If more people lived together with friends, that’d make a dent in both the housing and loneliness crises.
One is a friend. The other an acquaintance.
If someone is doing that while living with someone whom it’s bothering to the point of wanting to change living situations, there is a disconnect of empathy that betrays that it isn’t a friendship.
(Granted, my original comment was honing in on the “few hours a month” bit. That’s fine for maintaining a friendship. But not for building one. Again, it’s perfectly adequate for making acquaintances.)
I have/had friends whose pickiness/slovenliness was fine until we tried to live together, and then all that became a personality clash. It's entirely possible to have strong friendships with people you couldn't live with.
If my friends fell on hard times, they’d have a place to crash. I cannot say that of everyone I hang out with because not all of them are people whom I’d (a) enjoy being around and (b) trust to respect my boundaries (and trust myself to be tolerant of their incongruities with my preferences).
People can seem perfectly fine, until they seem to spontaneously turn into hoarders, or start eating all your food and lying about it, or start being aggressively in your face about a bunch of antagonistic culture bullshit, etc.
I think what we’re seeing is Americans increasingly fed up with (or even terrified of) other Americans.
It’s possible there are more unhinged people today, but I think that’s also a consequence of us spending so much time alone in the first place (and sycophantic bots are only going to make that worse).
I was also thinking of everyone, not just US Americans.
There is a reason for this, and it isn't because they hate their mental health.
The issue here is how hard it is to protect your own mental health when someone else refuses to respect yours, and how a co-living situation can make that hard - because you literally are all up in each others business.
No, of course not. But that doesn’t also mean it can’t have an effect. Social media is harmful to many of us who still partake. Sometimes what we do isn’t what’s best. Some of those people who live alone could benefit from living with someone else, others might not. It’s not an absolute, just worth considering.
> The issue here is how hard it is to protect your own mental health when someone else refuses to respect yours
Right, but I feel too many people are focusing on dipshit housemates. Good and understanding people do exist. Like, would you be one of those disrespectful people you describe? Probably not, which proves people like you do exist.
I realize hearing that or seeing that others may read that, may anger people who are deeply invested in the fraud that diversity is good, but all the legitimate research into the topic all tells us the same thing; that “diversity” is detrimental to any and all human communities all around the world, even for the very group that pushes it on others while aggressively rejecting it for themselves and their own.
edit: No amount of downvoting will change reality, whether you shoot the messenger or not. It's a shame, because good does not actually prevail, especially with brainwashed fools who assist those seeking the demise of others. Support of "diversity" is no different than the support of the genocide the jewish state committed and is to this day still committing in Gaza... the support of evil without the intelligence to understand that.
But it's getting harder because of the housing market.
Neither are threatened by living with a friend or someone else near your age. Sure, move out of your parents’ home, but that doesn’t mean you have to live alone.
The difference between sharing a 2BR and living in an apartment building are more exercises in cultural than physical difference.
This reminds me, yesterday I was walking down the hallway of my apartment building, and one of my neighbors passed by me but neglected to even acknowledge my existence, because their head was down staring at their smartphone.
Sharing a house is a good way to combat that. Sometimes you move in with people you tangentially know. Sometimes you won’t be huge friends with them but can still interact, or may even meet some of their friends and hit it off.
Living in suburbia has definitely made me yearn for this: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/should-more-of-us-...