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Why don’t more people live close to friends?

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Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#261

Post by Tade0 »

dTal wrote: post #247
Tade0 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that it's more about the person than the area. My friend is an urban activist and he always complained that his childhood neighbourhood wasn't conducive to meeting people. Recently I learned that we actually grew up just a few bus stops from each other. For me it was never an issue to hop into a bus/subway train and reach my friends - usually unannounced.

Easy to meet people, and easy to hop on public transport to visit existing friends, are two very distinct things. How did you meet these people who were not within walking distance?

School mostly - my family moved to the other side of the district when I was in 6th grade, but I already had an urban card and the right to go out whenever I pleased as long as was back by 7pm, so we stayed in touch, even though I went to a different middle school where in turn I met more people living closer to my new neighbourhood.

The only people my age in this new neighbourhood were bullies and/or juvenile delinquents, so I didn't make any friends there.

My closest circle currently is my class nerd group from middle school with one additional guy from a high school the two of those went together. The urban activist friend I met through another guy from this bunch, who introduced me into some extracurricular activities in his school which I could attend.

I also have college friends who, like me, didn't move cities to go there. One of them is actually a guy who my primary school friends met in their middle school and who went to my high school, but we only got to know each other better in college. We were all spread out over this 1.7mln city, but that was no problem since everyone had phones.

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#262

Post by maccard »

jesperlang wrote: post #243
hibikir wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, you are being too nice to US suburbs: It's perfectly possible to have towns that are much denser than any US suburb. My Spanish home town has about 100K inhabitants: You'd not call that a city anywhere in the US. And yet, It's basically a circle with a one mile radius: Yes, just one mile. In that situation, one can walk everywhere, and public transportation is limited to the elderly, people carrying heav…

More Europe anecdata: I live in a small town of around 2000. Within 5-10 minutes walking I got: a restaurant, a cafe, a grocery store, pizzeria and kindergarten. Within 5-10 minutes of biking I have: public library, another grocery store, two bars and a restaurant. Public transport is readily available to take me to the neighbouring hustle-bustle (pop. 600'000) within 35 minutes. So my town is 50 times smaller than y…

The 2k town often/usually only has one of a cafe/restaurant/grocery store. Sounds like you've got a good town though!

I live in a "mid sized" european city (500k), about 2km from the center, and the _only_ think I use my car for is getting out of the city. Within 10m walking I have pretty much everything I need, and within 20m of public transport (ironically, walking can be quicker for the short distances), I have pretty much everything I _want_!

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#263

Post by cityofdelusion »

noirbot wrote: post #139
schlowmo wrote: post #84

One aspect of this which I find myself often think about is that it takes some deliberation with whom you want to spend your time when you get older if you're not living the usual family life. I'm in my thirties now and sometimes it feels like there's plenty of time to figure this out. But most of my closest friends are somewhat older than me. Almost none of them have started a family in the traditional sense. Most o…

Yea, I think I feel this from the other direction. I'm not that much older than a lot of my friends, but I've lost many of them over the years to marriages and children. Many of them moved across the country or at least a large distance away to facilitate that, but even the ones who stayed nearby justifiably made their life about their spouse or children over their friends, and there was often little to be done to ke…

As I approach 40, I've learned that you can either loosen expectations and make new friends with those around you or be content with a dwindling friend group. Everyone changes over time and many (most?) friendships will not survive unless you are the "event organizer" of your friend group. The people who I was friends with a decade+ ago are completely different people (and so am I!), so its not too surprising that those friendships naturally diminish.

Priorities also change over a lifetime. I used to be the perpetual single person always losing friends that start a family -- now I am the person starting a family and losing what I have in common with the singles. It isn't that I don't enjoy their company; its that priorities change, family comes first, and there's hardly any time left to keep those friendships alive. Families are black-holes for free time, especially as societal expectations have evolved for what is expected of both men and women in the family.

Having been on both sides of this fence, I've had to adapt and continue making new friends. When I was single, I found new single friends that had time for hanging out, video games, bars and parties. With a family now, I make friends that are similarly time-constrained, that can do stuff like double dates or kid hangouts.

The hardest part is actually making new friends, but it is a critical skill if these sorts of things bother you. If you can make new friends, you can move anywhere. I do a lot of volunteer work which naturally leads to 1) meeting a lot of new people and 2) meeting "regulars", which has been a great source of new friendships for myself. It took me a long time to get to this point though -- I spent most of my 20s and early 30s just watching my existing friend group slowly die off, wasting time replacing it with online interactions instead of just going out and finding new friendships.

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#265

Post by nicbou »

enaaem wrote: post #253
trinovantes wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal theory is that suburban sprawl killed the "third place" in modern society. If you have to drive to a place to socialize (which probably involve drinking), then you're probably not going. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

I just came back from Vietnam and I noticed that many Western countries lack low intensity socialising. There are tea carts everywhere. People sit, sip tea or some other light beverage and just do nothing. They’re close to others who are also doing nothing with whom they may or may not engage with. Bars and clubs are too intense, too expensive and unappealing if you don’t drink alcohol. At libraries and coffeeshops p…

Most of Europe has a café culture. It is sorely missing from North America. You just sit outside and watch the world go by.

Berlin in particular has lots of parks, and people can go there with drinks, grills, frisbees etc. The sheer number of them means that most people are within walking distance from one. It’s great to meet without spending money. Again, those are almost absent in most of North America. You have to drive to them, so they’re inaccessible to kids. My hometown made loitering almost illegal in them anyway.

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#266

Post by cykros »

Commoditization of "home" is probably the number one culprit. Nobody wants to make a decision with the largest investment they have based around where their friends live right now (especially when they might react to market conditions and move in 1-2 years afterward).

And I'm not sure it's THAT new -- seems more like in the past, people befriended those they lived near, rather than necessarily moving near people they were already friends with. Institutions like churches and other community programs facilitated this. Meanwhile, a crumbling or defunding of such programs or just lack of interest (thinking "community house" activities from my youth), coupled with the divisive effect of social media, seem to have had a real chilling effect on this community building. That, and sheer density. Anyone that went from a small school to a big school knows that sometimes it's easier to feel all alone on a campus of 40,000 than it is on a campus of 300 (unless you're just totally ostracized at the small school).

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#267

Post by dalmo3 »

scarface74 wrote: post #175
iambateman wrote: post #85

Sprawl exists because it’s nice. People really like having a 3,000 square foot detached single family home with a 2 car garage. Especially when all of their friends have one. The only way everyone gets that, by definition, is sprawl. Of course, the drawbacks to personal health and well-being and societal stability are immense. But it’s really nice, too. Like, sitting in a massive basement with three TV’s while the gr…

My wife and I just moved from our 3200 square foot newly built (circa 2016) house last year and bought a 1300 square foot fully furnished condotel (units are owned individually in a resort condominium and they are rented out like hotels when we aren’t there and we get half the income). We paid about the same price that we paid for our house. In return, we pay one CDD fee that covers all utilities, minor maintenance a…

> 1300 square foot

I have to say I'm envious of anyone that "downsizes" to a 120m² home.

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#268

Post by aikinai »

wincy wrote: post #137
dopidopHN wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s unconventional, it’s just a definition of suburbs. Worse of both world in my book. Unless you want to raise your kid in isolation.

How? My eight year old daughter gets to roam free and has seven or eight different kids she plays with on a weekly basis. A few of them daily. We’re not worried about her getting carried off because the area is super safe. We lived in the city before and it was dangerous and the neighbor had a crazy pitbull chained up that’d break out all the time so we couldn’t let her out of the house. It’s also very diverse, her f…

I think this is a very rare situation in the US and depends heavily on either luck or targeted buying to land the right neighborhood at the right time.

I grew up in a wonderful neighborhood in a nice suburban area, but I was the youngest kid by about four years so I never walked to a friend’s house.

I also never realized I was missing anything until I moved to a non-US city in my twenties and found out how different life could be in a human-scale environment.

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#269

Post by cityofdelusion »

muyuu wrote: post #118

People move a lot these days because of mainly economic circumstances that fit their age, work, family circumstances and friends are made mainly earlier in life. Chances are thus that most friendships will be separated over time. That's not even considering relationships that start remotely in the first place.

Indeed, its a statistical inevitability.

For a childhood friendship to survive locality, their parents must not move, both you and the friend must not go to college anywhere, both you and the friend must not move anywhere else for a job, you must both live in the same part of the city and/or take jobs in the same part of the city, and for the entire duration up to the present, economic and family matters must not move both of you.

I imagine most people can list off their childhood friendships and see how each one eventually succumbs to something above. By the time you are middle-aged, your old friends (and many times family) will be split up all over the country or even the world. Most people I know that maintain a close-knit friend group are very much in the group that are born and raised in some tiny rural town and never leave or they have transitioned to long-distance e-friendships.

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