would be a huge sacrifice for her.
What's to be done?
edit: not sure how heavy handed the Mad Max irony must be for the /s to register.
edit2: Do not move back. Embrace change. Ask wife to steer all social life. Sever all ties with the men who have made all those awful career and family choices. Visit only sporadically, but offer resentful advice on how they could improve themselves. Leave with relief and conviction that you have changed into someone else, someone superior. Carefully select only the best qualified friends for family, based on consultations with wife. Expose children only to the appropriate sort of influence.
Good thing is you have more than enough HN Karma to burn so don't worry about the down votes, most people will get ‘it’ and gave you an upvote to offset the ones who did not.
Yeah I’ve made decisions to go back, but haven’t started a family. I’ve been curiously observing how much for those friends around me with kids friction against „society” is a whole thing.
But you have to be open to that, and it also requires a lot of social skills that are not really otherwise demanded (in fact, arguably discouraged) among, particularly, men in developer/software engineering roles.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t maintain relationships with school friends. But, especially if none of them are nearby, you owe it to yourself and your family to build a local community for yourself that’s on that same magnitude of closeness. It’s a process that takes 5-7 years (again, just making up numbers here - this depends on your personality, how far along you are learning social skills, and who’s in your community), but the best time to start is always now.
More than anything, it requires lots of time. Time that busy adults don't have.
How often do you think you would see them if you lived in the same city?
If you see them twice a year, for a few days straight, I think you are doing really well and I am sure they appreciate the effort you make.
Can you cut the difference and go camping once a year or every second year for a week or two as a family? So their kids and your kids get to know each other, and maybe your wife and theirs too.
If not: I don’t think it’s a realistic goal, at least in a typical Western country, for a person with a young family and a full time job to manage to meet up with friends, who are not co-workers, almost every day.
Our society would need to re-think its norms around moving away in order to move upward, which runs into some pretty big philosophical ideas around geography, culture, and values. For technologists, this cultural movement is still in a bit of a philosophical stage, but it's starting to make its way into some early experiments. https://www.plurality.net/ is probably the best written work on it so far.
I've been looking for networked states that aren't all in on living forever or obsessed with crypto and anarchism.
I don’t have a social media pretense at all, and the “intimate” nature of a “raw” group chat has helped me, personally, keep in touch with people I otherwise wouldn’t have.
About 7 years ago one of my college friends drunkenly made a slack group for us all. At the time we were about a decade out of college and have been friends since freshman year. The slack group has been going strong since.
There are times where it goes quiet for a while, then one message will fire it back up. And it’s cool to see it evolve where now we talk about house projects, family things, etc.
We also use it to coordinate times to hang out which e great since we live in different cities.
I also have some WhatsApp groups from other periods of life, but just mentioning the Slack group because it’s something I wouldn’t have thought of and has really helped maintain our connection 20 years after we all met.
I'm not sure the past you is the real you. People change and childhood friendships are mostly circumstantial. Would you befriend those people if you met them now? If not, than those relationships are kept by the power of nostalgia.
For myself, I feel I have changed, mostly for the better, over the decades but that neither "current me" or the "past me(s)" are any more or less real.
However, we fell into a routine of playing games together once a week (every sunday, same time, for about an hour). Which helps with feeling close even though I live far apart.
That said, I also made new friends where I live now but I am definitely less close to them.
Write them the occasional birthday card, say hi when you're back in town and otherwise just go on with your life.
If there is something wrong with your current situation, then perhaps you and your wife need to talk this over. Maybe you need to move to get away from whatever is wrong. Are you old friends new hobbies/interests things that you could get into, and their wives someone your wife could become friends with - if so great: move back and renew your former connections as it will be easy to break in. If not maybe moving a long way to where both of you have no friends is the right answer so you can start over. Make sure you choose a place where want to join a local culture, not the same things you are trying to get away from.
We opt in and out as much as we'd like. It's beautiful having options, mostly for our kids, who are really thriving by having easy access to playmates. So much better than having to "blind date" other couples and their kids from daycare/activities/etc.
The hardest part is starting. It doesn't have to be a huge commune initiative. Pick one friend who has a similar lifestyle and settle down in a neighborhood withing walking distance and take it from there. Think most important time to do it is when you become a new parent, when your kids and you will want companionship but won't have the time (nor energy) to build new relationships.
From a practicality standpoint making a new friend can be easier but it won't have the same spiritual and emotional connection as a lifelong one. If you are 80 a friendship of 60+ years will be something that invokes real satisfaction and lends depth to your life. Being friends with someone from down the street for 6 months doesn't really mean anything.
It might be that for some old friends add extra richness and depth to relationships, but that has not been my experience at all and I'm glad I've found local friends with common interests - I certainly prefer them to people I happened to go to school with. I know some folks from my job from long ago, and seeing old friends is nice, but still I mostly want to talk to the few that I still have some shared interest in common now.
"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today."
I was going to say that I think more of us should be figuring out how to make connections with the people in the communities we live in.
But I do think moving might make sense for lots of people (maybe including me), in order to have a better local community. Instead of moving to be close to past or current friends, I might suggest we should be moving to places where people are like-minded about valuing a tight knit community, then making friends with those people.
These places seem to be very few and far between, though, and it's hard (impossible?) to find them on Zillow.
personally i am going for friendly and tolerant. likeminded people (for me maybe the kind of people that read hackernews) are hard to find, and are a reason for me to prefer big cities.
Where did this idea that early friendships are not as good because they weren't formed intentionally with carefully curated people come from?
Isn't the fact childhood friendships can endure despite people changing a clue that maybe it is doing things right?
I would never become homeless as long as I have my childhood friends, none of my curated friends would let each other move in without a second thought. I've made more new close friends in a year of hangout out with anyone willing to spend time together than I did in the last 5 trying hard to find like minded people.
Tight and close knit communities are not just going to let you join them. You have to basically commit to fostering those relationships for years and years, and generally speaking that kind of commitment is not getting more prevalent, but less.
Now jobs are the most common reason to move away. However that is still a minority situation, the majority find a place to live and then a job there. Even when looking for a new job people tend to prefer jobs where they don't have to move.
And as someone else pointed, friends living on the RER or opposite side of Paris might as well live in another city, unless meeting up somewhere halfway instead of at someone's place, but that can quickly get expensive.
Instead they come away with "get your high school friends to pick houses on Zillow together and live an 'enclave.'" Weird indeed.
Cities aren't very conducive to this in part because... people in cities tend to be more transient and their relationships more transactional. You have so much more choice, and the people you know have more choice, and people come and go.
In order to invest in long-term friendships, you need to be in a location where both you and the people you're making friends with are actually going to stay, and where both sides of the relationship are invested in the long-term nature of it.
This is much more likely to happen in a rural area than a city. I'd wager that constraining choice creates intimacy far moreso than alignment of interests. It's not about how much you like each other — it's about high-enough switching costs to hanging out with someone else that keep you together over a very long period of time.
In a city, even if you find the most compatible friend ever... there's also going to be 50 people almost as compatible (and vice versa for the people you're hanging out with).
In a rural area, you might not find someone you're perfectly compatible with... but they're far more likely to be the only person in the area with interests that are that aligned... and that creates intimacy... which will only make you more like them and them more like you.
I think this is a bit of a false dichotomy that assumes you get a static group of people dumped in your lap—in either case—that you get to choose or be alone because everyone else is guaranteed to choose not you for some reason, and also that long-term friends always require the same amount of investment. Likewise, you seem to be leaning heavily into not having to make a persuasive case for yourself, as if there's never a situation in which you'd be compelling.
Although scarcity might favor ease of intimacy, I think it's more true that luck, opportunity, and chemistry, give any pair of people something to work with regardless of shared interest. You can't assume every person you meet is friend material, but if you and them are open to it, you can both explore further. If 1/5 people seem fun to have coffee or go to the gym with, including in a rural area that may not even have a gym, it'll take a while to build that up, but you'll want a breadth of possible situations to meet people in. Hometowns don't necessitate that, you get it for free in school or church or wherever, but starting anew you gotta get out there.
You're not wrong though, I just think it takes longer. When I moved to where I did, a good half of the people I met were always looking for a plan B, flaking on trivial plans, not interested in one-on-one stuff without an activity going on. That was 8 years ago, and they're long gone. In their place are multiple groups of friends I've met in wildly different contexts, that don't flake enough for me to notice, and I consider pretty solid and close. I let the others go, and likewise with everyone in my hometown that I still talk to, I either can feel great about making a deliberate effort to spend unconstrained time with, or they're not in the picture, and maybe only 4 are left because everyone else is either a shallow acquaintance or were just there out of convenience in the first place.
As you grow older, there is certainly an economy of time you need to manage, but as you grow closer, you get grandfathered into not coming to that one thing or whatever every single time. My friend group consequently grows slower than ever, but is bigger than ever, and I make a point of being the friend I'd like to have—as cheesy as it is; I expect the same of them, and if they can do that then there's something to work with.
Alain Bertaud, the urbanist, recently said, “the big contribution of cities is randomness.” And he continues: “You don't know what to expect. You don't know who you will meet. And, it's precisely because you meet people who are different from you, who have different ideas. Sometime even it could be obnoxious people. I think obnoxious people — I mean, what I consider obnoxious — are necessary in order to stimulate.”
In North America, there is a very strong cultural preference to isolate oneself (probably a residual effect of the frontier spirit). Hence a strong preference for suburban single family homes with backyards (“for the kids and the dog”) and which results in spread out developments where people rarely have to interact. That’s fine — but realize that’s a cultural preference.
I grew up in a house with no backyard and had an idyllic childhood. I knew my neighbors and biked to the playground. I was as happy as a clam. To this day, I don’t feel any need to own a house with a backyard. That is also a cultural preference.
I've experienced the opposite too, having lived in both NYC and San Francisco: urban homogeneity, and even monocultures.
Yes, San Francisco is very diverse in the origin of its people, but the people who move there tend to fit certain molds, regardless of their cultural background. New York might attract more varied "types", but the act of moving to NYC still tends to select for a certain socio-economic level, a willingness to make certain sacrifices, people with certain life-goals and expectations, etc.
I surprisingly have found more diverse personalities and ideas in smaller places that are less selective (in price, profession, ideology, etc) to move to or to live in. Places where a software engineer might frequent the same gym as an insurance salesperson, an elementary-school teacher and a tattoo artist, even if (and perhaps because) they're all from there and didn't move in for a job.
Now you have to be a lawyer or work in finance to hope to even get a modest sized apartment in NYC.
Off the top of my head, you might get SF State students, tech bros, Chinatown senior citizens who have never left an 8-block radius and don't speak english, Marina moms, Mission District multi-gen families. I mean, come on.
Maybe if you were only picking from people working at tech cos, but even then my experience does not match yours.
From what I've seen from these large cities, the only reason people think that is that they remain in their small subset, which is large enough for them not to notice the rest.
If you're so inclined, sure, your small rural town is too small to have more than one community, and so there will be a little bit of social diversity. But if you live in a large city and are willing or need to go out of your in-group, the diversity is much larger.
To follow that line further, I'd argue that the fact that rural living gives you less choice in company increases the degree to which you invest in the relationships that happen to be around. Consequently, rural living can create a greater sense of intimacy and companionship than the bustle of a city where there's always a new face around the corner (if you get bored of the old faces).
I lived in New York at some point, and experienced the opposite of this first hand. In my experience, in NYC, it's easy to end with a lot of acquaintances but few real close friends.
At least in the social circles I moved around, everyone was always looking for "the next thing". There was an intense sense of impermanence. The next apartment, because the current one isn't great. The next job, because one can always do better. The next friend, because there's always more people to meet.
Especially in a city as romanticised as NYC, where a lot of people arrive with the expectation to live their best lives, make it big, and/or meet the most interesting people, I think people get used to the idea that something better is always around the corner.
Aren't those like really dangerous?
Speaking as someone who's currently living in a small rural town, I concur with Chesterton here: if you really want to understand people in all their varieties, the city isn't the place to be. In most cities I've spent time in everyone walks or (worse) drive past thousands to reach the few who they already relate to. If you want variety, if you want to stretch your own perspectives, then you want to be in a small town where people actually stop and talk to each other because there's no one else to talk to.
[0] > It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. ... the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul ... A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises.
My VHCOL city neighbors / friends all have laptop jobs like me. They all vote like me. They all went to competitive colleges like me. They had to pass through all the same sorting mechanisms in order to afford the VHCOL lifestyle.
My MCOL exurb friends & neighbors include building contractors, teachers, professors, cops, cafe owners, etc. Their voting and education are heterogenous.
Not all urban environments always provide the learning that’s best for you. Some communities which “don’t favor intellectual pursuits” end up actually being far more intellectual than the most ambitious elite city-dwelling ones.
Most childhoods end up idyllic. All configurations humans put themselves into exist.
Though I will say that I am lucky to say that I did come back to folks who really do value intellectual pursuits, though it did take some time for me to take notice. The urban environment though, not so sure about that anymore, lots of noise and distraction.
I often tell people that living in a rural area is much like living in the city, but living next to the city is like neither.
Let’s say you’re interested in transformers. In a big city, you could go to a meetup, talk to different people working on this stuff at a production level (maybe there’s even some guy who works on it at Google), talk about tips or pitfalls that no one ever publishes and potentially have the conversation veer off to DuckDB or some obscure topic. When you have a gathering of like minds, the conversation can go in unpredictable directions and you can potentially land in very interesting places.
In a less urban area, this is far less likely to happen because there are just fewer people with the same interests (unless you’re lucky). I grew up with friends who were absolutely brilliant (high fluid intelligence) who come from farming families. But they just weren’t interested in what I was interested in. The core of intellectual pursuit isn’t just smart people, but the confluence of people who have the same interests and who are also well positioned.
You might ask, can’t you just learn this stuff online and talk to people on Reddit? But the reality is that positive effects of randomness require real life undirected interactions with the right people.
(This is for instance why people are willing to relocate to a cold city like Montreal (-30°C/-22°F in the winter) to work in Bengio’s lab for a couple of years, just so they can overhear lunchtime conversations about how to train certain models. A lot of this knowledge is caught and not taught.)
I’ve gotten so many ideas from just random conversations with well positioned people who happened to be doing something important and interesting. It’s not just about being smart.
People outside of cities can read good too.
I've had lots of good tech discussions in several of towns that don't crack the top 20 biggest US cities. And I wouldn't argue I'm incredibly well travelled.
Now my kids have a backyard. They are also a short walk to a city park with multiple playgrounds, a small trail through the woods, a fishing pond, and more. They can hop on the bus and go to the library or the many other parks. They can hop on grade separated bike trails and ride for dozens of miles through nature reserves. We take the train to watch hockey games deeper into the city pretty often.
Suburb doesn't have to mean isolation. If often does, but it doesn't have to.
Meanwhile I know many people who live deeper in the city who barely know anyone in the city and rarely interact with people outside of Discord.
Grade separated bike trails and train service is something most suburbs in the US lack (though they might have recreational bike trails that don't go to the centre of town).
Visiting Houten in the Netherlands is a reminder that you can have a boring suburb that still gives kids freedom.
And yes I do agree many suburbs aren't like this. They should be IMO, if we're going to keep building suburbs.
I used to think along similar lines. But I haven't found moving out of the city to be subtractive of my 'intellectual life'. If anything, it has been complementary - due to being grounded in mainstream experience again that I lost touch with in the city.
That said, I've very consciously kept those former social connections alive (I'm an hour away), as I still need semi-regular social interaction with people much smarter than me.
I just spent a couple weeks visiting a friend in a (fairly affluent) rural mountain town, and felt this overwhelmingly. Most discussion amongst rural people seems to focus on things that directly affect them and that they can in turn affect. Community projects, social events, improving their schools, local gossip, etc.
In contrast, my city friends spend a lot of time on "bigger" subjects: wars, geopolitical and economic trends, our predictions on technological development... also, a lot of conversation about people's travel plans and that sort of thing. Rich city people always seem to be traveling out of the city, or planning their next travel.
It's not that the rural people are ignorant of the world, rather, I think it's a conscious choice to focus on things in their sphere of influence. It was a really nice reminder for me. If I ask a city friend "how have you been doing?" I'm likely to hear something like "oh, I've just been so stressed about this election" or "I've been worrying about AI taking my job". A rural friend might say something about digging their neighbor's house out after the latest snowstorm, or start talking about the new ski trail that their community just built.
It's also way easier to meet people in rural areas because you see the same people regularly, and a friendly chat at the local convenience mart is pretty normal, as opposed to the instinct you get in cities where if somebody is actively seeking you out to chat, then he's probably either a weirdo or looking to scam you or, equivalently, sell you something. The same instinct that makes it difficult for you to approach people to chat.
There's also a "very strong cultural preference" to be "obnoxious," as you put it. Hence a strong preference to isolate oneself.
I'd be fine living and raising a family in a high-rise downtown in a country where people behave themselves. Not here in the US. The comparison isn't apples-to-apples.
I'm going to doubt that's because of density. That's entirely because of toxic aspects of the cultures (especially work and education culture) that make it near impossible to have and raise a child for the first few years of their life.
My dad kept reminding me how I shouldn't have pursued coding and studied to be a lawyer instead... He alluded to my cousin who never went to university and was able to buy a house by being a truck driver and then working in the mines. Sigh.
He is right though. I feel like a fool; a caricature of the stereotypical book-smart, street-dumb geek, crawling back to the small town on my knees just to have the town folk rub dirt in my face, feeling proud of themselves for never having taken such foolish risks in their lives.
If skills aren’t the problem, one possibility is that a rigid attitude, lack of humility, or something like that is rubbing interviewers the wrong way. Please forgive my unsolicited advice and good luck with the search.
But yeah no doubt wise to do some self reflection and analyze what one could do better when trying again. One shouldn't just continue the same strategy without reflection when faluire occurs. But also don't be too hard on yourself, sometimes things just don't work out.
This part of choosing where to live is so important and hard to articulate. I remember when I moved from small town to small town, then finally out to Silicon Valley. The first thing I noticed was the billboards by the side of 101. They were about programming frameworks, iPhones, hackerspaces, development tools and so on... Where I came from, the billboards along the highway said things like "Don't Shake Your Baby" and "Jesus Hates Sinners" and "Lift Kits For Your Truck". The vibe of the Valley and the general interest in intellectual things made me think for the first time in my life "I'm among my own people now!"
Since then, as we all know, the vibe has changed, and I've moved away, but for a very brief special period of time, my quality of life was greatly enhanced just by being in this nexus of people who's values and interests aligned with my own.
In terms of respect for intellectual pursuits and expertise and institutions that respect these things, the place is still head and shoulders above most of the USA, but it feels like every part of the valley has been utterly corrupted by hustle and greed.
I came out here expecting Netscape, Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics, but lately the place has morphed into Theranos, FTX, and innumerable Fintech, AI and crypto scams. Not to mention GiantTech capturing and gatekeeping everything else that's not a scam.
People in Argentina definitely aren’t seeking isolation in the suburbs. They mainly seem to want more space to host gatherings of everyone they know.
I grew up in a very intellectual city (Waterloo) with a back yard with big wood fences and we just became experts climbing them, venturing from yard to yard collecting half a dozen kids. We’d bike all over, including to the universities (though Laurier campus didn’t feel interesting).
I moved to a very blue collar small city and it feels pretty much the same. My kids are bringing back a lot of nostalgia for me, I’ve made a lot of friends at the curling club, and I’m mentoring a local high school’s robotics team (one difference: I’ve learned that young farmers are incredible engineers).
I wouldn’t suggest that my experience is normal either, though.
But suppose you were interested in Rousseau or Great Books. You wouldn’t find too many people willing to connect on that. But in a big city you will find both types and more.
Ironically enough as a sidenote, Rousseau most definitely was not a proponent of urban living, and in fact detested the intellectual cosmopolitan more than just about anyone else, he went so far as to declare big cities the abyss of the human species. I don't personally agree but that is one tough philosopher for the aspiring urbanite
> cultural preference to isolate oneself
In retrospect, we, as a society, developed this notion of private property. Consumerism and mass media did this to us. But historically, we did not own much. Someone would hunt and gather, and the elders would stay and look out for the children. Imagine you're retired, old, frail, yet surrounded by children who are willing to help you.
This is the type of property that is the most natural actually, and I can't really see what it has to do with isolation. Even an idealized communist society (think Ursula LeGuinn, not Stalin) would still have this type of property, and consumerism (accumulating doodads you use every day) would still be a possible risk.
* in these types of discussions, when discussing the origins of such basic concepts, private property is often understood to refer to ownership of goods you are not directly using on a day-to-day basis. If you live in a house, that's personal property. If you own a house someone else lives in, that's private property. And this is indeed a much newer idea in human society (though still much, much older than media).
This was not the only way it could have gone, but it ended up being like this due to the government kowtowing to the moneyed interests.
Sounds like you've barely talked to people living in suburbs. A ton of the people I talk to are very pro-SFH, big easements, lot restrictions, etc. Go to a city council meeting talking about rezoning for higher density. Tell me how all those people are on the car manufacturer's payrolls.
These people want this. They keep moving further outwards willingly because they want bigger houses on bigger lots with fewer of the "others".
It's the same people who argue transit brings the homeless and crime to your area, so the way to end homelessness is to end public transit. They don't need to be on the auto industry payroll or influenced by their propaganda; isolation is the goal.
These people are now sicker, sadder, more isolated, and with less access to good jobs and education than before. Now the jobs are far away, requiring hour-long commutes and they can't even buy bread without driving, sometimes for a long time.
Whenever I visit Europe its such a wild experience, being able to take public transportation to many places, having parks all over the place, sometimes parks surrounded by restaurants and bars. It feels vibrant, with kids everywhere. I'm glad I have a large support group here in the US and we've made many friends in the burbs (mainly because they also have kids), but this is not the reality for a lot of folks.
Our civil society organizations have eroded to the point that the private market has completely ended the concept of the third space. Places where community can be formed are gone; commoditized and politicized and so are not places where community can develop. Instead of the use of third-spaces we are forced to depend on our friends economically like this.
This seems like a good thing, "people are coming together, yay!" but being forced to live like this is not going to have good outcomes. These people have real issues described in the article, they need better child-care, they need closer personal roots, they need economic security. But we forcing people to make these contracts of great economic dependency, we should be more prepared to allow people to live more independently. I see this move as kin to the economic migration from the Global South today to countries like Sweden, Germany, etc. which has been causing great strife internally to those countries.
So now when I go back to see him there's all these people there that I've known since forever, living in the same building. It's oddly comforting. They've struck the just-right balance between being too close and too far apart. They see each other regularly but there isn't a gathering every day.
I would love to live near friends. I've been trying to find a place cheap enough and close enough to an area with plentiful jobs. But my friends are not all software engineers, and most are far from making that kind of money (or being able to work from home anywhere in the country). It's so fucking hard. And such a slap in the face to see a site that should make it easier, actually only intended to help people for whom that goal is already in reach.
That said, we did that because it seemed to us to be the obvious right thing, and it seemed that our parents benefited from doing this. If the only input I had was some super rich guy saying "Don't do what I did, man. Wealth isn't worth it. I wish I had friends" I would conclude that it's bogus.
A 10-minute walk would be a perfect compromise.
When I was younger many of my friends and their friends all moved into my apt. complex. It was great.
Now that we're older, I'm in the process of fixing up a place abroad I hope that many of us can stay at once people start retiring and/or scaling back on work. My wife and I are going to move soon enough, but we've already let our friends know we have space for others. I don't mind building the beachhead :)
My friends are in a diverse set of fields, finding a place with jobs for all of them isn't feasible right now.
I wonder if part of the reason is that housing is not an investment vehicle in Japan (probably due to the Japanese preference for newer, more modern builds and the fact that housing is a depreciating asset in an earthquake prone region).
In most parts of the world, housing is tied to land, and land is very expensive. What makes things worse in North America is cultural dislike of verticality —- people want to preserve a museum of their low-rise neighborhoods and don’t want any tall buildings to block the view. That’s fine, but the cost is unaffordable housing.
For nearly every maximum or minimum that the zoning and code sets, flipping the direction would be better. Have parking maximums instead of minimums. Have density minimums rather than maximums.
Make those who want to have too much parking get exceptions and be vetoed by a handful of people showing up on a Tuesday afternoon meeting. Let those who want the "luxury" of low density living in urban cores be the ones begging the neighborhood busybodies and control freaks for the chance to under build in prime locations.
I prefer to call it Tiny Neighborhoods, which is basically what the article describes.
If interested, I did a 3,000 word deep dive into the specifics of how tiny neighborhoods have worked over the past 50 years…
Easier said then done, though in most cases, but worth it wherever possible.
That's not to say the concept is bad, but it's very very easy for even a good group to rapidly devolve, the clearer heads quietly move away.
In the discussion of communities, I've come across the idea that it's better to organize around a purpose - say a farm cooperative or (historically) a religious cause. Sharing beliefs (being Like Minded) may not be enough for long term cohesion. Can you imagine living with your Blue sky cohort?
I don’t need or particularly want there to be any obligations or explicit organization facilitating this. When people are friendly and open, it happens naturally. You see someone walking the dog and strike up a conversation.
I guess if there was some way to anonymously self-identify as sharing this preference and it got enough traction, you could flag neighborhoods and even specific blocks with more of these people, and then the concentration would perhaps increase over time as people who value these things would pay a bit more to live in these areas.
Put simply, you feel like you live in a community without having built a commune or something.
Unfortunately it's kind of hard to tell what cities have this "social spatial density." There are denser urban areas that feel less communal, and far sparser ones that seem moreso, it's related to overall population density but not perfectly so.
Yes and I know what you are talking about, but I was indeed using it more in a loose meaning, like friends moving intentionally close together and living in houses next to each other and sharing common ressources like a sauna and take turns in babysitting. Not necessarily sharing one kitchen and bathroom together. But for some this also works, for me only with certain people.
"or (historically) a religious cause"
And that is still a thing. Personally my common cause would be building open source technology together.
And of course it's often not possible or easy to do this.
And yes, apartments are kind of separate enough to not hear each other too much. But then also everyone has young kids anyway, so we are all used to a certain baseline noise level anyway
— Baz Luhrmann from Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTJ7AzBIJoI
I haven't found the above advice to be true, I'm 40 now.
I moved off grid after living in a city for 20 years.
I don't have a lot of friends but I'm happy, my nearest neighbor is 5km away.
I enjoy the dark nights, the silence and the solitude.
I think friends are a really arbitrary thing to plan your life around.
Friends can also be a burden, more isn't just better; shoutout to social media.
"If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company."
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Words to live by.
Prioritize your kids, your spouse, yourself, and let the other chips fall where they may.
At our ages 40-60, we all have our own immediate families, obligations (kids, grandkids and/or aging parents), we still have to make an effort to get together and we probably wouldn’t get together any more than we do now.
I am 50 married with adult (step)kids and my wife and I are empty nesters. We recently moved from where I lived after graduating from college in 1996 and my wife has lived all of her adult life.
My core group of 5 friends I’ve put together from jobs I’ve had when living there are all married some with adult kids and others with kids still at home. It took a lot of planning and juggling calendars just for us to get together even once per quarter when I lived there.
They all still live there and we have a group chat. But it is still less than once per quarter that we can all get together. It’s a short cheap flight for me to fly in to hang out with them.
There are two other couples that my wife and I are friends with and we all live in different cities now. Similar scenario, they both have family obligations - parents, adult kids, grandkids, etc which make it hard for all six of us to get together. But we usually have planned a trip together at least once a year and we end up in each others city for something at least once a year - Atlanta, Orlando and Los Angeles.
My third group of “friends” are my seven cousins I grew up with (I’m an only child). They are all female and also have aging parents (who are less healthy than mine), children, grand children, etc.
They all live in my former hometown and I’m also in a group chat with them. They say they often only see each other when I come to town and get us all together.
It’s the same with my college crew - we all went to college in our hone town and they either still live there or have family there. We can barely get together for alumni college events
I was recently thinking how much I would like to be closer (geographically) with my high school friends (despite the changes that we've had over the years). But in the case of my friend whose phone number I recently blocked, I'm so happy that I don't live so close that he could drop by.
The benefits they talk about are real, but I don't know how realistic this is as a recommendation. I suspect few folks will find themselves not only able to buy housing (or a portion of housing), but also able to do so with folks whom they trust enough to make such a big commitment.
I'm curious what other folks think about such situations and recommendations though. Is it a realistic recommendation?
And I don't just mean Austin, Chicago, or San Diego, which are all pretty far away from NYC where I live. I mean places like London, Munich, Zurich, Tampere (Finland), or Tel Aviv. While I enjoyed it when my plane was landing in many of these places, I also enjoyed it when it was taking me back home. (Maybe except London, but, to my mind, London is harsher than NYC if you want to actually afford living there.)
So the closest I can live to my friends is online. Show up for a chat, talk, cheer up, support each other, and the bonds of friendship will remain, despite geography. Live next block and forget to say hello week after week, because the days are busy, and the bond will fray.
I'm also a nomad and have found that, with a little extra effort on my part (it helps that I'm extroverted and skilled with productivity apps), I can easily see many friends all over the world.
Also there was a study that found the reason some old folks lived super long in Italian towns is because of community.
I suspect that the focus should be on making it easier for people to choose to live near friends. Not sure how that would work though.
Internet-only friendships and acquaintances and groups can be deceiving too. They can be great and full of wonderful people, but the reality is usually that even if you spend 20 years in a particular internet community, you could leave tomorrow and few (if any) people would be talking about you for longer than a week.
Personally, family and the closest of close (family) friends are the constant. Beyond that, it feels like retreat into mundanity ... like Facebook.
The big issue is that friendships ain't permanent, and navigating the financial and legal implications of jointly owning real estate entails a need for quite a bit of permanence. I and the friends in question believe we trust each other enough to make it work (should we ever all be sufficiently financially secure to pull the trigger on that plan), but it's hard to be sure.
We also more drastically sort ourselves than before by some notions of class like "what you majored in" at "what tier of institution" and "stayed in academia" or "went into industry" etc.
moving to live near friends is probably helpful but not a panacea; nor are we going to do it so...
[1] Said by someone with some bitterness about this. [2] Who is also guilty of doing the same.
In what situation would you live somewhere long-term with no friends whatsoever?
Alternavely, you have to be willing to spend a lot of time in those neighborhoods, then go back to your home for the night. But, of course, the atrocious public transit system in most American cities means this is a pipe dream for me.
If this is more about living in a more dense area where you have friends closeby, absolutely. I live in a very dense area and I have friends all over the neighborhood. Some across the street, some down the road. We can meet up and see a show or do friendsgiving or whatever or just grab a beer.
It's not cheap and I don't live in a big place but I am astronomically happier here than I was when I owned a house in the suburbs 2016-2019 and had to drive 25 minutes minimum to meet up with people.
Does anyone here have shared or neighboring vacation homes or SHTF homesteads with friends?
In my home city, many houses around are my family and childhood friends, and I wish I could replicate that with my other friends too. If I ever become a billionaire and can buy a small village and make everyone move there, it would be a dream coming true!
Relevant website
As a renter, I’m constantly on the move because I can’t afford homeownership - the price to rent ratio is firmly between 19 and 20 at the moment, and that’s after moving from the Bay Area. Buying is a minimum of a 48% increase here in Seattle, that absurd.
Like most folks, we live where we can. Being able to pick a spot on a map has never been a possibility.
It's been tighter than that tho. In 2021 we beat loooong odds to find any housing and insane odds to score a decent place that fit all of us. People with money in the bank were going homeless.
my mother lives in a rental apartment that my family has been in since 150 years ago.
I recently moved out of an apartment complex in Santa Cruz County in California that got sold after being owned by a family for about 50 years. Some of the tenants lived there for decades. The new owners submitted plans to the local government to upzone the 1960s-era apartment complex, which will involve residents needing to move during construction. Thankfully for me, the sale coincided with a major career change (WFH researcher to a professor who teaches in person) that required me to move anyway, so I moved. However, I feel for long-time residents of my former apartment complex going through the uncertainty of the future and the difficult housing market in Santa Cruz County should they be forced to move.
Renting, by definition, means you don’t own your place. While there are some people who are able to have stable renting situations, there are others who have the bad luck of receiving an eviction notice due to a sale. Owning a place means not having to worry about a landlord.
Wouldn’t it have been better to just buy property in that area? 150 years ago was 1874 - that’s many an economic cycle and the homesteading act was still a thing then.
I find it hard to believe that renting was the best play here. Unless (cost of house/cost of annual rent) was always 16+, then maybe.
It's the poor who are often able to put those issues aside because they have so little status and wealth. They have nothing to lose.
With family, the further I get, the happier I am. They are what they are, and I can’t say I’m that interested in it.
I’ve replaced that with friends I can actually count on.
For those of us from toxic homes, found family is more important. The LGBTQ community was decades ahead of us on this.