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…
For what it's worth, as the rare suburbanite HNer, I fondly recall my family having the same sort of relationships with neighbors in the late 80's and 90's; unfortunately the same just doesn't seem to happen even in socioeconomically comparable suburbs today. Even just attempts to strike up small talk with a neighbor when we both happen to be outside at the same time are usually rebuffed, and the idea that anyone wou…
HOA's are far more common than they were in the 80's/90's (Google says they went from ~20% of homes in 1990ish to ~50% now). It really changes the risk/reward of friendship when your neighbors can arbitrarily force you to spend a whole weekend doing something dumb to please the HOA. It has happened, and I'd rather not repeat it.
The explosion of culture the internet brought on has also fragmented us. Shared interests are fairly uncommon because everyone is watching something different on Netflix, doing different hobbies because they can, etc. That's not totally a bad thing, but it does tend to make smalltalk bland.
Income inequality has also changed demographics. My neighbors are substantially older than me. There aren't even that many children in the neighborhood, a lot of them are retirees that presumably bought when the neighborhood was cheaper. Again, not totally a bad thing, but it means we don't even share nostalgia.