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Should more of us be moving to live near friends?

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Re: Should more of us be moving to live near friends?

#41

Post by matwood »

renewiltord wrote: post #22

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…

> 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 :)

Re: Should more of us be moving to live near friends?

#43

Post by fragmede »

gazook89 wrote: post #39
wenc wrote: post #6

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 precisel…

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.

Re: Should more of us be moving to live near friends?

#44

Post by em-bee »

sanderjd wrote: post #33
paxys wrote: post #17

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 n…

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…

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.

Re: Should more of us be moving to live near friends?

#45

Post by fragmede »

l33tbro wrote: post #36
wenc wrote: post #6

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 precisel…

> 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 consci…

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.

Re: Should more of us be moving to live near friends?

#46

Post by extr »

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?

Re: Should more of us be moving to live near friends?

#47

Post by williamtrask »

wenc wrote: post #6

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 precisel…

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).

Re: Should more of us be moving to live near friends?

#48

Post by danenania »

wenc wrote: post #6

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 precisel…

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.

Re: Should more of us be moving to live near friends?

#49

Post by zenoprax »

renewiltord wrote: post #22

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…

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.

Re: Should more of us be moving to live near friends?

#50

Post by lordnacho »

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.

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