Coming from a Latin American the idea of re-starting your life across the country for college and then again for work (multiple times sometimes) while away from family and friends is very foreign.
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”.
In Anglo cultures kids aren't usually moving away from home until they are at least ~18 years old. This is not a factor in teenagers feeling isolated. Suburbia and the decline of third places probably play a far greater role in this demographic.
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...
> 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.
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.
"anglo cultures" already had quite a lead before WW2, hard to miss that the previous superpower was the British Empire. The outcome of WW2 elevated America, there's no relationship there to broader anglo culture.
Quite a stretch to jump to "everyone might be miserable". Immigration from Latin American and other non-anglo countries is on a scale where it shapes American and British domestic politics, difficult to conclude that those immigrants are searching for the misery of anglo cultures that they can't find at home.
> "anglo cultures" already had quite a lead before WW2, hard to miss that the previous superpower was the British Empire.
I think you're trying too hard to muddy the waters by creating a definition for "anglo" that does not match reality or any use of the term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Americans
Even within "European Americans", nearly half has an ethnic origin that is classified as German, not English.
Another important aspect is immigration and naturalization. The bulk of high-skilled R&D specialists who turned the US into the technological powerhouse that it is aren't exactly Mayflower descendants. It's immigrants and first- and second-generation. So it's very hard to argue about "Anglo" thins with the extreme reliance on immigration and descendent of immigrants to play the roles that made all this progress possible.
A few points:
- German and other NW European cultures share the family atomization characteristic of Anglo-Americans
- Anglo as a term stems from England. England is named for the Angles, a Scandinavian/Germanic tribe that invaded Britain a long time ago. The term Anglo-American reflects the seminal English influence on American culture.
- The English and their descendant culture, America, basically invented the modern economic world and it predates WWII by a long time.
The idea that WWII is why America is on top is a-historical.
>The idea that WWII is why America is on top is a-historical.
How so?
The word "anglo" is so fraught that I think it's probably less useful to try to argue about what it means than it would be to just leave it alone.
I'm actually here to point out that the U.S. had the world's largest GDP as early as 1890, or as late as 1913, depending on your source of data and how it's estimated. So, WWII isn't the origin of that. We can now argue about whether GDP is a good indicator, but before doing that I'd ask for a better one (with historical data) to be suggested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Maddison_statistics_of_t...
Well, that's a very self-defeatist attitude. I can see how it can make someone sad.
US had world’s largest economy well before WWII. It initially took first place in 1880 before going back and forth until 1900 when to firmly took the lead for a century. https://education.cfr.org/learn/reading/how-did-united-state...
It was a huge country with lots of natural resources like oil, gold, coal, etc.
>It boils down to "everyone might be miserable, but someone else is getting rich so it's good."
Aren't Scandinavian people statistically the happiest? That's not anglo culture.
Isn't the suicide rate highest in Scandinavian countries and lowest in South Europe?
The more sad people kill themselves, the happier is the average survivor?
Britanica did a video on this: https://youtu.be/ldvQOnvc2Io?si=9R1IHMfS0i7RhB8s
Different cultures also define happiness differently. For the scandanvians, happiness stems from contentment and balance, American society tends to link it to consumerism and material success.
In a static population sure. Over decades?
Admittedly Anglo culture took a lot of influence from the scandinavians (due to Viking conquest etc). I think some of the cultural tenants we are talking about probably did come originally from Scandinavia.
Why are you calling that Anglo-Saxon culture? You're clearly talking about the US, not the UK or France... You're not even talking about the whole US, or the majority, just the culture in the larger cities. Even within the US it isn't the people that were born here who traveled the farthest and learned a new language for an opportunity. This conversation is very surreal.
Someone else? My brother the US median income is miles ahead of everywhere else.
Income alone is not a good measure.
> In Anglo cultures kids aren't usually moving away from home until they are at least ~18 years old. This is not a factor in teenagers feeling isolated.
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.
In the American South community is as easy as picking a church and going to your kids public school sporting events.
Are there problems, of course, like all societies. But it's easy and it works.
This presupposes both an interest in religion and organized sports.
With this mindset you likely wouldn’t live in the south anyway as you’d end up miserable. Just like a southerner living in CA.
>This presupposes both an interest in religion and organized sports.
Sorta but not really. Lots of people just fake it for the community aspects.
At least w.r.t. the latter point, you shouldn't need to be interested in sports to be interested in your kid's sporting events. Spoiler: nobody likes t-ball, but they do like their kids enough to go to the t-ball games anyways.
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Same thing works in Philadelphia.
So, people moving away is not new and not surprising, and happens all over the world, it's basically the main driver of urbanization. What's new was (rich) people moving "back" (to suburbs for the American Dream, and nowadays to have kids).
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...
It's easy to blame the decline of organized religion, but it curiously coincides with the same time-frame in which the car was invented and modern suburbia sprung up. Having to move to allow for a family is definitely a new and worrying phenomenon.
My gut feel is that having to maintain close family ties and living with parents until adulthood are an adaption to poverty, poor social mobility, and low trust society. People will rationalize it but given opportunity they'll act in the exact same way as the rest of us (just look at urbanization in China).
Thanks for the article, wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if the loneliness epidemic is a statistical artifact of bad data.
It’s a trend that’s a few centuries old at least. The French and Indian War was partly caused by Americans who didn’t have enough land to farm to support a family moving west, and the British trying to stop that was one cause of the Revolution, and then the whole of 19th century American history is a combination of farmers moving west because the east was full and immigration from Europe largely driven by the farmland of Europe being full. Before that almost everywhere was stuck in a Malthusian equilibrium and if you couldn’t support a family in your home, moving away would just make it harder.
I suspect close family ties and living with parents was the default throughout human prehistory. Our Hunter-gatherer ancestors were probably not leaving their tribe behind and moving away. It's only since the industrial revolution that people have been leaving their birth family behind en mass.
From what I can tell (though this varied by culture!) free first born males stayed with the parents. Females were often traded to other tribes (both as war spoils and more peaceful ways). Free second and later sons often discovered the family land couldn't support them and their older brothers families and left looking for anyplace to live (often resulting in war which in turned eased population pressure, though sometimes a city job existed though they were worse than farming until the industrial revolution). Slaves of course had no control of where the children went. The sexism above was real, though how is manifested varied from culture to culture with some worse than others (sometimes it was the oldest female who stayed home).
Genetic diversity requires someone leave their family and join a different one. How that happened varied but nearly every culture recognized siblings having children together resulted in deformed kids and thus developed a culture to prevent that. Every culture includes other animals.
I think in any low trust environment where social mobility outside the group is poor, sticking together based on blood lines probably was the default for sure.
However I think there's plenty of evidence that migration and intermingling between tribes occurred frequently. If only as social practices to prevent inbreeding. Probably a bunch of bride kidnapping sadly but also young males leaving to seek opportunity isn't an exclusively modern phenomenon.
> also young males leaving to seek opportunity isn't an exclusively modern phenomenon.
True but as far as we can tell it was usually (if not entirely exclusively) done through the same social networks that existed locally [unless you were leaving to murder/rape/rob people]. Unless they really, really had to you only moved to another city/location because you had a cousin, uncle etc. or someone else there you had some ties with. Outside of organizations like the church or the army (and even then) a complete outsider was at an extreme disadvantage (relative to today).
>Our Hunter-gatherer ancestors were probably not leaving their tribe behind and moving away.
It is like literally what they did - more than ever after and before.
As far as I understand the recent decline in the numbers is that people stopped lying about which church they don't go to. Because church-goer numbers are stable.
What happened during the last century is ... complicated. For one thing religion was never really that organized in the US. (Maybe except in Utah. But that's also relatively new.)
I think simply WWII, and the post-WWII economic boom (plus the GI bill), plus then the heating up Cold War slowly but surely transformed society. For the new generations the various Christian belief systems offered by churches were simply not a real option.
People got an appetite for different answers whether be that science or pseudoscience based. Cults and other ideology-based groups filled some of the vacuum. (And of course the counterculture eventually and then after Vietnam and the race riots came the backlash. The Southern Strategy, which platformed evangelicals, but as a political group, not as organized religion. Basically emptying out the spiritual part, etc. And of course it still works.)
> So, people moving away is not new and not surprising, and happens all over the world, it's basically the main driver of urbanization. What's new was (rich) people moving "back" (to suburbs for the American Dream, and nowadays to have kids).
Actually, no. It is a very recent phenomenon, and never experienced before at this scale in the history of mankind.
Even at the current scale, this is what the data shows:
> Nearly six in 10 young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up, and eight in 10 live within 100 miles, according to a new study by researchers at the U.S. Census Bureau and Harvard University.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/07/theres-no-pla...
Sorry, do you mean they are not moving away or not moving far or ... ?
About 4 million people moved from rural areas to a town in the 19th century in the UK.
Many people moved to "the new world", etc.
Of course most moves were short (simply "one level up" on the density ladder).
"""
The working-class intercounty migrant was young, literate and skilled; the median distance travelled was 59 miles. Regional migration pathways are described. Rural workers moved more frequently than urban workers, but urban workers travelled a greater median distance than their rural counterparts
"""
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03057...
""" ... only 29% of heads of households in 1871 had been born in Manchester and 12% originated from surrounding counties, 32% were long-distance mainland migrants, coming from as far afield as Scotland and East Anglia. """
https://www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/migration-cities/0/...
So if 80% are staying withing a 100 miles, 20% moving more is not that far from the 32% in the 19th century.
>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!
No such cities exist in the USA
Except for Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Madison, San Antonio, Buffalo, Memphis, …
> Memphis
They said safe my guy
You have no idea what a "safe" high density city is "where people can be next to their new and old friends" if you think any of the cities you named meet either of those criteria.
And yet somehow tens of millions of us manage to live in them.
It's amazing what people will adapt to. A friend of mine living in Minneapolis said you can't lock your car in her neighborhood, otherwise someone will just break the windows to get inside to look for things to steal. One night, her husband forgot and locked it out of habit, and before the next morning one of the windows was broken.
That anyone chooses to live like that baffles me.
That the American left is allergic to draconianly prosecuting property and nuisance crime a la Singapore is not an indictment of urbanism in general
There is no perfect place to live. Everywhere has trade-offs, and I bet we could both come up with 100 things more important to our quality of life than whether you need to lock your car door or not.
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> 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.
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.
No one said that the religious belief itself is the important factor, and your first guess of it enforcing terrible marriage is insultingly reductive. Your second guess only comes close. It's literally the church, the meeting place where you see the same people every week. Kids meet other kids, adults meet adults. If you think that every person in the building actually believes what the pastor says then i think you have not been to most American churches. The shared belief is a part of it but can be easily faked if necessary. The entirety of social life from the church is the proximity. The vast majority of friends made from that proximity do not spend even half their time together speaking about the church or the belief, especially the children.
Sure, the church has problems, as does religion. All that's being said is that church is the last great, high trust, free, "third space" in America. The fact that it houses a religion is related but not central to that fact.
When I go back home to South GA, I see first hand the majority of people in my own extended family believe everything the Bible says literally as well as people who I went to private Christian school with.
I think the point is that secularism doesn't give you 'instant friends' like religion does. Secularism doesn't have shared culture or common experience to bind people.
For example, there's a 0.5 mile street in the town I grew up in that has 13 churches. This was an area settled by people from around the world, and the churches enabled them to have an immediate extended family when they showed up.
> their children to marry and have kids, so that there are grandchildren to fill those golden years
Which seems to benefit everyone long-term, though (on average/societal scale anyway). I mean what alternatives are you suggesting?
Communes? State run child breeding and education facilities?
If your issue is with monogamy, well that has proven to be the most stable system and seemingly facilitated most of human progress (at least in the more successful societies).
> a lot of young people may choose to stick
You do have a point, it's certainly not necessarily optimal from the individual perspective. Problem is that most alternatives might not be sustainable over several generations so they just die out.
Probably not exactly what you're thinking about but e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers
I think your second guess is what was meant. Doing church things is a social occasion, a place to meet people and make friends.
From the perspective of my original comment, more than anything church is just a formalized social occasion. Repeated social contact, and proximity seems to be critical to friendship formation.
Wasn't commenting on family formation etc.
This is going on a tangent, but I would like to point out to you that Atheism is itself a religion: It's a belief in no god(s), a belief in refuting god(s).
I'm Japanese, we (Japan) consider ourselves Non-Religious when we choose to celebrate newborn life at Shinto Shrines, weddings at Christian Churches, and funerals and graves at Buddhist Temples with no dogmatic attachment to any of them as an institution as we go through the motions in life.
There's a healthy enjoyment of Christmas involving cake and Kentucky Fried Chicken in there, too.
Thusly, I always find it interesting/amusing that Atheism is usually positioned as the anti-religion in the West when really it isn't.
I'm going in a tangent too here :-) . One can say that atheism (with lower case) is a lack of religion. And then there is the meaning you suggest: Atheism as a belief in refuting god. That one is not a proper religion, but more like an ideology. Or maybe it is a religion in the sense that it can be used as a moral cornerstone.
More than playing with words, not believing in god may be one of three things: irrelevant, a disadvantage, or a door to a better world. It is irrelevant if you observe the rites and traditions of your society anyway, e.g. if you celebrate newborn life at Shinto Shrines, and weddings and Christian Churches, and Christmas, and if your passing through this world does not intend to play with those "immutables". It's a disadvantage if you find yourself in an ostracized minority or simply disconnected from your neighbors. But it may also be a door to a better world if you yourself or your neighbor are gay, or if you yourself and your neighbor are medical researchers trying to understand why people age, or if you yourself and your neighbor are fighting for the rights of women in some dark corner of the world.
An atheist may write books where gods, angels and demons play with humans, and find it amusing and delight others with it. Or they may enter a church and find it pretty and feel empathy for the pain that move people to worship in such places. An atheist may come to terms with their irreverent faith on that pain not having to be an eternal part of the world, and may try to do something to change it.
I think the parallel many draw is that atheism is taking a position of certainty on the question of a God. And that certainty is based largely on personal belief as any evidence for such a question will inherently be weak.
To me agnosticism would be more the absence of religion, because the absence of religion doesn't imply any particular opinion on the existence or not of a God. One can believe there might be a God without embracing any religion.
The idea that someone can be without “religion” is very odd. The word “religion” is generally worthless as used, as for most people, this is merely some vague sense of what was called “religion” in their particular experience. But a coherent common characteristic, as it were, is that it is a worldview with a highest good. Everyone has some kind of worldview and some notion of a hierarchy of goods, usually something absorbed from their environment.
So it is pointless to speak of whether you are “religious”. It makes more sense to ask how you are religious. It is far more interesting to discuss the merits of your religion or other religions than to go around pretending you don’t have one.
The first isn't atheism, it is agnostic - no religion and not looking for one, but open to it if you can convince them your religion is right (which you can't because they are not interested in the topic)
Atheism is defined as the absence of belief which is essentially what OP said.
The fact that we are open to changing our mind if theoretically presented with strong evidence does not make us agnostic.
You’d probably also accept that sun is made of cheese if presented strong enough evidence but don’t call yourself agnostic about the topic given your current knowledge.
Atheism is the position that God does not exist. An atheist is someone who therefore says “I believe that there is no God.”
It is not a mere lack of belief, as agnostics can be said to lack belief in God as well. People who are simply ignorant of God also lack a proper belief in God, but this is not atheism, only ignorance. They simply have not come to terms with the subject and therefore have no position on the matter. An atheist does, however unsophisticated it may be.
This view that atheism is simply a lack of belief in God is common among the intellectually challenged New Atheist crowd and would have been ridiculous to the much more intellectually substantive atheists of old, like Neitzsche (who, btw, while an atheist, found it a horrifying thing; the other classic atheists could be described as world-weary rather than insipid, parochial, middle class triumphant).
For someone concerned with the lack of intellectual seriousness of the New Atheist movement, you seem especially committed to ontological realism. Is there some compelling argument I've missed?
That aside, "atheism" can obviously mean both things—with regard to a belief or the endorsement of an "existence" proposition. In the case of atheism/theism, the belief part plays a substantial role—it distinguishes between B(~p) and ~B(p), the strong and weak positions, respectively.
There are other ways besides ignorance or agnosticism to arrive at ~B. For example, if my view is that ontological claims can't be propositions, then obviously I can't have beliefs about them one way or another. Or I could reject all supernatural claims out of hand. Why would you insist that one take a firm position on whether "God" specifically "exists" or not? Isn't atheism just a consequence of these views?
To put it plainly, logical consequences of other views can make one an atheist just as much as rejecting p outright. One needn't explicitly endorse or reject every mystical metaphysical claim out there. That would be a bit silly, just as it's a bit silly that we've inherited a special word for "atheism" in the first place.
In practice though, unless you're in the Richard Dawkins camp, it's a distinction without really a difference.
The Richard Dawkins camp is pretty large (or maybe just vocal?) on the internet though and so the difference is important.
I vote vocal.
> but I would like to point out to you that Atheism is itself a religion: It's a belief in no god(s), a belief in refuting god(s).
This definition of atheism is non-standard, and dilutes the meaning of "religion".
Let it be noted that almost all atheists will disagree with you that it is a religion. Not all of them, of course, because atheism isn't an organized movement with a doctrine which states what is and isn't "true" atheism.
It's not a religion, though, by any reasonable definition of the term.
Atheism is not a religion – it’s simply the absence of belief in gods. Religions involve organized systems of practices, rituals, and doctrines, none of which apply to atheism. Not believing in something doesn’t make it a belief system, just like not collecting stamps isn’t a hobby.
Atheism has a large component of refute the existence of God, make practice of region hard for those who are religion and so on.
There is the I don't believe in God and I'm not interested in anything more. However there are a lot of vocal Atheists who have turned it into a religion with practices, rituals and doctrines around proving there is no God and thus I elevate that to a religion.
You can choose where you want to be.
You're describing a fictitious brand of atheism, one that I -- surrounded by friends and family who are atheists -- have never observed.
Atheists simply don't believe in any gods. Lowercase "gods", it's not exclusive to the Christian God, which a specific god we also don't believe exists.
> rituals and doctrines around proving there is no God
Please provide evidence to substantiate this claim.
Their rituals involve quotes of Noam Chomsky or Richard Dawkins anytime region comes up. Noam Chomsky and/or Richard Dawkins wrote their doctrines which they accept without question.
Maybe that isn't you, but it exists.
> but it exists
A religion without gods can exist, and trying to prove God does not exist can be a hobby, but Atheism does not mean either of those concepts.
This is not reddit nor 4chan.
> It's a belief in no god(s)
That would be better stated as "no belief in gods". The vast majority of atheists in non religious societies aren't spending much time thinking about how there are no gods, or reading up on how they should believe there are gods. They just aren't thinking about it at all, it isn't something they work at.
To steal a quote: "not going skiing isn't a hobby".
Japanese are massively superstitious (as are most peoples). That's not quite the same as religion but it's somewhere in the same side of the spectrum.
I would question this thesis.
First, “religion” is not an especially good word in practice, as what people call “religion” is highly varied, enough so that the set of assertions that hold for all of them is exceedingly small and increasingly banal such that it ultimately becomes synonymous with worldview. The vague feeling of what religion is in most people’s minds is highly informed by caricature and parochial experience that is then overgeneralized.
But in the specific case of Catholicism, superstition is, in fact, recognized as sinful precisely because it is irrational (and thus opposed to human nature and the human good) and often rooted in a desire to control what is not in scope for human control or ought not be within the scope of the desire to control. Think “spells” that are meant to control others or palm reading meant to tell you your future or rituals that are supposed to alter your luck like throwing salt over your shoulder or believing that black cats bring bad luck. All these are regarded as irrational in the sense that they have no rational justification, no causal efficacy, or trade in bogus notions, but also conspicuously evil when they entail the desire to objectify and manipulate other people. (These, in turn, are said to predispose their practitioners to malicious influence, as ill will and irrationality are weaknesses that predispose a person to that.) Faith, properly understood, is not the nonsense the popular culture or Hallmark movies tell us it is (i.e., wishful thinking), only either a rationally justified trust or reason supplemented by some kind of divine act. The divinity of Jesus is an article of faith, but the existence of God is not, as it can be know by unaided reason. In any case, the point here is that genuine faith is not a matter of superstition, even if in practice superstitious people often live out a superficial ersatz of faith.
Now, if there is anything that is magic-adjacent in terms of intent and the desire for control, it is the Baconian view of science, not something like Catholicism. Modern science grows out of the Catholic tradition as a sustained enterprise in the sense that Catholicism takes the nature of man to be essentially “rational animal”, and because God (vis—a-vis the Second Person of the Trinity) is seen as essentially Rationality as such (Logos) and the world the fundamentally and fully intelligible creation ex nihilo of God. Baconian science, however, places less emphasis on knowing and greater emphasis on power.
For me, "religion" generally means "belief in invisible people/spirits/beings that have influence on the world". Superstition is a superset of that that includes the subset of "belief in ghosts/spirits/souls aka, invisible people/spirits/beings that have influence on the world". The majority of Japanese (and probably most other cultures) believe in "ghosts/spirits/souls that have influence on the world" but most Japanese might not a few special all powerful ones (eg: "God").
The Japanese traditions and customs and social systems you describe are really the part of “religion” atheism lacks. There has been no successful attempt to recreate the social bonds and community of religion in an atheistic context.
Atheism is not a religion but the single belief that there is no all-powerful sentient being organising the human world, which is a staple of Western religions. The corollary being that anybody believing in God is delusional and/or manipulative. This usually stems from the realization that religious leaders are abusing their followers, using cognitive dissonance to force people to do things that run counter to their most basic interests while serving parasitic power structures.
Unfortunately atheism has the side effect of weakening the social constructs that organized religion brings. Not being a religion itself, it does not prescribe any replacement rituals.
The Japanese stance you describe would better be described as agnosticism, the belief that God's existence doesn't matter. This allows to mix and match existing rituals and beliefs into a coherent whole and puts the individual back into the driving position. It's a very sane way of handling fragmentation of belief and what I believe more people should be doing.
What you’re describing isn’t really agnosticism. Agnosticism is about not knowing if gods exist, not about thinking their existence doesn’t matter.
The mix-and-match approach you’re describing is seems more closely related to religious syncretism.
Once one admits that God's existence is undecidable, s/he can either live in fear of both possibilities or live free of both possibilities. Having no use for unfounded fear, I personally much prefer the latter option. God, if it exists, is irrelevant. Any spiritual activity I perform is for my own benefit and for the good of those around me, never for the consideration of a possible being that couldn't be bothered to manifest itself and make clear what its moral rules (if it has any) actually are.
It could be argued by the religious that in some cases they did manifest(according to their beliefs), and there's actually an excess of copies of the rules if considering the amounts of the Quran or Bible printed.
People who marry and live in the same home with their biological children are by far the happiest and most successful by all kinds of measures.
what is your definition of "high trust society". I don't consider the USA a high trust society having lived in Japan and Singapore. In Japan and Singapore, I trust that others won't steal my stuff. I trust that I won't be mugged. I trust that my packages won't be stolen. I trust that my car will not be broken into.
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.
The USA is a large place. I've had bikes stolen (last case 40 years ago - the bikes were left outside unlocked for 5 years and only once were any stolen), but that is all from your list. In every place I've lived some of my neighbors never locked their doors when they left. I have always known people who just leave their keys in their car when they leave it. I lock my front door, but the garage doesn't have a lock and there are some expensive things in there.
Which is to say I find the US is a high trust society where I live. I know there are other places where things are much worse.
The US is slowly (rapidly?) devolving into a low-trust society. What used to be pockets of low-trust are spreading rapidly by my estimation.
It's been sad to watch it slowly get worse every year.
It goes for all things, not just petty/street crime though. Everything from business owners not prioritizing doing good work and building local reputation, employees slacking off as much as possible, investors demanding extreme profits at the expense of everyone else, corporations shipping out entire towns worth of industry to foreign countries, on down to actual crime itself.
It certainly wasn't all roses in the past - but it's a marked change from even my youth. Civic engagement is easy for anyone to see, and that would also be such a symptom.
The U.S. is an extremely litigious society. Even when Lincoln was a young professional, he had the frontier job of… attorney. So there’s something to that which bares examining when discussing how trust gets built and reinforced in American culture. (Probably something about settler culture and property rights and the only way to resolve disagreements about it via the law.)
One wonders how much of the high trust was a product of the immense prosperity unlocked by industrialization, some ameliorating reforms during the Progressive Era that mitigated the excesses of the Gilded Era, the New Deal, and postwar victory.
America has always been a low trust society when it came to “others”. Jim Crow was the law when my still living parents were growing up.
They literally didn’t trust people to drink from the same water fountain
My also still living father born in 1945 in the south didn’t live under this after the 60s or so. So how do you explain the gap for the last 65 years?
Have you also noticed all the recalls on pretty much everything we eat? Huge sign that people are not working.
People not working? WTF? It's the direct result of deregulation/self-regulation of the food chain. When the inspectors work for the food processing company, they don't have an incentive to find problems.
You'd think companies would value not killing their customers and market forces would take care of the problem, but, empirically, that's not how it has turned out. Customers are too far from the source; the incentives for fucking off are too high, and too frequently the food processors get away with it. Big-L Libertarianism is not compatible with safe food and medication.
Having lived in Asia I disagree it's a "high trust" society. I also see it described as "less individualistic and more concerned about the group".
What I observed was a deference to authority. Harsh government punishment for anti-social behavior is accepted and seen as the "role" of the government. While people in Anglo countries might protest against unfair government action, in Asian countries it's much more rare. People in Singapore grumble about how the government might punish behavior, but they keep those conversation to their family and close friends.
In terms of trust or concern, it doesn't extend much beyond the immediate family unit in Asia. I would say respect or concern for strangers is higher in Western countries Many people in Asia are happy to rip off others in Asia (if they think they can get away with it), but even the deadbeat cousin gets money from the family because "it's the right thing to do".
Yeh Japan surprised me in that trust survey, perhaps the question didn't translate well. On a general basis they seem to trust each other even less than most western nations.
Very hard thing to measure.
Just have a look at https://ourworldindata.org/trust. The Anglo countries are all well above the global average (but admittedly East Asia and the Scandinavians have us beat). I'm super impressed by how high trust China is tbh. Apparently, since the recent increase in surveillance (and ability to police petty crime), a lot of folks don't even bother locking up bikes etc.
FWIW the only Anglo country left in the EU is Ireland.
I don't trust that data (haha, trust). how do they ascertain trust? By asking? It might be true that Scandinavians claim they trust their neighbors but those are places where your stuff will get stolen, packages get stolen, you don't leave stuff on a public table to use the restroom if you don't want it stolen. In other words, you can't actually trust people. They list Japan as less trusting, even less trusting than that USA. But, actions speak louder than words. You can trust others in Japan. You can't trust others in LA, NYC, SF Bay Area, Seattle, Chicago, and other major metropolitan areas of the USA (the places where everyone lives.)
So, it seems like their methodology doesn't actually match reality and is why I don't trust their results.
Trust is not just petty crime. It's everything from crime to business transactions and more.
I might leave my laptop on a table while I use a public restroom in China, but I sure as hell trust a business partner far less than I would one in the US on average.
Cultures differ greatly in how trust is assigned and expectations. There are areas in Eastern Europe I would walk through a dark alley at 3am in the 'bad' part of town and not think twice about it. But I sure wouldn't trust their police force to not be corrupt and expect a bribe if they hassled me. The reverse holding true in a major city in the US.
> In Anglo cultures kids aren't usually moving away from home until they are at least ~18 years old. This is not a factor in teenagers feeling isolated.
I grew up in a Midwestern shithole.
My older friends leaving, and knowing I was was going to leave too, didn't help.
Might teenagers feel less isolated if they had family around though? I grew up with tons of cousins my age and that was always a part of my social life. Doesn’t matter that I wasn’t 18
I think coliving is going to come back into vogue.
I wish it would. Perhaps it will with rising costs of living and housing.
dancing grannies is definitely not a result of social technology haha, but yes, old people culture in china is top tier
When Americans are motivated to move out of the small town they were born in, it's often because that "small town" is a dying and depopulated hollow shell full of awful, racist, jobless, drug-addicted idiots who are mostly only surviving off of some kind of long-term disability insurance.
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.
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Yes, racist.
I took my (Asian) partner back with me to visit the small town I grew up in, and I could not believe some of the shit coming out of people's mouths when they saw her. Literally 1 in 5 people she talked to while we were there would do some sort of "funny" voice or ask her some real stupid shit; and 1 in 20 people we passed while walking around in the downtown area would shout slurs at her from across the street.
And that's with me there walking with her—I can't even imagine what they'd be doing if she was there alone.
Is she one of those Asians who thinks it’s “racist” when people ask questions that merely acknowledge that Asians are highly likely to be immigrants or children of immigrants? Like: “where are you really from?”
I find it impossible to believe that people are literally “yelling slurs” to anyone in street unprovoked. I look like a 9/11 hijacker and nobody has ever done that to me even walking around bumblefuck south Georgia.
Why are you asking this given what the parent comment described? Are you accusing them of lying or blowing things out of proportion? I'm truly, honestly happy that you have not experienced anything like what the parent comment described. But I grew up in west coast America and I still experienced a lot of casual racism. Park next to someone? They yell, "This ain't China, don't park so close." Walk home from school? Students yell ching chong at me. Shit is messed.
People don’t shout anything at me, racial or otherwise. Certainly not “1 in 20” strangers on the street. So I find OP’s story difficult to believe and likely lacking context.
> Park next to someone? They yell, "This ain't China, don't park so close." Walk home from school? Students yell ching chong at me. Shit is messed.
Is this “racism” or bad manners/people trying to get a rise out of you? Did that guy yell at you because you were Asian, or would he have yelled at you if you were white—just with a different comment? Same for the kids in school—if you were different in another way (fat, skinny, etc) would they have shouted that at you instead?
Do you think you’ve ever been materially prejudiced because you were Asian rather than white?
again, super happy for you. but i feel some people try to go out of their way to convince themselves that racism is not at play even when it clearly is, because it paints a picture where they are somehow "better" than those who experience hatred. the guy who yelled at me to park farther away, when I called him out on what he said, he walked up to me in an imposing manner and said, "so yeah, I can be a little racist, so what are you going to do, mr. china?" I'm not even chinese.
this is just an anecdote, and you don't have to believe what i say. but i think racism (against asians) is very real and many people are affected by it every day.
I assume such events are randomly distributed. So I’m talking about your reaction, not the conduct itself.
What I find odd is the impact of this negative interaction in a parking lot. Do you think the guy wouldn’t have yelled at you had you been white? If not, what’s the real difference between “this isn’t China” and “are you blind?”
>I assume such events are randomly distributed.
your point is racism towards asians does not exist, because these random assholes are being assholes toward random targets and they would basically act the same way to other white people. i disagree. i believe what the grandparent comment described about their partner's experience in rural town america is more or less true. you are free to think they are a liar or an outlier. but when people you have never interacted with call you a chinese ching chong on the street when you're just walking home, you have to admit there is some racial element to their abuse. would they have yelled anything at me if i were just another white dude in their predominantly white neighborhood? somehow i highly doubt that.
no, i don't think these people go about their lives consciously trying to be especially mean to asian people. most of them have probably just internalized certain biases against asians. for the sake of convenience, i and many others have decided to categorize such patterns of behavior as racism.
again, you are free to believe that racism is not real. if you are squarely within that camp, i doubt anything i say will change your mind.
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As I already told you (yes, you), I doubt anything I say will change your mind. I do hope one day you will come to see that yelling ching chong at an asian man on the street should be seen as racist if you think a bunch of Arabs were being racists just because they said the word "Bangladeshi."
FYI, I doubt we've ever interacted before. In particular, I am not 'rayiner and I am not Bangladeshi.
If you keep this up i'm going to email dang. Your choice.
Please do. I assume your post breaks this guideline:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Amusingly for this discussion, I started reading 'rayiner about a decade ago (long before this account) specifically because he seemed intelligent but I disagreed with him about issues involving race and the South! Being accused of being 'rayiner is an amazing twist to the story.
Re: your experiences — racists (and bigots in general) are a lot more likely to voice the bigoted things they're thinking, when the target of their vitriol looks like someone who wouldn't fight back against what they're saying. So: women (when the speaker is male and physically larger); old people; people with disabilities; etc. It's the same victim-selection logic that criminals use.
If you're the sort of person who would never expect to get randomly fucked with on the street, then you shouldn't expect to be the target of voiced bigotry, either.
> Did that guy yell at you because you were Asian
Yes, 100% it was because she was Asian.
The small town I grew up in is effectively 100% white (just by coincidence of history); but exists near some major global cities (like the one I live in now) that have a good mix of ethnicities, and especially an increasingly-large percentage of Asian people.
Due to various economic factors, many otherwise-well-to-do people can no longer afford to live in the big cities. This includes many immigrants of other races who originally moved to this country to live in these big cities, and have never visited the rest of the country. These people (including the immigrants) started off just moving to commuter suburbs — but as those shot up in land value as well, people are now increasingly moving to outlying non-cosmopolitan small towns, which do still have lower land values.
And that's shifting the demographics of these small towns.
This wave of demographic shift has not yet reached the town I grew up in.
AFAICT there is a sentiment among people who live there that they don't want "outsiders" — i.e. immigrants / anyone who's not a tenth-generation resident of the country — to move into the town. The sight of such people — especially when those people are "city slickers" doing "tourist" things in the town — enrages them.
So, it's not a prejudice these people have that's specific to any one race of people — but it is a racially-motivated prejudice. It is, essentially, a racial purity mindset — whether the people living there would call it that or not. (I say "racial purity" generally rather than "white supremacist" specifically, because this dynamic exists in provincial small towns in every country that's currently experiencing demographic shift — with the people in those small towns being bigots against any ethnicity other than their own, but especially against whichever ethnicities are increasing in prevalence in the countrie's large cities and beginning to "spill over" into small towns.)
Since you’re ethnically Bangladeshi, have you never had someone in the US be racist to you?
I have! Indians can tell I’m Bangladeshi and exclude me in just us desis” groups. And once I was riding in an elevator with an Arab family and they said something in Arabic about the “Bangladeshi” that I assume wasn’t very nice.
The only time a white American ever said anything negative to me was a middle school bully, and I called him a pig-nosed pink pig in response. Both of us were just looking to get a rise out of the other, so in my estimation that’s not “racism.”
when white people call me chinese ching chong it's not racism, but when arab people say something about bangladeshi, then of course it's racism? i have a couple guesses as to why you would think this way and it's sad.
You said it was “students” that yelled that. As I mentioned, I had a similar experience in school where another kid mocked my skin color. But these kids aren’t saying that stuff based on some racial ideology. Kids are mean and will pick up on any characteristic to mock other kids. Kids also mocked me for reading during recess. Why should I perceive these instances of childish bullying differently?
The comments by the Arabs, by contrast, is based on a racial ideology. Though I don’t get worked up about it because who cares about a random interaction at the mall? The only thing I’ve ever experienced that I’d call material racism is the social exclusion by Indian people. Because that arises in professional or workplace contexts.
My fav thing in the tech world are the “conservatives” who grew up in some of the bluest areas in the country (and benefitted from all affiliated things like excellent education and healthcare systems) then cast doubt on how bad small town red America is on these dimensions.
I love living in small towns. Truly, I do. I lived in towns ranging from 2k to 10k, and like 90% of it is great.
But avoiding police is essential for people like me who even have slightly more melanin in their skin than the usual amount. There are certain stores I learn not to use, and I have to learn the locals too avoid in each one I live. The number of times that I'm treated well but that I'm somehow unique in my imagined racial group is unusually high.
And I want to be clear, this isn't just in "white" communities in the Midwest, but other cultures/"races" too. I don't fit in with any because I fall into the mythical "mixed race" category.
This is truly a sad social construct that I wish would die already, but yes, it's often part of the cultural nature of such places. Holding these beliefs often leads to people holding the view that their problems are caused by some external force that they can never overcome, and they end up trapped in places with low economic opportunity.
So yes, racist. And I'm not limiting this to one race or culture. It's sadly a common part of the places where I most want to live and will never fit in.
> have to learn the locals too avoid in each one I live. The number of times that I'm treated well but that I'm somehow unique in my imagined racial group is unusually high.
What do you mean by this? Are you treated well or not?
Nobody likes to be told that they are racist. Once you realize that land value and low airfares are just ways of changing the scenery on different time scales, you can start working the deeper problems.
I’m from latin america. The world is a vast, beautiful place with stunning, clean cities full of opportunity and serendipity. Either I can explore the world and live in these places, or go back to my dangerous, dirty city to spend the rest of my life there because family lives there. Sometimes it isn’t worth the tradeoff
“Though the roads may wind far and wide, And cities gleam with promises bright, The heart will always turn to the soil, Where the roots of our ancestors lie. No matter how distant the dream may be, Home will call, and there we shall be.”
– Mariana Ruiz del Valle
We need a poet who sings about having a "dangerous, dirty city" to call home, and the yearning of the heart is to escape to somewhere better and never returning.
Not hard to find. Most modern artists value leaving home and tradition in pursuit of the novel and transgressive.
That's true. It's probably one of the main themes of the modern era, in the arts and in life, the freedom to pursue individualism and novelty, and break with religion and tradition.
This meaning of "leaving home" as a cultural trend, I see it as part of the modern historical period that has passed its peak. We're living in the natural and logical result, and searching for a way back home.
> The modern era is closely associated with the development of individualism, capitalism, urbanization, and a belief in the positive possibilities of technological and political progress.
> It has been a period of significant development in the fields of science, politics, warfare, and technology. It has also been an Age of Discovery and globalization. During this time, the European powers and later their colonies, strengthened its political, economic, and cultural colonization of the rest of the world. It also created a new modern lifestyle and has permanently changed the way people around the world live.
> In the 19th and early 20th century, modernist art, politics, science, and culture have come to dominate not only Western Europe and North America, but almost every area on the globe, including movements thought of as opposed to the western world and globalization.
> The brutal wars and other conflicts of this era, many of which come from the effects of rapid change, and the connected loss of strength of traditional religious and ethical norms, have led to many reactions against modern development.
Belle from Beauty and the Beast
It just doesn’t though. That is a feeling specific to her and a few others. It’s not universal at all
Family and friends have a bigger impact on ell being than you think. A lot of people in "dirty cities" are shown to live a happier and more fulfilling life with less when they have a strong community they're part of.
The trouble is those clean cities full of opportunity devolve into dangerous dirty cities when the high trust bonds of community break down.
Tokyo and Singapore do not. My whole country, and family, struggle with corruption, poverty, third-world-country crime and infrastructure, extortion, gang violence, and I’m supposed to want to go back and live there and raise my kids there? Nah, there are far better places to be despite being far from family.
In the case of America, violent crime is at a 50 year low. New York City, for example, was far more dangerous back when La Cosa Nostra was calling the shots than it is today.
Wasn’t the 50 year low just before Covid?
2022, though 2019 was marginally lower
From an American's perspective, given how much Latin American migrant inflow we have, it'd be easy for us to say the same about Latin American cultures and not imagining how we could leave everything behind. Perhaps people's choices don't always reflect their desires and instead reflect the economic realities around them. "Getting out" is viewed as success where I was from because "staying behind" meant a worse life for those who didn't come from wealth.
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.
100% of Latin Americans you see are migrants because, well, you are in the US. You are only seeing exceptions.
The immense majority of Latin American don’t live in the US neither migrate there.
Presumably at least _some_ are descendants from when a big chunk of the US was part of Mexico, so I would imagine the number is less than 100% (but probably close to it, the region wasn't very populated)
I’d guess possibly a majority would migrate there if given the opportunity to do so safely, legally and without abandoning immediate family though
Not everyone, I was given the option to go to the US legally (L1 visa) and passed on it, the person that chose to go instead regretted it and came back.
I am from Uruguay though, which is the best Latin American country, so YMMV, if I was from Venezuela I'd move to the US 100%.
You could say the same about the US-born, so I think you missed my point since you're trying to draw distinctions between the US-born and Latin American-born based on, well, I'm not sure what honestly. Your response is a bit odd, but kind of proves my point about pathologizing the ills of America and romanticizing other cultures, even those which are decidedly "Western" as well.
Statistically the number of Latin American migrants that move to the US yearly is tiny compared to the internal migration and especially to the number of people in Latin America who didn't go anywhere, though. The fact the it's not 100% who don't move doesn't really disprove anything.
It seems you haven’t read the context here where Americans are being framed as lacking community values because some small percentage migrate internally for better economic opportunities. The people here who see Americans who have moved to big cities form smaller places are seeing the exception, not the rule, as was pointed out elsewhere with statistics.
You’re proving my point exactly: those characterizations, especially in the context of Latin American culture as a foil, reveal their own biases. Both are based on anecdotes and vibes, not reality. To me, it's all narcissism of minor differences. I find the need to paint whole cultures with such a broad brush weird, especially based on my experience with people from around the world: most people aren't so different.
> Both are based on anecdotes and vibes, not reality. To me, it's all narcissism of minor differences
I think most are thinking about a higher proportion of adults living at the same household as their parents in some countries when they say that. However in recent year the proportion in the US got a lot closer to Latin American countries. Then again it probably significantly varies by race, ethnic background etc. which doesn't invalidate the anecdotal evidence people might have.
> cultures with such a broad brush weird, especially
US is very heterogeneous but it works reasonably well in many other places besides a handful of outliers.
You’re coming across as disagreeing with me, but it’s unclear about what. Your response to the out-of-context bit at the bottom seems to agree with my central statement about the negative framing of American values in the OP, so I’m very confused what your point is.
> but it’s unclear about what.
True. Looking back you hadn't really made any coherent enough arguments in your comments that could be agreed or disagreed with.
We tend to be pushed towards immigration because of a lack of safety, of growth opportunities, and no hope that things will get any better.
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.
And the impoverished areas of America are also where gun crime and drug overdoses are the most common. Oh, and don't forget losing healthcare and education services as the area continues to decline. These things go together just like in Latin America.
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.
More $$$ is a strong motivator.
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.
> Latin American tends to be unsafe (physically)
Depending on which country and which city, Latin American cities are not more dangerous than risky US cities. Many of our cities are reasonably safe. There are burglaries, muggings and robbery like in most big cities all over the world -- no more, and no less.
There are some "trouble" hot spots that are particularly dangerous, of course. The same can be said of the US.
Risky US cities are pretty risky though. Which is why I said that.
Let me rephrase then: average Latin American cities in many countries are comparable to average US cities.
There are trouble hotspots (and countries) just as there are trouble hotspots in the US.
It's not true that Latin America as a whole is "unsafe". It's not Ciudad Juárez everywhere. I live in Buenos Aires and there's crime comparable to any big city (with better and worse periods, of course).
And large portions of the population (much more than in the US) live in areas that have violent crime and murder rates higher than the worse parts of Oakland. And that isn’t even counting Guatemala as it’s just ‘adjacent’.
Southern South America isn’t bad, but also doesn’t have many people in it.
The children of that immigrants are growing up and seem to have less concern about the cousins back in the old country - their home is the US as are all their friends. The people back in the old country are interesting but not really relevant.
Same as it ever was. Not a lot of Irish, Norwegian, English, French, Germans still keep in contact with ‘home’ after 2-3 generations either.
> when polling shows younger folks want just as many kids as their own parents but can't afford them.
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
> From an American's perspective, given how much Latin American migrant inflow we have, it'd be easy for us to say the same about Latin American cultures and not imagining how we could leave everything behind.
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.
That the claim would be wrong is my whole point. Equally wrong to the original claims being made about the US population and their values.
80% of Americans live near where they were born. This isn’t the root cause of estrangement.
curios any more insight on that stat? it contradicts the thesis of the op
edit found this https://themortgagepoint.com/2024/08/20/most-americans-stay-...
Two good ones:
“The Typical American Lives Only 18 Miles From Mom” https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-f...
“More than half of Americans live within an hour of extended family” https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/05/18/more-than...
If you’ve lived within 20 minutes of a friend versus 2 minutes of a friend, it’d be immediately obvious how irrelevant “only 18 miles” and “within an hour” are.
Someone 45 minutes away might as well require a flight, as far as I’m concerned
It's like that thing about radio waves. I proposed the inverse square law on friendship versus temporal distance.
I agree. You could say temporal distance out of sight squared = amount out of mind.
(I know that's not the real inverse square equation just having fun)
I question whether that's relevant to the topic. Being next door to your friends and family (the article) and being a 10 mile drive from friends and family are not the same thing. In one you see each and interact with each other daily. In the other, probably at most once a month.
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.
10 miles allows visiting every weekend, it becomes common for the whole extended family to meet for Sunday lunch as I see of my siblings. It also means if you need help moving, replacing a roof, or something else you can make a phone call and get plenty of help on a Saturday. My parents choose to live 30 miles from their parents - close enough to visit every weekend, but not so close they would poke their nose into the kids business every day.
I live 300 miles from where I grew up. Going to "back home" to visit is a big deal and so we don't do it often. Not only is two days lost in travel (technically it is 5-6 hours to drive, but it still wastes most of the day); we can't go home to our beds and so that means we need to get a hotel or sleep on floors - both have downsides. Thus we only consider this trip over long weekends. Visiting us is a similar effort for my siblings and so I rarely see them anymore. (don't get me started on visiting my in-laws who are over 1000 miles away - suffice to say we need a full week off to consider that)
In short, if you can do so I strongly recommend you live close to your friends and family and not move away. However there are many reasons why someone cannot do this.
Distance really isn't that relevant. Time of travel is. This was drilled home to me having moved from a relatively "sparse" metro area to one of the most dense cities in the US.
7 miles might mean a 7 minute drive, or 90 minutes on poor public transit stuck in traffic. When I lived in my previous place, someone 7 miles away would have been a regular daily friend. Now, I would not see someone more than every few months since 7 miles is the equivalent of a 45 minute drive most hours of the day in most directions unless they happen to live right next to rapid transit.
My closest friends here in the city live a 7 minute and 18 minute walk away. I see them about as much as I'd have seen someone living 5-10 miles away from my previous location. The only real difference is the ability to drink while visiting.
Living "near" might be a meaningless metric depending on the definition.
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.
Also worth considering that social phenomena is hard to measure.
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-myth-of-the-loneliness...
Not sure if it’s just in America but people love to tear others down to lift themselves up by comparison. Once it clicks and you understand what is going on it’s easy to just ignore them.
OT, but it's interesting to hear this about America. Just yesterday I was in a conversation about how that (i.e. Tall Poppy Syndrome, what you're describing) is Australia's defining characteristic, and things are much better in America. But maybe not.
Tall poppy syndrome isn’t real, Australians don’t have a problem with people being successful but object to greed and lack of humility. Have a look at people who have claimed they were harmed by tall poppy attitudes and see what you think.
To use examples familiar to Americans, I’ve never read a bad word written on Hugh Jackman, Cate Blanchett, Terrance Tao….
The tall poppy thing exists well in the pocket of the US midwest I grew up in (Rust Belt) - I understand it to be a cultural inheritance from the Irish/English/Scottish working class which remain cohesive communities. When you scope out to the broader American culture it dissipates, though I wouldn't be surprised to find it in other kinds of communities.
This isn’t restricted to US culture. Every culture on earth sees a draw from the small towns and villages to the city. Opportunities, culture, better pay, access to education. Japanese villages are empty. Spain, Italy the same. I’m in Thailand and my guide said exactly the same thing yesterday. There’s also a draw away from the city as people have kids. They want a bit more quiet. Good schools safe environment.
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.
> Every culture on earth sees a draw from the small towns and villages to the city.
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.
Internal migration in the US is at record lows and has been declining over the past few decades.
It used to be far more common to move for economic opportunity and put down new roots far from previous friends and family.
I am Cuban and from Miami. The culture here is very similar where people will sacrifice everything in order to stay living close to family and "home". Here it stems a lot from the financial anxiety passed down from our parents and a culture where you relied a lot on your entire family. I think it really holds a lot of people back.
If you're Cuban and living in Miami, you are literally not near your "home", and probably not near your family? Or rather, physically close but still a plane ride and a diplomatic cold zone away.
Sounds like you haven't been to Miami before or don't know about the city demographics. Cuban population is massive, more people speak Spanish in and around miami than English these days. So yeah, he's home.
Presumably they’re Cuban-American…
HN is a bit of an bubble - the vast majority of Americans never leave the town they were born in.
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.
>or staying in the same small town for your whole life.
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?
That’s how things used to be and it’s a good spirit. Volunteering and being civically engaged are good for the soul.
Agree with this 100%. It’s so much easier to have kids if your parents live nearby to help too.
Root cause is moving for work IMO.
Yes and since a majority of college goers now see it as a job mill (that's what it is for most) the move for college is also just a preemptive move for work
Most people go to college not very far from where they grew up. That is in the same state or only one state away. Then they move back home afterwards. (or they fall in love with someone, and move near that person's family thus getting a new family)
The socio-economic landscape in the US means where it is cheaper/easier to setup families and have kids is rarely correlated with economic opportunity. And in the US, people can move easily.
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.
> cheaper/easier to setup families and have kids is rarely correlated with economic opportunity
That's the problem. Due to car culture and zoning policies etc.
This could now be (partially) solved with remote work.
It’s likely always been that way. Cities are crowded and more expensive, but have more jobs and opportunities. Rural areas are boring, but cheaper.
first time I went to latin america, I fell in love with the innate closeness everyone seems to have. ya'll so friendly I keep finding excuses to down to colombia.
On the other hand, if you look at Latam, you see that compared to anglo countries there is not much entrepreneurial spirit or drive to do things differently or be differently. And I feel this reflects at an economic level (innovation and startups) and social level (women equality, lgbt, secularity, etc)
>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”.
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.
The ironic thing is that Latin Americans are largely descended from people who left one continent and set up a new life literally a continent away. Like, your ancestors were the kind of people to sail thousands of miles to create a new life.
Right, and then we put down roots. People move. some of the people who stetted their have moved on again, but a core remains with roots. Maybe those people will all move away, but I doubt it - humans still live in Africa.
More that they described it as "very foreign" when it literally is not. The people who didn't live in Spain and Portugal!
I mean, can't we say that about basically everyone except the people in the African plains/the fertile crescent? The whole species is descended at some point from people who moved away from where they were born
What we do is making new friends wherever we move. Most of the time keeping the best ones (not all equal, not all relatives are equal either), keeping touch, visiting each other, making things to do together. Because it is good for us, does not feel an effort at all.
Now we have friends from foreign places that are not so foreign anymore! Friends from all around the world. : )
I consider ourselves lucky.
I think it facilitates the relatively high social mobility you see in the US. Being able to start over a few times means you can easily reinvent yourself whereas someone that lives in the same situation they were born into might not.
America is huge. A big reason a lot of people move is work and money. I grew up in the Midwest and moved to the West Coast because the job prospects and money were way better. Not to mention the WC state I'm in is much nicer than the Midwest one I grew up in.
Alot of those values make more sense, if you stop to view them as some side effect for individual happiness and more as cooperate digestive tract juices.
Exactly how was I going to find a job that was computer science related in small town south GA in the mid 1990s?
Remote work could have solved this. The higher-ups had other thoughts.
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.
Remote work couldn't have solved anything. It's a great option for some people but it can only ever be possible for a tiny fraction of jobs where everything is done online. So basically nothing in agriculture, mining, construction, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, military, transportation, utilities, tourism, hospitality, primary education, sports, etc. Even in the tech industry a lot of employees will always have to at least occasionally work at a certain physical office in order to access specialized or security controlled hardware.
Perhaps it’s just my bubble, but I mainly see this happen with people who do knowledge work which could definitely be 100% completed online.
Even if this is just a “tiny fraction” of workers, allowing them the liberty to easily pursue their career while also maintaining close relations with their family would be good, not merely something to write off as negligible. Every human life matters.
It simply creates an even more privileged knowledge worker class.
I recently spent a lot of time in some more rural parts of the US. There is rapidly growing resentment over this topic. It came up nearly daily in casual conversation/overheard at bars/etc.
It might be good for 5-10% of the population, but at what cost to social cohesion? These were certainly not CEO type of folks, and they were not terminally on-line or overtly political. Just quite average people across the age and industry spectrum.
Now add in those knowledge workers typically making far more money than the prevailing local wages and it gets even worse as they bid up housing.
This is something I think about a lot. It's easy to dismiss as many here do with "stop crying, life isn't fair" - but that's not a very satisfying answer. It's about as satisfying and corrosive to society as telling coal miners to "learn to code".
> Remote work couldn't have solved anything.
It couldn't solve everything, that doesn't mean it can't solve anything.
My experience in rural areas (northern canada) has been the opposite of yours.
Locals welcome remote workers because the alternative is bidding up housing over vacation homes that sit empty.
Remote workers give back to the community through civic engagement and injecting their income into it year round. Anyone not in that mindset of integrating with the community typically doesn't stay past their first winter.
Locals are also the ones to decide if/when/where they advertise real estate to outsiders. Locals always get first dibs via word of mouth so there isn't as much resentment.
But maybe that is the difference between rural communities and remote communities?
I grew up in a rural area, where everyone has a southern accent, which sounds like nothing but music to me. My relatives tend to live next to expanses of farmland, as I myself previously lived for years. Although I’ve recently moved to the city that’s about 45 minutes from where I grew up—-due to a return-to-office policy and also managing to use years of experience to land a solid software job in my home state—-I regularly drive out through woods and fields to spend time with people to whom I mean a great deal more than I ever will to any employer. Having a larger salary than most doesn’t change who I am in the least. I am one of those very people for whom you claim to speak.
My family was heartbroken over the years that I lived away from them. At times, they wondered what they might have done wrong to cause me to leave them. Moving away from my roots, to pursue my only job offer after undergrad, was the opposite of social cohesion. Many of my peers from high school——the size of my graduating class was 69——do not make anywhere near my income, and none of them feel any resentment towards me about it, just like they don’t resent the farmers who own hundreds of acres of farmland (my tech salary doesn’t come close to what some rural people make) or the classmates who went to medical school or got their JD. If anything, we feel mutual pride for what one another has accomplished. (The accomplishment, in fact, is not the money, but in living true to one’s values and contributing to something greater than yourself, something I was at times forced to betray to work in software.) I feel that your sampling method didn’t pick up on something really crucial about small, rural communities, where people tend to grow up together and to know one another for life, in continuation of multi-generational relationships among their families.
Rural areas will do just fine if people like myself choose to live modestly among people they care about, in a county that doesn’t even have the convenience of a grocery store, instead of in one of the most expensive places on earth.
Yes, if I moved back to my home town and spent time around my family and friends I also would be welcomed since I’m not an outsider.
I’m not talking about people who previously had roots that came back home as a wayward son. Those people, including me, will get a pass as we are one of the good ones. Especially (and maybe only) so because we’ve kept up relations and close ties over the interceding years and we are currently few and far between.
However, I’m fairly confident in my sampling bias on this one. I am close enough to people where they are willing to talk freely and the tenor is not great. Perhaps I simply have a bubble of especially negative folks, and maybe your area of the country is different. There was already a large current of resentment towards the white collar professionals prior to covid and I can only say that it’s accelerated quite a bit since. I only recently was able to spend considerable time around places like where I grew up.
We are not generally a single generation away from “moving away from the farm” at this point in the country. Many are generations removed. And it doesn’t need to be absolutely middle of nowhere either on this one. If you’re a curiosity for the area you typically won’t have an issue. It’s when you hit a critical mass of “haves” vs the “have nots” that the problems spring up. And many folks resent the people who don’t have to “work for a living” sitting at home all day. It’s about a shared experience and “in this together” feeling that most knowledge workers will simply not endenger.
If tech elites are making this call on behalf of generations-old communities, what jobs they’re allowed to have locally——sounds a little like a communist, planned economy, where some districts are assigned to have certain gainful opportunities and others are assigned to not have them——based on their own value judgements and informal conversations, it’s the height of arrogance for them to reason that only they can keep the social structure from fracturing in a tight-knit community of which they were never a part.
Why not put it to a vote at the community level, out of respect for community autonomy, economic freedom, and democratic values? I can tell you that the people who are close enough to their children for them to want to stay around would never say no to a job opportunity that lets them do just that without sacrificing their career to do so. To boot, these communities generally have been home to at least some remote workers for decades already, but much of tech has fallen ill to narcissism in believing that it is somehow too special / important to also provide such an opportunity.
The majority of people who choose to live in their hometown, over a flashier place that they could also afford, are doing it out of love for their community, not out of some anti-social tendency to take advantage of it as you suggest. Perhaps some decision makers, somewhere, got where they are through a self-selection bias, and are projecting their own psychological quirks onto others.
There are a great many people whose families have roughly stayed put for generations. Your reasoning / dismissiveness / lack of care for these people shows a lack of insight or a tendency to marginalize the concerns of people from rural America.
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I go back and forth on this. I still keep in touch with a bunch of high school and college friends. For better or worse those guys know "the real me" and the history and relationships are impossible to replace. They all still live close together but I live far away - I only see them once or twice a year, if that (less right now because we're all in the "very young kids" stage). I miss them.
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?
Move back, force your wife to only interact with your dudes’ wives. Shed individuality, kick back beers with the boyz. Reminisce only about the good old days. Bond over ritualized sports. Start families in sync so kids can be raised together. Forge new shared traditions, establish a rules based order of discipline and brotherhood. Protect the offspring from outsiders. To do this establish dominance over other families. Punish disobedience. Never leave the inner trusted circle.
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.
Hey @scyzoryk_xyz I laughed out loud and could understand the tongue in cheek sediment before the edits. When I was younger dreamed about becoming rich and buying a whole subdivision and moving my family and friends into the compound. Obviously, that was before I actually had a wife and children. Compromise is the only way relationships work with family and friends.
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.
Ended up with a karmic boost instead ¯\_( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)_/¯
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.
Your commments are great, and made me lol, which is super rare - great insight, honestly... thanks
But if you've never had kids, you're missing out on so much. This is just my experience, and is how I "grew up" from 20-35. I didn't want kids, but now love them so much, and as 55 year old man, with a 21 and 20 year old that still live with me, I'm doing so well, and have been blessed by them being in my life, and my wife who wanted kids more than I did, lol.
I know you are probably aware of this, and it probably tears at you, in some way. I know it did for me. And your mission, if you choose to accept it is not to live life on your own terms, but on the terms of God (imho), your health, your wife, your kids (if you choose to have them), and ultimately in others, which once you perfect the previous, you will want to help others more than anyone else.
Not everyone has to have children of course, and in many ways it'd be easier if you didn't, but it sounds to me like your seeking new paths, and this is a life changer, imho, and something that every generation before you did, to have you, and bring YOU to life.
Good luck!
Not saying you’re wrong, but when people with kids say this, it means very little to me. Like of course you’re going to say that, otherwise you’d be admitting that having your kids was a mistake.
As mentioned in my parallel comment - the conundrum is that anybody advertising not having offspring is almost always going to sound shallow, immature, hedonistic to some extent. Like, nearly all arguments against having children feel sort of sad and lonely played out over the long term.
OTOH, anyone with kids would have to be some sort of psychopath to not argue for having them. Who the hell would believe another person’s existence can be a mistake? All my parent friends end up trying to convince me to have kids, and I don’t even put up any counter-arguments because damn - I really like their kids too. Even the ones who had them in the worst way imaginable!
I don’t think it’s merely about “admitting mistakes” - parenthood isn’t a restaurant menu option or consumer choice miscalculation you make. We are literally wired to love our offspring. We’re mammals - it’s not a logical decision. This whole breeding thing, it’s the strangest philosophical aspect of human nature.
The way I see it: if you can’t or if you don’t do kids, you better have some sort of conviction about what it is that you have to contribute. And it’s not about competition, being right, being smart - it’s about your own mental well-being. There is only so much fun to be had before you start to wonder.
I know this sounds like I’m arguing for having kids - I’m really not. I’m saying the decision not to do something can be just as profound against that absence. You just better have a plan for what it is you want to do with your time on Earth, when those mammalian instincts start kicking in.
Yeah, I’m somewhere in that window, and those thoughts are definitely emerging (I’m at 35 and SO is 33). This is blowing my mind, because I’ve been standing fast by the idea to not rush, to not force, to not push reality. But something is softening, not just in me but also in the SO.
I do appreciate you sharing the idea. It takes maturity to stop thinking only about your own terms, your own wants, your own needs. To take responsibility in one sense but to also accept your limitations. That bigger thing can be God.
Thank you for your kind words. The big question that is turning in my mind is if this is the only one path. Obviously, folks without kids don’t feel the urge to go around pushing others not to have them. And folks with kids love their children, so it’s not like they’re not going to want to share how profound it is for them. I used to perceive growing your family as this tedious chore, but I’m also starting to see how it can also be a wonderful gift.
It’s a big dilemma regardless. I just would not be sure whether to make the choice for my brood to live in a bunker commune surrounded by weapons, or whether to insert them into a world of skyscraper elite back-stabbing palace intrigue. On one hand I could ensure my blood mixes with that of our other apex predator families. But on another I could throw them into a doctrine of pain and suffering that grinds them into strength and perseverance. Decisions!
My partner and I had no intention of having children and we agreed on that. Eventually we moved in together and got married. We both had good jobs, traveled, ski / snowboard, hiked, camped, went to see everything we wanted to see. Long story short we stopped NOT trying to have kids (stopped all birth control) and never happened. Started the whole process of finding out who was the issue, and that was starting to add up quick in the expense department. We were about to start an even more expensive process when an opportunity presented itself that led to us adopting our first child. In less than a year we found out we had conceived one of our own. Sometimes it takes one to jump start the process, I guess. Even longer story short our relationship was starting to drift and then with our children we grew close again. Now we have two more best friends in our family. Coach their teams, host their parties, uber them around, and they are like having two more best friends that live with us. Going to be sad when they leave us but also super excited to be just the two of us again.
This goes to what you are saying about purpose in life. Without them I am not sure we would still be happy or even together. Children gave us a new reason to live and something to work on together. Life is no longer how the two of us can be happy but how we can make others happy, thus giving us pride to be happy ourselves. Strange to think about where we would be without them, but glad I only must speculate not actually know.
I grew up more remote with less opportunity for friends. My partner grew up in a densely populated area with lots of friends (my partner is way more socially adjusted than I am). The ones I made are the ones I still have while my partners are mostly gone and live elsewhere. We decided to raise our family in a large neighborhood with lots of friend opportunities as I feel that is the best way to let them experience life. Personally, I would love to be on 20 acres with my arsenal and survival gear, but that would not be fair to anyone in my family. We got the house with woods in the backyard (and a highway behind that) and both sides for a half acre in each direction, with close neighbors to the front. The rest of the neighborhood is house to house like any other. I need to be able to walk out my back door and take a leak if needed and be alone. While walking out the front provides the typical suburban experience. All comes back to compromise.
Whatever you decide, best of luck! Living the Mad Max lifestyle is hard to beat....
This is great. I can almost imagine a two timeline movie of this. Really hits home.
What do you mean two timelines? The movie is about the daywalker, who goes on 2-3 week long business trips every few weeks and ...
This should be a copypasta.
People you meet later in life - even much later, even when you have a wife and kids - can absolutely come to know “the real you.” (I might describe “closeness of relationships over time” as “asymptotic, with an upper limit” or at least “with diminishing returns,” if we want to get really math-y about something that is not really measurable.)
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.
Can you elaborate on the social skills that aren't otherwise demanded? I can relate to this a bit, but I feel like I'm only starting to scratch the surface
Not being competitive and one upping everyone, being ok with peoples flaws, being honest, being vulnerable, being dependable, not being selfish or self centered, being self reflective… some of these sound obvious but I’m in my 50s have uprooted many times and have always managed to make close friends. I do lament the trail of friends I’ve left around the world, but we are all very similar and scattered as well.
The real problem is most people later in life are full of friends and thus don't really need more. They have and used those social skills in school (including college), but then settled into life and made friends. As one friend moves away they will need a different one, but that doesn't happen often and so they don't need to make friends. It isn't that they are unfriendly, just that they already have a social life as full as they want it.
A social life is a dynamic, changing thing. "Full" vs. "empty" is an obvious way of measuring it, but I think "stagnant" vs. "dynamic" is a more important metric that we don't take into account as readily.
It's quite possible to have a "full" but stagnant social life (which is where I think some older software folks with families are finding themselves). It's also possible to have a dynamic social life without large numbers of people involved.
To avoid stagnancy, you always need new friends. This doesn't mean you have to kick others out. It just means accepting the natural flow of friends and relationships in and out of our lives, and accepting that this is something we don't have full control of.
> 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.
More than anything, it requires lots of time. Time that busy adults don't have.
> I only see them once or twice a year, if that (less right now because we're all in the "very young kids" stage). I miss them.
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.
My father see his college and high schools friends in teashops almost everyday. They just sit, sometimes eat. All come and go. No long term planning. Just phone calls.
Did you possibly reply to the wrong comment?
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.
I intended to reply to you. Nope, my parents don't reside in a western country and they all have private businesses and we are relatively well-off.
But even those who are not well-off or business owners will do this.
It all depends on the type of circle. Even within the same city, given the same depth of relationships, distance and the location matter. In a busy asian city, being as little as 15kms apart could result in meeting much less often. In a US small town with excellent roads, little traffic and everyone having cars, the friction is much lesser.
Time for friends is sacrificed first when you need to prioritize work/wife/children etc.
Nothing. Stay with your wife’s social circle, stay in touch with your old friends, and build community where you are with your family. Children are a fantastic icebreaker and way to meet people.
> What's to be done?
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.
Interesting, but this just a framework. Where are the actual implementations? Ie, the communities?
I've been looking for networked states that aren't all in on living forever or obsessed with crypto and anarchism.
Remote work should make this much easier than before.
Not really the case in my situation. We moved to be closer to family (both sets of parents had coincidentally had relocated to the same area of the country late in life, but before we met). The choice between friends vs family complicates my situation. Love my family, but it's not the same as having peers in a similar stage of life.
I don’t know if it’ll help any, but I maintain a solid handful of group chats with friends of mine from years long past.
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.
This is good advise. And if you don’t have this, just be the one to initiate.
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.
likewise. We have a signal group chat that we've slowly been adding new friends to. It's a fantastic way to stay in touch
Do you think the "you" at highschool and college was "the real you"? Because that is definitely not the case for me. You grow older, you learn, you change views, you mature...
Exactly, this is the "peaked in high school" stereotype and it's not good.
Yeah, this is interesting. I have had several different, non-intersecting, groups of friends throughout my life. I think they all know a different me. Some know what I would currently consider the "real me": basically a geek who is into Emacs and science fiction. But other groups variously know me as a hippy, a party goer, a womaniser, a gym-going "real man" type etc. I think sometimes they are disappointed that I'm not those things any more.
Eh, maybe the "real me" wasn't the right choice of words. I just know these guys in a way that when I see them I inevitably fall into fits of laughter in about 5 minutes. I know they aren't going to ask me a bunch of bullshit about my job or how my life is going. They're not going to try to out-compete each other on hot takes about the political topic of the day. They're not going to try to impress me, or expect me to impress them. More likely they take the piss out of me. I can just relax.
> "the real me"
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.
That varies with people. Some do genuinely feel that they have (and in many cases they genuinely have) hidden away part of themselves that they used to express in the past and want to express again, and in extreme cases this can be quite significant parts of their personality. For others all those past bits were things they only did to "fit in" and they are happy that they are not part of their current life. Most of us are somewhere between those two poles.
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.
I am in the same boat. I live in a different continent than my college friends, and see them about twice a year when I visit my home country.
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.
Like us: make friends in the new places too! More friends, more fun, richer life! And I am also sure this is not something I had to tell, people do this way all the time, you do this way too I am 100%.
> What's to be done?
Write them the occasional birthday card, say hi when you're back in town and otherwise just go on with your life.
What is wrong with your situation? Make friends where you are. If you live close to your wife's family make friends with them.
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.
Nothing is wrong. We moved to be closer to family which in retrospect was a great decision and one I'm still happy with. We don't have much of a social circle here outside of that, but we have kids < 2 so it's hard to get out too too much anyway.
New friends?
Make new friends
100% this. Started out with two families buying houses near each other in a family centric LA neighborhood (Eagle Rock). Then it expanded to 3 --> 4 --> 5 all within walking distance. We all have similar aged children. It's magic. We watch each others kids, do frequent backyard/park/sleepover playdates, and help w dropoff/pickup. It makes parenting SO MUCH EASIER. I often joke that I'm not a real parent bc we have so much help. Living closer meant compromising on other decisions (ideal house/commute/etc), but proximity to friends has more than outweighed the cons. One family was living near the beach and loved it, but decided it was more impt to live near us then right on the coast.
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.
I would bet having that many friends, friends who are married, and who want kids, and have sufficient funds/income to afford a home in SoCal puts you in a rarefied portion of society.
It does, we're in our 40s now, but all priveleged to have good careers that enabled us to make this choice.
Turns out that humans have been right for the last 100.000 years and it takes a village to raise a kid.
Smart practices! Will also greatly benefit the children in the long run, I'm sure. As a non-north-american it's funny that you call it a "commune" :)
Ha yeah, extreme, but speaks to how isolated many Americans are
How are the schools though? Will the kids in your commune go through LAUSD together?
Good, choose this neighborhood for the public schools and "suburbia light" vibe, eg proximity to target but also walkable to nice coffee shops / restaurants / local things.
Weird that the article frames friends as being constant in life and your career/house/neighborhood/kids' schools/community as totally flexible when practically speaking it's the other way around. It is normal to move away from people you formed bonds with in high school and college. If you are lonely the solution isn't to uproot your life and go after them, but to form new bonds with people who are around you right now. The end result is the same – you get to live near friends.
The article frames this issue with an older person looking back on their life and being glad they maintained lifelong friendships.
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.
I'm 50-something, lots of the friends I've made in the last one to four years birdwatching are close now. I have old friends from 30 years ago but they're mostly a drain. I've formed new relationships with folks in my Tai Chi class as well. We're very close now, closer than I am with any of my old friends.
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.
Making true, lifelong friends is like planting seeds. People you meet and stay in touch with for the next 20 years will undoubtedly by wonderful friends in time, but people you meet today will not be the same as people you have known for 20 years. Living next to someone I have known for the majority of my life(assuming we are still very close) is very different than living next to someone I have known for 6 months. I understand the idea is that you still live near friends but it is just not the same.
I draw a different conclusion from your analogy though. One should continue to plant those seeds of friendship wherever you are. Friendship is not zero sum.
"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today."
Nailed it.
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.
i'd change that to like-minded and valuing a tight knit community. just valuing a tight knit community is not enough, because if i don't fit in with those people than they won't let me join.
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.
I believed I needed to befriend like-minded people for the longest time, and only recently did I realize that held me back - my closest friendships now are with not so like minded people and they are more fullfilling and stronger than any since making friends in school.
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.
Right there with you!
I don't really understand where Zillow even factors into your assessment here, but maybe that is part of the problem. If people are looking for close knit communities on Zillow, that is a massive mistake.
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.
"Zillow" was a metaphor for the point that you can't just find neighborhoods and communities like this by searching online. Which I think is pretty much your point as well!
Agreed. However, it seems that in the US especially it becomes difficult for people to make new friends after we're in our 20s. And probably even harder now than it has been in the past given the increasing preference for isolation. Instead of moving as a solution, we need to focus on helping people figure out how to form longterm friendships at every stage of life.
Most people live where they are many jobs. Most people live close to their parents. They were able to find a job close and so choose that. Generally if you look for a job you can find plenty of them in whatever field you are in.
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.
Depends where you live. In the US people move for jobs a lot, we studied that aspect of US life in French schools. In France it's common to move to Paris to work once you finish school.
The advantage in France is that friend cohorts are likely moving to Paris roughly at the same time. But moving further out into the suburbs or returning to the province / a city nearer their hometowns to start a family is comparable to the US - just my guesstimate.
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.
Life has taught me that the most unstable thing in life is social connections (including friendships)
It's "failure to launch" as a social activity. It seems directed at unburdened youth who do not need to struggle to survive in any way. If friendships are truly the path to the highest levels of wealth then the takeaway should be that learning how to make new friends is the highest of human endeavors as it not only enriches your lives but the lives of those you connect with.
Instead they come away with "get your high school friends to pick houses on Zillow together and live an 'enclave.'" Weird indeed.
Less of us should be discounting the value of investing in new, long-term friendships, in the second or third place we live, and stop discounting the impact of arbitrarily moving away for cheaper or more isolated pastures just because we work remotely. There's a threshold past which it's worth considering how much is worth it to remain, but for many it seems like a no-brainer financial consideration, and they don't really seem to have tried to integrate within their neighborhood, perhaps because they knew they'd eventually be forced out by the landed gentry. I'd personally never move back to my home city, I'm happy in the metropolis I moved to, but have put in a hell of a lot time and energy into forming a strong social circle and be present in my community, and I probably wouldn't throw that away just to own a house somewhere in the boonies, but I also wouldn't spend millions to get a 2 bedroom condo, so it's an awkward place to be in one's thirties.
Yes but investing in new, long-term friendships is a bit of an oxymoron. In order to do that, you have to pick one set of friends and then stick with them (cuz opportunity cost — the day is only so long). And once you've done so, you then have to stop investing in new friends and stick with those old ones.
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.
> Yes but investing in new, long-term friendships is a bit of an oxymoron. In order to do that, you have to pick one set of friends and then stick with them (cuz opportunity cost — the day is only so long). And once you've done so, you then have to stop investing in new friends and stick with those old ones.
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.
I would love to, but I come from a place where intellectual pursuits are not valued, so I would lose out on that front if I moved back. I’m the type who needs to always be learning. So I would always need to be in a big city.
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.
> 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.”
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.
I wonder if the homogeneity has come from gentrification and high property prices. NYC might have been a crime-ridden dump in the 60s, but it was cheap enough that Andy Warhol could afford to rent a massive studio. And a modern day Leonard Cohen wouldn't be welcome in the Chelsea Hotel.
Now you have to be a lawyer or work in finance to hope to even get a modest sized apartment in NYC.
That feels like a big factor. I see far more engineers and techies in SF than artists and poets. Not sure how many artists could survive in the city when not only rent is so expensive, but almost all other goods are also more expensive (largely because the stores and their employees pay those high rents too).
This fits with my experience living in SF: people might look different, but if you were to be blindfolded and talk to a group of them, you would struggle mightily to pick out any substantial differences between individuals.
Sounds like you're thinking inside of a fairly small bubble. If you picked 10 people, at random, from the 800k residents, I assure you that there would be substantial differences.
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.
The point is that no one in practice selects a random sample of the people living near them. Everyone they meet is from some self-selected sub-group—the people who live close to X park, the people who work at Y place, the people who shop at Z store. And the larger the city, the more people there are nearby you who are like you, so your total variety experienced will be smaller unless you're actively going out of your way to go places that you don't normally enjoy.
So while OP may be wrong about a random sample of people in SF, they're probably correct about the people that they know in SF.
In a small town everyone shops at the same store, visits the same parks, works out at the same gym. There's only one library and a few restaurants, so there are fewer opportunities to self-select into smaller groups.
I just don't agree (aside from the part about small towns, I guess, but that's not relevant to SF).
If OP can't find differing personalities in a place like SF, it's a skill issue, sorry to say.
> it's a skill issue, sorry to say.
That's the point, isn't it? You need to try, and have both the determination and "skill", to find variety when the environment gives you homogeneity.
I'm sure I could find an elementary school teacher, or an insurance salesperson to chit-chat with in SF or NY. I never tried, cause why would I? These aren't Pokemon to collect. It just so happens that my gym in the middle of Manhattan filters quite strongly for a certain income level, and thus age, but also profession, etc. In my current gym we all just go to the same class together.
Next time I'm in SF or NY I guess I can invest the time and effort to join a facebook group to meet school teachers, if that's what we mean by skill here.
Same when I lived in Paris for me, I feel more of that randomness in encounters the parent commenter talks about in my small rural (albeit touristic) town.
You're saying the average person from the XVIth and XXth district are the same? The VIIth and the XIIIth?
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.
> if you live in a large city and are willing or need to go out of your in-group, the diversity is much larger.
There's a double crux here; Firstly, why would you? By sheer numbers I'm sure there's more school teachers, insurance salespeople and tattoo artists in NY than where I currently live. But while in NYC, why would I have gone out of my way to meet people with these professions specifically when there was plenty of people demanding my time in my circles already? Where I currently live, I just meet them at the gym.
Secondly, this applies to the other side too. While in SF I once people went to a party with a group of people that was very into photography. I never saw them again. Thinking about their perspective, why would they have hung out with me again? We lived far from each other (Oakland vs SF), they had own clique, and I'm not really into photography. The pull was weak both ways. I don't share much with the insurance salesperson I met at the gym, but it's the daily routine that's led to a meeting point, without any side having to "try", chatting, etc.
NYC has diversity by the numbers, but if you talk about an individual's perspective, there's very strong clustering leading to local homogeneity. SF isn't that big, so I'm not even sure if it has more diversity by the numbers compared to where I now live. But the filters leading someone to move to SF are strong, as is thus the pull to cluster with people that are very similar to you based on where you live, shop, workout, etc.
Having lived in both rural and urban settings, I'm not sure the isolation you describe would be as correlated as you think. People in rural areas still hang out with one another (and even... alot) and people in cities still isolate themselves.
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).
> rural living gives you less choice in company increases the degree to which you invest in the relationships that happen to be around
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.
I’m curious, do you live on a farm, or a suburb?
Villages and small towns exist.
Yeah but on the census is your area rural or urban?
Lots of people LARP as rural despite living in an urban area.
Big difference between a small town a truly rural. My friend lives in a rural place; it's a full 30min drive to the grocery store on one lane each way highways. There's like six restaurants in 80mi.
You are kind of missing the point. You can have a small rural town where the people in the town generally all live in/around the town but between that town and the next town over might be 1-2 hours.
In that type of small town you still have quick access to your necessities and you can walk to your neighbors' houses but once you get out of the bounds of your small town it might be 30 minutes before you see the next building, an hour to the next small town, and 4-6 hours to the nearest city or large town.
You are kind of missing the point. You can live in a small town that might be 1-2 hours separated by the next town and still not be "rural". You're still living an urban life, not a rural life. It's not like you need your town to be >1M people for it to be "urban". There's small town urban, there's a big city urban, and there's rural.
Do you actually live in a place statistically considered urban or rural? If you have multiple chain restaurants in your town, you're almost assuredly not "rural". If you can see your neighbor's front door, you're probably not rural. If you feel the need to erect a privacy fence so your neighbors can't see you, you're probably not rural.
You're being needlessly pedantic. The top-level comment is saying that they could only live in a big city for {reasons}—it's very very clear that a small town of 5000 doesn't count for them. In that context, the commenter that started this subthread is clearly using "rural" to describe everything that isn't in a big city—places where there are hour-sized gaps between small towns count as rural when it's used to distinguish from "big city".
Trying to insist on a different dividing line between categories is not useful in this context where OP was already clear that they believe a small town doesn't work for them.
> In that context, the commenter that started this subthread is clearly using "rural" to describe everything that isn't in a big city
That's not the term for rural though. That's small towns and villages, not "rural". These are real words with real meanings. If I started saying the furry 30lb animal in my house that goes "bark" is an elephant it's not the right term to use and I'd welcome you calling out my improper usage.
Most Americans have never really experienced "rural" living.
But I guess you'd prefer for people to just continue to ignorantly use improper terms. Better get off the computer tonight and fly my elephant around the galaxy. Or walk my dog around the block. Words have no meanings anymore, it's all pedantic.
Which definition of "rural" are you referring to?
NCHS codes, RUCC codes, census designated places, ZIP code designations, take your pick. All of those are generally OK by me. Something other than just "small towns and villages exist", as both easily get classified as urban or suburban.
I've got loads of data backing up my assertion tons people think they live in a rural area don't live in a statistically classified rural area. People overly misuse the term rural and don't really understand a truly rural area.
> Something other than just "small towns and villages exist", as both easily get classified as urban or suburban.
Even if you're being pedantic (which, as noted, is pointless and silly), small towns aren't necessarily urban or suburban. For the census, 2000 housing units or a population of 5000 are required to count, and my town is the only one that made it onto the census list within an hour of me. 20+ small towns, 6 county seats, only 1 urban area. And that urban area has only 10% of the total population of those six counties! In other words: 90% of the people within an hour of me live in rural areas even according to the census.
And, again, as noted, I think it's silly to insist on a term of art in colloquial usage. Most people, on hearing what I just said, would agree that my town is a rural town in the middle of rural counties. But even if we do use pedantic definitions, you're objectively wrong.
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...
So instead of all this complaining of me being a pedant you could have replied to this question with just a "yes" and far fewer ink would have been spilled. Who was really being pointless and silly in this exchange?
> Yeah but on the census is your area rural or urban?
> And, again, as noted, I think it's silly to insist on a term of art in colloquial usage
I disagree. If you ever call the furry creature in my home an elephant I'll correct your usage regardless of if you somehow feel it's the proper colloquial usage. Using the term incorrectly is using the term incorrectly. If we just make up whatever "rural" means to you personally then it'll be hard to actually use real statistics to understand our populations and cities.
If we're just going to go by vibes for our definition of rural, tons of places can be rural. I live a short walk from a fishing hole, there's a big wooded area near me, loads of big pickups driving around, people in cowboy boots and cowboy hats everywhere, I drive past farms every day, and I'm constantly next to a large horse stable. I guess I'm in a rural area! If I get a few friends to agree and use the term I guess it's right. What's that? It's a city of a population of 120k and a density of >4,000/sq mi and is deep in one of the largest US metros? Hmm, doesn't sound very rural, but it's vibing right, so must be.
It's absurd 30% of people who live in suburbs think they live in a rural area, and it does affect their lives.
> So instead of all this complaining of me being a pedant you could have replied to this question with just a "yes" and far fewer ink would have been spilled.
While we're being pedantic, no ink was spilled on this conversation. Let's not invent a definition of ink that includes pixels on a screen.
The pedantry is the problem. That you were wrong even in your pedantry is entirely unsurprising because people who are being pedantic almost invariably are—people who actually are experts on a topic generally recognize it to be complicated enough that it's not worth trying to be perfectly precise in casual speech.
So in my first comment I didn't feel the need to waste time address the merits of your claims—that would only validate the invalid approach to discourse—but when you doubled down (twice!) I decided to humor you and sure enough, you were wrong.
> If we just make up whatever "rural" means to you personally then it'll be hard to actually use real statistics to understand our populations and cities.
Agreed. So let's not invent a definition of rural that says that small towns and villages "easily get classified as urban or suburban" and then try to use that as a hammer to tell people they're wrong about what type of environment they live in. :)
Edit: you added a whole paragraph after I replied, but it doesn't change anything. The environment you describe would not be called a small town or a village by anyone, even those who apparently misuse the word "rural" in conversation with you.
> no ink was spilled
Maybe I print all of these with an inkjet.
> That you were wrong
I'm sorry, where was I wrong? Where did I ever actually accuse any particular person of living in one place or the other? And in the end you do live in an urban area by your acknowledgement. I've only been asking for people to ensure they're really using the right terms.
> Agreed. So let's not invent a definition of rural that says that small towns and villages "easily get classified as urban or suburban"
Yes, let's not invent one. We'll just encourage the improper usage.
> The environment you describe would not be called a small town or a village by anyone
A surprising percentage of people living in areas like that do. I personally know some.
> If you have multiple chain restaurants in your town, you're almost assuredly not "rural".
By this standard, there are no rural communities east of the Mississippi. Is that congruent with what you intend to say?
I've definitely visited places which are rural which are East of the Mississippi. I have family who actually live in forests and on large farms who don't live anywhere near chain restaurants. Places where you can't even see the neighbor's fence line from your front porch. But the vast majority of places I know and have visited are urban. If there's multiple chain hotels, once again probably not rural.
Over 80% of the US population lives in an urban area. And yet so many think they live "rural" because their town isn't NYC or SF.
https://www.pewresearch.org/decoded/2019/11/22/evaluating-wh...
31% of people who live in NCHS defined suburban areas think they live in rural areas. They LARP as cowboys living in urban areas. I'm surrounded by them.
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> People in rural areas still hang out with one another (and even... alot)
Aren't those like really dangerous?
As an American I can see your points, but then as a European you’re making some wild leaps of logic there.
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.
Interestingly, the quote you cite here seems to be specifically directed at G.K. Chesterton, who said exactly the opposite—that larger societies tend towards reducing the amount of variety that you experience, precisely because you can choose to associate primarily with people who you relate to [0]. In a small community, you could choose to be entirely isolated, but if you want company you'll need to associate with the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker—there's no way to keep company only with the particular class of intellectuals that you find stimulating.
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.
Yes, this is often overlooked by VHCOL urbanists. I split my time between a VHCOL city and a MCOL exurb.
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.
I agree. You want to be intellectually challenged? Hang out with people who aren't exactly like you from time to time.
Not just intellectually but also politically (which I dont find to be particularly intellectual). By being surrounded by "your own" you live in a filter bubble that can only make you more extreme / radical. Basically all your friends vote the same as you but some do it more loudly and obnoxiously.
You miss the fact that regular people on the other side are just normal people with slightly different policy preferences. ie - they might agree climate change is real, but aren't rich enough to profess it as their #1 policy concern.
I will say, you don't have to leave the city to know all kinds of people, but you do have to choose to meet all kinds of people. It's very easy to form a bubble in a city, where as with what you say in a small town you pretty much have to interact with a lot of the town or go live in a cave or something.
I think it’s likely folly to think that the big city is only place where intellectual pursuit and learning can happen.
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.
It's a simple matter of density. It's not about intellect or intellectual pursuit at large, rural people are plenty smart. It's that intellectual pursuits can be very niche, and you're more likely to find someone that shares that very specific intellectual pursuit the more people there are, in close proximity. If you're located somewhere rural, your closest neighbors maybe 30 mins away, and friends often further. That's a totally different experience compared to having your friends live in the same high rise or be your neighbor 3 mins away. Not saying that one is better than the other, but they're clearly different.
This is it. It’s proximity.
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.
> In a less urban area, this is far less like. 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.
The idea that spontaneous interactions lead to innovation is wonderfully captured in Kevin Simler’s essay Going Critical
You can do all that online… however in-person networking is important.
No you can’t, because the depth, pace, and honesty of conversation doesn’t exist online
This has not been my experience.
Are you just trying to find that level of communication in places like this?
It is not possible for it to exist in any text based forum because it depends on:
* body language, non verbal communication
* the ability to respond instantly
* the ability to interrupt
* the ability do develop relationships over time
Which do not exist altogether anywhere on the internet
It sounds to me like you’re just describing the limitations of textual communication, which I agree is limited in all the ways you have written in this post except the last.
But, it’s entirely possible to have thoughtful, deep, honest discussions with individuals over a textual medium and to develop meaningful relationships in that way. I have done so. Often these relationships start in a more open public setting and become more meaningful in a private space, similarly to real life.
Or you know, video conference. I have zoom calls with AI folks from all the world weekly.
Agreed, the comment reminded me of the secret king in the corner meme “they don’t know I have intellectual pursuits.”
People outside of cities can read good too.
It's like the people who think the only tech people are in SV.
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.
I grew up in a suburban house with a backyard that opened to many acres of swamplands and nature preserves. It was also a bicycle ride away to go to a few different parks, the movie and video game rental store in the same strip as a corner store with all kinds of snacks and ice cream, go visit Space Center Houston, go fishing on the lake, and even take a canoe all the way to the bay. I had friends in my neighborhood, friends in nearby neighborhoods, and friends all over the city by the time I was 13.
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.
I'm curious what suburb you're in, that sounds nice.
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.
My childhood was in Clear Lake (just outside of Houston, Southeast side, near the bay), I live in Richardson today.
And yes I do agree many suburbs aren't like this. They should be IMO, if we're going to keep building suburbs.
> I would love to, but I come from a place where intellectual pursuits are not valued, so I would lose out on that front if I moved back.
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.
> being grounded in mainstream experience again that I lost touch with in the city
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 depends on how you lived in the city and how much video calling you do outside of work. If you're an hour away, it doesn't make sense to meet a friend in the city for coffee for 30 minutes and then drive home, but if that's not how you interacted with people in the city, then living in the suburbs or rural areas isn't going to change how you interact with them.
What sort of area do you live in now? Urban living is a bit more mainstream than rural by a fair margin in the US, although suburban beats them both.
Your experience in rural areas differs quite extremely from those I have had. In particular living in rural areas basically forces one to have hobbies. Even in the most rural areas of areas I found people whose interests included astronomy, plenty of guys into computing stuff, radio/ham culture, taxonomy, and so on endlessly. Incidentally the guy who was huge into astronomy, with an educational background in it on top, was also a biker who was built like a tank and tatted from (nearly) head to toe. Of course there were also plenty of people whose hobby was 'drink self into stupor and watch TV' but they were not the rule.
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.
> In North America, there is a very strong cultural preference to isolate oneself
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.
High density living in a downtown area is inversely correlated with having a family across a wide selection of different countries though. The highest density countries like Korea and Japan have some of the lowest fertility rates.
> The highest density countries like Korea and Japan have some of the lowest fertility rates.
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.
Generally speaking, birth rate declines happen because people have more things to do than have children. That's why all rich countries experience them and noone has been able to reverse them. (Japan actually has slightly reversed theirs. Korea hasn't because Korean men are awful misogynists no women want to associate with.)
There are high density countries with high birth rates though; they're either very religious (Israel) or very poor (Africa).
The same effect can be observed in animals and one theory is that it's a stress reaction to densely populated environments.
https://academic.oup.com/endo/article/162/11/bqab154/6354390
I had to move back to be closer to my parents in a town which doesn't value intellectual pursuits because I couldn't find a job in the tech sector in the big city after almost a year. This is in spite of having a long list of technical accomplishments and an impeccable public track record under my belt.
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.
> This is in spite of having a long list of technical accomplishments and an impeccable public track record under my belt.
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.
Or honestly maybe just bad luck. Lots of possibilities for just a one-off internet comment.
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.
I hope it's bad luck because I struggle to find what else to improve. I can launch high quality projects quickly and reliably and my main concern is product-market fit. I feel like I've tried everything and its opposite. Problem I face now is I've lost a lot of faith in the system and it requires a lot of energy to maintain my work ethic and also maintain the outward appearance that I still believe in success. I often feel like I'm only role-playing entrepreneurship and there is no chance of success.
Sometimes I feel as though I'm being hindered artificially by some hidden forces but I try not to focus on this. It's partly why I share my experiences online and why I talk about this with my co-founder and family members. It helps when others validate my experiences because it can often feel like too many coincidences.
I worry the feeling might get worse with AI now literally manipulating people's psychology and thus, the markets as well. There's a chance my fears may become reality.
It'd be silly to keep working on a startup if there was a super-intelligence preventing me (or any new industry entrant) from succeeding right? This is a new reality I may need to factor in at some point. Would have been insane to think that way 5 years ago. Not so insane anymore.
> I would love to, but I come from a place where intellectual pursuits are not valued, so I would lose out on that front if I moved back.
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.
Hmm, tangentially related, but how would you say SF changed? Where would you get this feeling of SF back then nowadays? Thought about giving SF a visit in summer as an aspiring software engineer & entrepreneur but curious to what you think about it.
Hard to say, and it's highly subjective. It just feels like Silicon Valley is no longer about building cool things and making the world better through technology. It's become about exploitation and extraction, instead of building. It's about capturing and controlling users rather than serving them. It's about "crushing it in the market, bro." It's grindset, hustle culture, performative work. It's about phony tech chops and faking everything until you make it financially or crash and burn. Maybe it's always been this way and I just didn't see it when I moved there.
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.
As I was reading your comment I was thinking “this feels just like the time of Silicon Graphics and SUN”. Glad I got to experience that time in the valley, even though I started to feel the influx of people who were just there for the money, not the passion, starting around 2002/2003.
>It's become about exploitation and extraction, instead of building.
What if I told you it always has been about that.
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As a former SF resident who visits frequently, I still think it’s a unique and wonderful city. I would move back in a heartbeat if the weather were not so foggy and cold compared to southern California. Visit! And explore the whole bay area. Berkeley especially.
I don’t think suburbs are the cause of isolation. I’m on the tail end of a trip to Argentina and I can tell you that in general, people in the suburbs here are out and about, chatting with the neighbors, and getting together with family/friends in their backyards all the time.
i read the parent comment as the desire for isolation being the cause of suburbs,
Either way, the association between suburbia and loneliness/isolation isn’t a universal thing.
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’m not sure I’d draw any general conclusions from your experience. It’s a rather broad brush.
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.
I get it. I lived part of my life in Southern Ontario and knew a bunch of people from Waterloo and surrounding areas — absolutely brilliant mechanical minds. (Farmers truly make great engineers — in fact many famous American engineers trace their roots to farming communities in Wisconsin or some such).
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.
>But suppose you were interested in Rousseau
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
I grew up in a small nowhere village, lived in small and large cities, and even Rome. But I think the sweet spot is a small city of about 200k. Though I find that it probably depends on which stage of life you are at. The older I get the more I'm tempted to move to even smaller city. And now, it's even hard to go camping, without civilization being within short driving distance. People are everywhere. My closet is full of winter jackets, that somehow it never gets cold enough for me to wear. I think people sometimes shop for a solution to a problem they don't have. Or that they fear the problem so much they overcompensate.
I can appreciate that being a bit of an obnoxious person myself.
Where's that Alain Bertaud quote from? I'd be interested in listening/reading more about his stuff.
I do not know from where the quote is but he wrote a book - Order Without Design
That is true. I would love to have intellectual friends who like the arts, like pottery, writing, and music. I imagine those hobbies to be very affordable.
> 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.
"Private property"* in the sense you're using it here likely already existed by the the time of hunter gatherers. In some senses it even exists in many animals. The more common term for it is personal property: "this is my house, you can't live here; those are my scraps, you can't have them". Many animals also have their own nests, that they will defend from others; or even their own territory where only they hunt, and which they will fight others trying to encroach on.
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).
consumerism and mass media did not create private property. Scribes didn't write about it that anybody read, and the first printing press was already private property.
Reminder that there was no cultural preference, this was done (like in other places) to keep the industrial engine running, mainly carmakers. The more roads there are, the more cars people will buy and the more they will drive, this, mixed up with redlining and other racist policies created the environment we live in today.
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.
> Reminder that there was no cultural preference, this was done (like in other places) to keep the industrial engine running, mainly carmakers.
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.
They didn't want this, they've been made to want this because that's what society expects out of them, due to how public transportation in this country sucks everywhere and the infrastructure in big cities is a joke. Worse, having kids in such places is terrible as childcare is expensive, there are few parks or things to do with kids that don't require you to pay for it, and the city itself isn't made for kids on strollers.
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.
These people can vote against this kind of zoning and can vote for transit and densification. But instead they show up in droves to city council meetings to fight against it as much as they can. They keep choosing to move further outwards once public transit expands and "the wrong people" start moving in. They complain about the neighborhood "losing its character".
You've got your head in the sand if you think these people don't exist in large numbers in suburban USA.
A few of the member cities of DART have talked about reducing funding to public transit. For a lot of the people I know, they say "great!". You act like these people don't exist.
They do exist, but they don’t exist in a vacuum, it’s decades of carbrained policies to get people to believe this is the only way to live.
And the cities that do have good public transportation (by US standards) like NYC are letting it rot, thus convincing people even more this can’t possibly work.
Also, people voting against their own interests is basically America for most of its time. They’ll continue to vote for restrictive zoning and then complain they can’t do shit and live alone and can’t make friends
> decades of carbrained policies
Decades of carbrained policies they voted for and continue to vote for and continue to believe in.
This isn't some shadowy cabal doing things that everyone hates but somehow has no power over. These are popular policies being picked. We're never going to enact real change if we don't acknowledge people currently do want these things, and it's not obvious to them that the alternatives are better.
You and I agree the alternatives are generally better and we should at least move to give more people the option to live in car-free or at least not car dependent areas. But a ton of people honestly think that kind of a choice is a terrible idea and don't want to see it happen. And they're far from auto industry payrolls.
Yeah, we’re fucked. I don’t see this ever changing.
I think it’s easier to isolate in an urban setting.
Sorry AI, not taking the bait today.
This is certainly a reaction to economic strangulation of a huge percentage of people in the economy. Of course, if people want to be near each other they should, but this phenomenon is a direct result of the crumbling conditions for the working class. The resurrection of third-spaces is a much better alternative than the erosion of first-spaces.
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.
My childhood friend did this with his buddies. In our 20s they bought a big house in the suburbs and each had a room. They lived in that for a few years, and then when people started sprouting kids, some of them moved into the same building that was run as a coop. Eventually a lot of them were living in this coop.
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.
It sounds very interesting. From the perspective of someone who finds it hard to make friends, it seems to me that such a concept is completely impossible. How diverse human connections and experiences are!
Can I ask what country that is in?
Of course the LiveNearFriends website is only for people in the fucking Bay Area and lists houses that are millions of dollars.
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.
My friends and I live near each other. It's a quick 10 min walk to their place and we have keys to each others' places. We've slowly lobbied more people to move nearer and life is getting better with each additional participant. I'm a firm believer in optimizing for our relationships.
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.
Epicurus was a strong proponent of living with friends though I much prefer my own living space.
A 10-minute walk would be a perfect compromise.
> We've slowly lobbied more people to move nearer and life is getting better with each additional participant.
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 :)
Give this to people you know - https://livenearfriends.com/
Great idea - to make this happen we either need to solve the housing affordability crisis in high-density areas, or spread job opportunities around to lower-density areas.
My friends are in a diverse set of fields, finding a place with jobs for all of them isn't feasible right now.
Tokyo seems to have done this. It’s not cheap by any means, but rent seems relatively affordable relative to pay (and very cheap compared to expensive cities in North America).
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.
I think it's simply illegal to build housing like Tokyo does in every US city, and often every project over 3 stories needs community input and faces environmental lawsuits over things like shadows
"Urban" planning in the US is actually the art of urban destruction.
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.
Japan has detailed zoning restrictions, including the shadow a building can cast on a neighbor's lot. Maybe there are fewer lawsuits because the law is clear so it is easy to know if you are following it. https://ranjatai.wordpress.com/2022/02/11/sunlight-on-japane...
There's two big differences:
1) clarity of law without local community process that overrides what the law says you can build,
2) extra capacity to actual build. Almost 100% of land is "built out" according to zoning, meaning that almost no land allows building anything more than already exists. In fact this downzoning was so intense that many many buildings would never be allowed to rebuilt, including iconic buildings.
We have literally outlawed cities in the US, due to the wishes of people that want suburban automotive lifestyle to replace city life.
Yeah I think that is the big difference. In the US it doesn't matter what the actual rules are, the lawsuits will come regardless and drive up costs massively, and many places allow local councils to reject buildings without reasoning.
This is in the category of "things I believe I read from a reputable source, but which I can no longer definitively attribute", but my understanding is that one contributor to Tokyo's lovely and specific density is that its zoning laws are pretty relaxed, and on top of that they are not very strictly enforced. This is maybe less workable in a society with higher variability in people's judgment of what is ok.
And the sheer amount of people. It is very fun to have so many people who are at least semi-proud of the city they live in. Embracing both the chaos and the calmness of 6am on weekeneds.
And yet Japan has a loneliness crisis so severe they created a government minister position to address it.
Why not remote work? Why should a few cities reap all the benefits of these jobs? Spread the wealth!
There is a movement called Cohousing that I don’t think gets enough attention.
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…
Great read! Cohousing sounds like exactly what i've wanted in a neighborhood. I wish it were the norm.
Yes of course. Intentional communities of like minded people are the alternative to atomarisation of strangers living next to strangers with fake smiles and talking behind the back as the standard social interaction.
Easier said then done, though in most cases, but worth it wherever possible.
Have you spent time around intentional communities? It's possible you're taking a looser meaning of the phrase than I am, but Intentional Communities have no shortage of toxicity and drama, especially since by their nature these communities filter for people for whom the 'default world' didn't work.
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?
Rather than an “intentional community” which sounds kind of overbearing to me, I’d be happy to have some way to filter for houses/apartments that are simply in proximity to others who are at least open to making friends and want to be pleasant, neighborly, etc.
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.
If you live somewhere that's reasonably dense, this is possible. I live in a very walkable city that is also socially quite dense. Most of my social links are people who live a walk or a short bike ride away. During the warm months, if you are around town you will see people you know, and have the option of conversation.
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.
What city are ya in?
"Have you spent time around intentional communities?"
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.
I visited a friend who, along with a dozen of their friends, bought a series of new build townhomes in a suburb of a major city. It was very, very cool.
Absolutely you should live somewhere where you have friends nearby. Or better yet live somewhere you can make friends who are nearby. Big cities are the best when you're young and single because there's just so many more opportunities to meet new people that you can make friends with or date. I think the article talks about being with your childhood friends, and maybe that's good for some people but people who make good friends when their 10 won't necessarily be a good fit for each other when they're 25 and that's ok.
I'm living with my partner and her brother and family and another family who are friends of ours in a house (which has three apartments). We moved there to live together (and continued to work remotely or found work elsewhere). Six adults, six children. It's an absolute treat. I can't imagine going back to a nuclear family setup. Living in a larger web with more support from all sides (both for adults and children) is just amazing.
And of course it's often not possible or easy to do this.
Do you ever get on each other's nerves? Are the apartments separated enough that there's noise issues?
Totally. A conflict engagement rather than conflict avoidance culture is definitely helpful, so that resentment doesn't build up, and information can flow more easily.
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
If I moved near where most of my friends live, it would cost probably an extra 300K in a housing costs and working much longer hours at a job I'd surely hate. I'd rather use the money to visit them once in a while and make even more friends where I live.
“Understand that friends come and go, but for the precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young.”
— 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.
Do you live completely alone, or do you have family or roommates?
I live with my dog, my family is 1 hour away.
Having contracted around Europe for 20 years, my friends are scattered. There are many of those places I'd be happy to settle down in, but my upcoming move is based primarily on the changing climate. The area I am living in now is already changing, and the climate change models dont bode well for this area. Anyway, the contractor lifestyle has taught me there are new friends waiting to be found wherever I live, even if my next new friend is the 200 year old oak tree next to a stream deep in the forest.
Difficult to foresee which way will it tip, on short-term it will be hotter for sure but if (big IF) medium-term the AMOC slows down or stops, it will be much colder.
It doesn’t matter when I lived near friends and family.
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
More of us should be prioritizing making friends, probably: if you pull it off, you've achieved a similar effect at much lower cost. If you're the type of person who's organized and capable enough to organize a communal living space with your friends, you're logically also able to find friendships in your area, much more so than the average person is.
Yes, it is already difficult enough achieve compromises on where to live with an economically mobile spouse, much less parents/in laws, I can’t imagine achieving much success with adding friends to the mix.
Prioritize your kids, your spouse, yourself, and let the other chips fall where they may.
This post is coming to me at an odd time regarding friends. On the one hand, I've rekindled some friendships with friends from high school and I'm so happy to be reconnected with them. I wish I could see them more often and spend time with them. On the other hand, I also just recently blocked the calls and emails from a long time friend. It wasn't a decision that I made lightly. Without getting into too much detail, our fairly frequent phone calls had become toxic with us arguing about politics and him lecturing me about various things (and perhaps me lecturing him too about various things).
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.
My friends are all over the map.
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.
At moments like these, you must realize how lucky we are to live in the internet age, where you can stay closely connected with friends all over the world
I did, yes it is nice, I don't know if it's even possible for most folks. The only way to get a house in my case was to buy it with family and split it (in our case it was one big old house that'd been converted to a duplex nearly a century ago, so while it's one building it's well set up for two families to live separately).
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?
I've been to a handful of trailer parks with wonderful communities, and a lot of the people are not poor, just saving money, and stumbling upon community!
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'm currently in the process of moving away from friends. It's definitely not something I want to do, but I don't have much of a choice due to the lack of tech jobs in the area, the increasingly oppressive culture & laws of a deep red state, and the lack of amenities.
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.
It was very hard for me to make friends. Even now, I only have two. When I didn’t have a family of my own, I was heavily dependent on my friends. Such "friendships" often didn’t end well for me. That’s why, at some point, I started striving to ensure that my mental health didn’t depend on my "social connections" (I’m not sure, maybe I misunderstood something in the article).
I can relate. There's something about the human group dynamic that, by default, isn't kind to certain types of personality.
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.
That’s partly why I’ve been working on becoming less dependent on any external source for my sense of self-worth. It’s not easy, though...
I'm glad you said "less" dependent. Never forget that what you're striving for a balance point appropriate to yourself. Your goal isn't to attain one end of a scale.
It's very hard to imagine. I feel like I don't exist when I'm alone
I have a few friends (and family members thereof) within relatively close proximity (either walkable or a <5 minute drive), and it's indeed been pretty handy. A couple of us have even talked about someday together investing in someplace we can all live (be it a multiplex, some chunk of land with a few double-wides, or - only half-seriously - one of the mansions that periodically hit Zillow in our city), much like what's described in the article.
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.
This feels weird af to me ... there's a place for highschool friends and I cherish and miss some of them. But there's also a place for striving forward into a world and meeting and learning with new people.
Personally, family and the closest of close (family) friends are the constant. Beyond that, it feels like retreat into mundanity ... like Facebook.
our society(s) have conducted two (three?) experiments at once, and it's not easy to separate the confounding factors. We spend less time with our relatives. We have drastically smaller families/fewer relatives. We move great distances and go out of touch with not only our families, but also our former friends.
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...
Oh! It's so nice to read something you've thought about your whole life. I have an uncle, now in his late 60s. He and his friends have been living in the same society since kindergarten. They meet almost every day, go on trips, and party at the drop of a hat, always there when they need each other. I've been jealous of that for such a long time. My friends and I, in the pursuit of money, fame, and who knows what, are now spread across continents. We probably speak once or twice a day. Recent friendships haven't stood the test of time.
Maybe make friends where you are? There’s a formula. Find people who share interests, spend time with them. meet their friends, expand your interests, be open. Be friendly, help, ask for help.
We can't move anywhere because we can't afford to. When 500,000 H1-B visas are brought into the USA to do entry level accounting and programming jobs, we have far less negotiating leverage to work remotely or make higher pay. Supply and demand. Your employer wants to increase the labor supply to reduce your price (your salary) and options like working where you wish.
For me it's mostly a money issue. Then I'ld lose contact with my family and friends, so I'ld have nobody guaranteed to help if i have issues. Also, moving (far) requires a lot of money, then finding a new job, maybe even a better one than you had since the cost of living might be higher in the new place.
Should writers stop using the question format in titles when the answer to the question is immediately apparent?
No, because they bugger off somewhere else shortly after for new opportunities or changed life circumstances[1][2] Probably better to make friends where you live.
[1] Said by someone with some bitterness about this. [2] Who is also guilty of doing the same.
Absolutely. It really has a positive effect on your mood. When you have someone close to you, you always hang out and it makes it worth everything. Share struggles, share ideas, feedback. It is really a great feeling.
I live very close to a couple dozen of my favourite people. I’d like to move out of the shithole state I live in, and began seriously planning it until I realised that it would never be worth trading the proximity.
Or, in California, buy a single-family urban home and subdivide it under SB-9.
Another popular option in California that does not get mentioned in the article are what is called Planned Unit Developments or PUDs. These are case by case approved plans to develop dense housing on a lot that might otherwise have a single building or unit. Three or more townhouses is a common alternative but sometimes there are cottage bungalows or a mix.
Doesn’t this weird question presuppose that you live somewhere with literally no friends?
In what situation would you live somewhere long-term with no friends whatsoever?
I think it's worth emphasizing that "living near friends" doesn't require "living in a big city." By moving from Chicago to Milwaukee, I grew my friend group, found more social opportunities, and those social opportunities are less of an economic burden. Still a city, but considerably smaller. Big cities can offer great things, but only if you can afford to live in certain neighborhoods. Smaller cities offer many of the same opportunities but with lower financial barrier to entry, and less physical distance between you and the most lively areas.
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.
Fiefdoms. Got it.
Paywalled but from the comments here it sounds like this is moving near your HS friends? Absolutely not. Nothing in common with them.
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.
I see a lot of internet commenters (here and Reddit) that act like they’ve outgrown all their friends from childhood/highschool and it always rubs me the wrong way. I’m sure there are folks with actual trauma they are running from, but it generally comes across as incredibly arrogant.
21st century, where we discuss moving with friends and loneliness and do not mention family relatives...
It might boost propinquity.
Does anyone here have shared or neighboring vacation homes or SHTF homesteads with friends?
we moved across the country where we don't know anybody. i do not recommend this. having friends nearby is such an important aspect of mental health and overall joy in life.
Wish I could, but the high cost of living in my home town of Santa Cruz drove me and all my friends away. Then when I went back, home was no longer home.
My friends and I joke about moving back to our home town to be together, possibly on the same block, mostly because of how cheap it would be. Truth is I have a lot of childhood and frankly recent trauma there and would never want to move back. Thankfully over time we’ve all seemed to be coincidentally landing in the same metro area over the years so we see each other a lot and it’s been a great way to bounce back from COVID.
This is such a great text!
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!
My wife and I moved with our kids back to the country we grew up in in large part because of this. For us it wasn't just being closer to extended family, though that was a part of it. We just realized Western culture (we lived in Silicon Valley, which was probably the extreme of that) was very individualistic (or nuclear-family-focused), and people's lives aren't as intertwined as in other parts of the world. As an introvert, that was actually fine for some time, but once we had kids, we felt like it just wasn't a healthy way for our family to live and we were missing something pretty meaningful.
Yes. Friends make life way better!
Relevant website
I wish I had.
No
just based off the title: yeah sure, or make new friends?
rich people problems
More like I need to be rich to move to where my friends are - I went to college in the Bay Area and I can’t afford to live there. But honestly it’s not hard to keep in touch these days if you want to so I’m not the least bit bothered.
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.
> More like I need to be rich to move to where my friends are
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.
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> i dont think finding a place in city like SF should be considered long odds lol
To rent or to buy? Because those are vastly different things in today’s economy. Rent, sure - you can find one. Buying? You need 250K+ saved and jobs that lets you pay 8K/mo for at least 10 years.
But I do agree that people in areas with high RE who own a home and two cars shouldn’t be included in the poor category. That’s easily 1M in assets.
> what were the long odds please do tell
These were the calculable factors for this area, in mid 2021.
Each rental listing had ~400 unique applicants per day. For total number of rentals, a generous est is ~100 new listings per month in the 3 counties we searched. In our 4 mo of searching (of a 6mo window) I found 2 good fits but 1 was at the extreme end of affordability.
For a decade of complex reasons (inc. extreme poverty, responsible spending and unforeseen changes in the rental market) I had a ~0 credit rating. That rules out most/all software managed rentals - over 95% from what I can glean.
The ad for the rental we scored inc a crayon layout on lined paper. It was posted for 2 hrs and received >50 applicants. We scored it by offering 6mos up front plus a 2x sec dep. Having that much money on hand followed another set of timely and unlikely circumstances.
The long odds, they are whatever all the above maths out to.
> eugenics, poisoning, dictatorships, genocide, identity theft, torture, blackmail while moving.
No.
> simply wanting to live in a specific area?
Needing to live where existing jobs/clients were, for our multi-income household. Moving anywhere else at all would have stranded us without reasonable prospects.
why does renting force you to move? how does owning a home allow you to stay if other considerations may force you to sell the house and buy another one?
my mother lives in a rental apartment that my family has been in since 150 years ago.
When I was 12 years old, we had to leave a rental house because the landlord sold it. It was very disruptive for us since my parents were low-income and didn’t have much savings. It also took place at a time when market rents increased quite a bit. My parents struggled to find housing; we moved into an apartment temporarily, and two months later we finally found another house to rent that we could afford, but it was in a more dangerous neighborhood.
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.
that's only true in the US though. most other countries have better renter protection. my point was that it's not just renting that forces you to move. you moved yourself because of a job. if you had owned a house you would have had to sell it at that point.
Well for one, I am in the US. Secondly if you owned a house you can rent it out - you don’t have to sell it. It’s a better deal especially in the Bay Area since property taxes are capped.
Thirdly, I move to find better deals on rent - many places I’ve lived don’t have rent control so moving is really the only option to keep costs as low as possible. I moved states because of a job, but within the Bay Area it’s the only way to keep up a desirable savings rate.
Also, try commuting from SF to SJ every day. It’s an incredible waste of time, particularly if you don’t live near the Caltrain (and now BART) corridor.
> my mother lives in a rental apartment that my family has been in since 150 years ago.
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 close to the center of the city. the only properties were large buildings with multiple apartments. so no. it would not only not have been better, it would simply not have been possible without moving out of the city, if it was possible at all.
which i think it wasn't because in the 19th and early 20th century all property was owned by aristocratic families. and you either had property to begin with or you never could get any unless someone with property gave some of theirs to you for some reason. then came the world wars and by the time buying property became possible it probably wasn't affordable by many.
i also seem to remember that rent was very low for a long time. though it raised quite a bit in recent decades.
> the homesteading act
Their mother likely rents in Europe where the US homesteading act didn't apply.
Ah, I didn’t catch that. My apologies for not catching that when reading their comments. EU does have far better consumer protection for renters.
Rilly? In my experience, many of the rich people are isolated and paralyzed by concerns about status and wealth and family connections and ....
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.
A granular housing choice is a privilege not afforded to poor people. They live where they can, typically in places heavy with compromise.
Resources are not always in terms of material terms. Poor people with family, friends, associates, familiarity of a region, etc. stay there. What's a bit unique for American migration patterns in the past 60-ish years people have become less and less mobile for economic opportunities and the cultural shift has sometimes become more resentful toward those that feel betrayed by those leaving regions for better economic opportunities. In a lot of countries people are happy and even envious of those leaving their areas of origin. The underlying reasons for lack of mobility is another heatedly debated topic altogether but there's absolutely plenty of things the poor, particularly rural ones, absolutely have plenty to lose.
you expected many poor people here on HN? :)
not rich enough to drop low interest mortgage rate.
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This is great advice if you replace "friends" with "family"
Not always
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.
Found family is just as valid as family.
For those of us from toxic homes, found family is more important. The LGBTQ community was decades ahead of us on this.
hmmm I don’t think I want to be THAT close to my family… don’t want any pop-ins :)
I enjoy pop-ins. Someday nobody will pop-in because they'll all be dead.
not sure why this is being downvoted… the fact that I’ll be eternally sad when older members of my family are no longer roaming the Earth has no bearing on whether or not I enjoy the pop-ins. I think perfect distance from your family is one which you can do a day trip (come for lunch, leave in the afternoon) but far enough you’d call to make sure we are not hiking/biking/snorkeling/…