Why don’t more people live close to friends? • Hacker News Board

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

#461

Post by nicbou » Tue, Apr 18, 2023, 4:20 PM UTC

mantas wrote: post #360

nicbou wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think that meeting someone over drinks is equivalent to exchanging a few comments asynchronously, one of us is blissfully unware that they're missing out. Café culture simply means that you have a convenient place to meet with other people with some regularity. You really don't need to be judgemental and dismissive about it.

I see two faces of it. One is meeting local people as in building local community and fulfilling socialising bar for yourself. Another is collaborating on ideas long-term. Those are very different. For me the most valuable part is the later. And interwebs do wonders in this space. Same conversions IRL may have been nicer, but there's no way I could have been part of them (or at least so many of them) otherwise. And i…

I'm saying that most of Europe has access to such spaces, and that they serve an important purpose. It's a good place for loosely planned social encounters. Whether or not you personally like them is irrelevant.

> And if you're in a crowded cafe watching a famous person

You can go to another café

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

#462

Post by dougmwne » Tue, Apr 18, 2023, 4:20 PM UTC

subtra3t wrote: post #440

shadowofneptune wrote: post #235

A citation in this article can shed some light on how it is for gay people: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/10/people-wh... > In LGBTQ circles, placing a high value on friendship has long been common. Carroll, Rivera, and several other people I interviewed for this story, absorbed the idea of “chosen family”—that those besides blood can decide to become kin—from this community. Though he and Rivera ne…

I would think that most members of the LGBTQ+ community in most parts of the world are shunned out of their traditional familial and friend circles (neighbous, classmates) due to their perceived abnormalities. This would force them to actively seek out friends (perhaps facing a similar situation to them) and value them more due to them already knowing what it is like to be without them.

Even when being queer is accepted, your life path is very different from your straight friends and family.

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

#463

Post by kjkjadksj » Tue, Apr 18, 2023, 4:21 PM UTC

brianjking wrote: post #39

First I'd have to understand how to make some friends as a 37 year old man who works entirely remotely. I'm trying on Bumble BFF mode, but not having tons of luck.

Introduce yourself to your neighbors too

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

#464

Post by dionidium » Tue, Apr 18, 2023, 4:22 PM UTC

kjkjadksj wrote: post #455

dionidium wrote: post #433

> 5.) Many States Aren’t Safe — For So Many Reasons > I’m not talking about crime, don’t be ridiculous. I am talking about states that have criminalized or significantly curtailed gender-affirming care and body autonomy. This is an interesting question, but you're not going to get the answer from a terminally-online culture-war-addled substacker who thinks that gender-affirming care has a bigger impact on where "marg…

Crime is measured on the orders of magnitude of small tens to few hundreds per hundreds of thousands of people or so. On the otherhand, these laws affect these groups 100% of the time so long as they remain in these states where its clear their representatives don’t care about their concerns.

Crime at the societal level is measured at those rates because most places have no murders for decades, whereas the most dangerous neighborhoods — basically all full of “marginalized people” — have staggering rates of violent crime.

Violent crime affects 100% of the residents of North St. Louis, I assure you, and is constantly front of mind.

And there are far more poor African Americans living in high-crime neighborhoods than there are people worried about gender-affirming care. Frankly, it’s not even close and it’s a sign of something very goofy and broken that this is even a question.

And crucially, even if this weren’t true, it’s no justification for pooh-poohing concerns about crime. It’s evidence we’re dealing with a culture-war-poisoned weirdo who believes concern about crime is some kind of fake right-wing issue, when poll after poll show that it is a primary concern of marginalized people living in high-crime cities.

It doesn’t mean those other things aren’t important; it just means that this was written by somebody who doesn’t understand the relative prevalence/importance of these issues within literally orders of magnitude. So how could they possibly make reasonable inferences about the causes of related social issues?

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

#465

Post by justnotworthit » Tue, Apr 18, 2023, 4:23 PM UTC

NikolaNovak wrote: post #21

nonethewiser wrote: post #5

Isn’t being friends with your neighbors a far more obvious answer to this? I thought that’s where this was going. > Sometime during the pandemic lockdowns, I began to nurture a fantasy,” Adrienne Matei writes. “What if I were neighbors with all of my friends? Every day, as I took long walks through North Vancouver that were still nowhere near long enough to land me at a single pal’s doorstep, I would reflect on the p…

In addition to what other have said, the definition of "friends" may change with time and context. Like yourself, my family was super "close" to our neighbours when I was growing up. But they weren't even remotely "friends" in the sense that I might use the word today - there were zero common interests; significantly different backgrounds, world perspectives, priorities, lifestyles; they had little to talk about othe…

I like to label the first "allies" and the second "friends". The "allies" category should be explored by writers as much as friends.

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

#466

Post by TacticalCoder » Tue, Apr 18, 2023, 4:24 PM UTC

0zemp1c wrote: post #399

habosa wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans are friendly but when it comes to the decisions that matter (voting and the votes with our wallets) the preference is for the private over the public. People are scared to depend on each other or to be forced to interact with strangers. So we’ll all try to have our own cars and drive on huge suburban streets and put our kids in private schools and build fences around our yards and vote down zoning laws that…

> And we’ll wonder why the people in that cute little European town we visited that one time seemed so much happier. except they don't think that the Americans nod politely and whisper to each other " can you imagine living that close to your neighbors? nooooo thank you! " HN needs to just drop this notion that anyone opposed to density is a caveman. I love the fact that my neighbors can't see me and I can't see them…

> HN needs to just drop this notion that anyone opposed to density is a caveman.

I totally agree with that. I've been a city dweller (in Europe) for 45 years or so and hated every second of it. I then lived in suburbia for 5 years and liked it much better.

I then just spent one year in the countryside in a very remote area and loved it. I knew my neighbors (but we all had big plots so it's not as if we could see each other) and already have made friends there.

Now I'm back to european city life and not one of the worst city (Luxemburg) and yet I hate it already. Shitty miserable apartment life, stacked on top of each others like ants "because density".

Just fuck that.

I'm going back to the country side as soon as I can.

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

#467

Post by lezojeda » Tue, Apr 18, 2023, 4:25 PM UTC

balfirevic wrote: post #292

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…

> People really like having a 3,000 square foot detached single family home with a 2 car garage. Sure, I'd like that too. But also, how about 3000 square feet apartment with top-notch sound insulation and a balcony, with an underground garage? That sounds like it would have most of the benefits, I would actually prefer it, as I don't care about yards. And with 10-20 story buildings, you could still have quite a large…

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

#468

Post by reducesuffering » Tue, Apr 18, 2023, 4:27 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #168

rayiner wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, what young married couple would want to live in their parents house if they can afford their own? Anyone who has kids and sometimes wants a break. > All of my extended family grew up in intergenerational households because they were poor immigrants who had to make do, but all the cousins became doctors/lawyers/engineers/etc and got their own house. How much of that is just unconsciously going along wit…

> Anyone who has kids and sometimes wants a break And then there is the lack of privacy. Your parents who came from a different generation trying to tell you how to live your life (ie my parents are very religiously conservative). I would have to deal with my mom and my wife walking on eggshells to not offend each other. I would have to deal with my dad wondering why I would waste money paying people to cut my lawn,…

> I would have to deal with my dad wondering why I would waste money paying people to cut my lawn

That can't be the problem that comes to mind when dealing with a parent. I love my parents, but if that's the extent of your annoyance, you got off real real easy.

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

#469

Post by lezojeda » Tue, Apr 18, 2023, 4:28 PM UTC

agentdrtran wrote: post #401

jutrewag wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it’s missing the best part. The outdoors and having a huge backyard. You can’t have any hobbies like woodworking, metalworking, gardening/farming, animal husbandry etc. in that setup.

Cities subsidizing maker spaces would solve the wood/metal workign part of this well, and I live in a pretty dense part of the city that has a community garden down the street.

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

#470

Post by CalRobert » Tue, Apr 18, 2023, 4:29 PM UTC

0zemp1c wrote: post #410

CalRobert wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is true, why is it illegal to build anything but low density suburbia in most places?

Well one example is infrastructure...if a formerly-rural area gets a gradual accumulation of homes, chances are they are all on septic systems...so people are using their property for waste water recycling, and there is a limit to how dense this type of living can be. I grew up just outside a decent-sized city in Canada, now living in Texas...both places, on septic. Its not rare.

Right, but that's one of the reasons to make it easier to build infill development, which is largely illegal due to zoning, parking minimums, height maximums, etc.

I live on 3.5 acres and have a water treatment system and part of the reason is that there's a shortage of homes I _actually_ wanted, which are decent flats in the city where my kids can bike to school, so they're very expensive.