Mister Rogers had a point – routinely greeting six neighbors maximizes wellbeing

I wonder about this, and not in the sense that this person is being extra cautious still. In my case, I moved into my house a few months before the pandemic struck. When I moved in, the couple across the street came by to introduce themselves when I was moving in. We had a short friendly chat and exchanged numbers.

Once the pandemic hit, everyone sort of disappeared, and I hadn't even talked to the neighbors on one side of the house. During that period, I got more introverted and sort of started avoiding social interactions with people, and not because of a fear of catching COVID. I just became more withdrawn since I wasn't socializing in general.

Anyway, after it got safer and more people were getting out, I now felt awkward seeing the people who introduced themselves on that first day since so much time has elapsed without conversation. (That's on me and my social anxiety, though.) I think it'll require me getting over my introversion to chat with them now.

On the other hand, I have been over to a neighbor on one side of my house a couple of times, but that was them going out of their way to include me.

I think what I'm saying is the pandemic created this weird empty period where people who had just moved in to neighborhoods didn't necessarily build connections with their neighbors and now it'll take some effort to bridge those gaps. On top of that, I think there was some social practice that many of us were out of, which made it even more difficult to just chat up strangers, but I feel like for me this is finally starting to go away.

Ugh I know it’s good social strategy but I hate doing it so much. I just want to be left alone, and engaging with other casually indicates that I’m open to further interaction.

Did you go over and knock on his door and offer him a tray of brownies or a potted plant or something? I just moved, and that's exactly what happened with us. Nonzero chance we'll be looking after our other neighbors' amazing Bernese within the next 6 months.

Congratulations. You live next to an Oompa Loompa factory.

This is a good point. There seems to be a lot of untreated mental illness nowadays. Or maybe we're just encountering it more because everything is filmed and sites like r/PublicFreakout exist. Or maybe the pandemic really screwed some people up. Who knows?

I had an Amazon package mistakenly delivered to my house. I recognized the address of one of my (unknown) neighbors a few doors down, and I had time, so I walked it down to their door.. Maybe I'll finally meet this unknown family. I knocked on their door, holding the package, and let me just explain something that's important: I'm a slightly overweight nerd that spends too much time in his office chair. I'm about as threatening looking as a Best Buy worker in his khakis. Well, through the window next to the front door, I saw one of the home's occupants (a young lady probably early 20s) just standing there looking at me through the window, apparently not knowing what to do. I knocked on the door again and gestured towards the Amazon box in my hand. Well the woman let out a shriek from the bowels of hell and damnation, like terrified. Picture Donald Sutherland in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. I'm just standing there trying to hand a package to a neighbor and she is screaming over and over and over and looking at me like I'm a serial killer. I put the box down on the front porch and backed away. I heard the screaming long after I got down the driveway to the road.

I don't know what's wrong with people. Maybe this person has some kind of traumatic past and can't bear to even see other people. I don't know. This didn't seem like even remotely a thing 10 or 20 years ago.