Should more of us be moving to live near friends?

Yes but investing in new, long-term friendships is a bit of an oxymoron. In order to do that, you have to pick one set of friends and then stick with them (cuz opportunity cost — the day is only so long). And once you've done so, you then have to stop investing in new friends and stick with those old ones.

Cities aren't very conducive to this in part because... people in cities tend to be more transient and their relationships more transactional. You have so much more choice, and the people you know have more choice, and people come and go.

In order to invest in long-term friendships, you need to be in a location where both you and the people you're making friends with are actually going to stay, and where both sides of the relationship are invested in the long-term nature of it.

This is much more likely to happen in a rural area than a city. I'd wager that constraining choice creates intimacy far moreso than alignment of interests. It's not about how much you like each other — it's about high-enough switching costs to hanging out with someone else that keep you together over a very long period of time.

In a city, even if you find the most compatible friend ever... there's also going to be 50 people almost as compatible (and vice versa for the people you're hanging out with).

In a rural area, you might not find someone you're perfectly compatible with... but they're far more likely to be the only person in the area with interests that are that aligned... and that creates intimacy... which will only make you more like them and them more like you.

This is it. It’s proximity.

Let’s say you’re interested in transformers. In a big city, you could go to a meetup, talk to different people working on this stuff at a production level (maybe there’s even some guy who works on it at Google), talk about tips or pitfalls that no one ever publishes and potentially have the conversation veer off to DuckDB or some obscure topic. When you have a gathering of like minds, the conversation can go in unpredictable directions and you can potentially land in very interesting places.

In a less urban area, this is far less likely to happen because there are just fewer people with the same interests (unless you’re lucky). I grew up with friends who were absolutely brilliant (high fluid intelligence) who come from farming families. But they just weren’t interested in what I was interested in. The core of intellectual pursuit isn’t just smart people, but the confluence of people who have the same interests and who are also well positioned.

You might ask, can’t you just learn this stuff online and talk to people on Reddit? But the reality is that positive effects of randomness require real life undirected interactions with the right people.

(This is for instance why people are willing to relocate to a cold city like Montreal (-30°C/-22°F in the winter) to work in Bengio’s lab for a couple of years, just so they can overhear lunchtime conversations about how to train certain models. A lot of this knowledge is caught and not taught.)

I’ve gotten so many ideas from just random conversations with well positioned people who happened to be doing something important and interesting. It’s not just about being smart.

High density living in a downtown area is inversely correlated with having a family across a wide selection of different countries though. The highest density countries like Korea and Japan have some of the lowest fertility rates.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34914431/

Nothing. Stay with your wife’s social circle, stay in touch with your old friends, and build community where you are with your family. Children are a fantastic icebreaker and way to meet people.

There is a movement called Cohousing that I don’t think gets enough attention.

I prefer to call it Tiny Neighborhoods, which is basically what the article describes.

If interested, I did a 3,000 word deep dive into the specifics of how tiny neighborhoods have worked over the past 50 years…

https://iambateman.com/tiny