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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?

#71

Post by dlisboa »

Coming from a Latin American the idea of re-starting your life across the country for college and then again for work (multiple times sometimes) while away from family and friends is very foreign.

A lot of the conversation around modern American youth feeling isolated, lacking socialization and not building strong relationships seems that stem from this drive.

Another thing that’s really weird and related is another recurring theme in the American ethos: the cultural shame that comes with living “at home” or staying in the same small town for your whole life. Somehow they made it so living close to your family and friends for your 20s-30s and maybe forever means you’re a “loser”.

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

#72

Post by scyzoryk_xyz »

extr wrote: post #46

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…

Move back, force your wife to only interact with your dudes’ wives. Shed individuality, kick back beers with the boyz. Reminisce only about the good old days. Bond over ritualized sports. Start families in sync so kids can be raised together. Forge new shared traditions, establish a rules based order of discipline and brotherhood. Protect the offspring from outsiders. To do this establish dominance over other families. Punish disobedience. Never leave the inner trusted circle.

edit: not sure how heavy handed the Mad Max irony must be for the /s to register.

edit2: Do not move back. Embrace change. Ask wife to steer all social life. Sever all ties with the men who have made all those awful career and family choices. Visit only sporadically, but offer resentful advice on how they could improve themselves. Leave with relief and conviction that you have changed into someone else, someone superior. Carefully select only the best qualified friends for family, based on consultations with wife. Expose children only to the appropriate sort of influence.

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

#73

Post by ryandrake »

flawn wrote: post #62
ryandrake wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This part of choosing where to live is so important and hard to articulate. I remember when I moved from small town to small town, then finally out to Silicon Valley. The first thing I noticed was the billboards by the side of 101. They were about programming frameworks, iPhones, h…

Hmm, tangentially related, but how would you say SF changed? Where would you get this feeling of SF back then nowadays? Thought about giving SF a visit in summer as an aspiring software engineer & entrepreneur but curious to what you think about it.

Hard to say, and it's highly subjective. It just feels like Silicon Valley is no longer about building cool things and making the world better through technology. It's become about exploitation and extraction, instead of building. It's about capturing and controlling users rather than serving them. It's about "crushing it in the market, bro." It's grindset, hustle culture, performative work. It's about phony tech chops and faking everything until you make it financially or crash and burn. Maybe it's always been this way and I just didn't see it when I moved there.

In terms of respect for intellectual pursuits and expertise and institutions that respect these things, the place is still head and shoulders above most of the USA, but it feels like every part of the valley has been utterly corrupted by hustle and greed.

I came out here expecting Netscape, Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics, but lately the place has morphed into Theranos, FTX, and innumerable Fintech, AI and crypto scams. Not to mention GiantTech capturing and gatekeeping everything else that's not a scam.

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

#74

Post by charlie0 »

williamtrask wrote: post #56
extr wrote: post #46

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…

> What's to be done? Our society would need to re-think its norms around moving away in order to move upward, which runs into some pretty big philosophical ideas around geography, culture, and values. For technologists, this cultural movement is still in a bit of a philosophical stage, but it's starting to make its way into some early experiments. https://www.plurality.net/ is probably the best written work on it so…

Interesting, but this just a framework. Where are the actual implementations? Ie, the communities?

I've been looking for networked states that aren't all in on living forever or obsessed with crypto and anarchism.

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

#75

Post by linguae »

em-bee wrote: post #52
pixelatedindex wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like I need to be rich to move to where my friends are - I went to college in the Bay Area and I can’t afford to live there. But honestly it’s not hard to keep in touch these days if you want to so I’m not the least bit bothered. As a renter, I’m constantly on the move because I can’t afford homeownership - the price to rent ratio is firmly between 19 and 20 at the moment, and that’s after moving from the Bay Ar…

why does renting force you to move? how does owning a home allow you to stay if other considerations may force you to sell the house and buy another one? my mother lives in a rental apartment that my family has been in since 150 years ago.

When I was 12 years old, we had to leave a rental house because the landlord sold it. It was very disruptive for us since my parents were low-income and didn’t have much savings. It also took place at a time when market rents increased quite a bit. My parents struggled to find housing; we moved into an apartment temporarily, and two months later we finally found another house to rent that we could afford, but it was in a more dangerous neighborhood.

I recently moved out of an apartment complex in Santa Cruz County in California that got sold after being owned by a family for about 50 years. Some of the tenants lived there for decades. The new owners submitted plans to the local government to upzone the 1960s-era apartment complex, which will involve residents needing to move during construction. Thankfully for me, the sale coincided with a major career change (WFH researcher to a professor who teaches in person) that required me to move anyway, so I moved. However, I feel for long-time residents of my former apartment complex going through the uncertainty of the future and the difficult housing market in Santa Cruz County should they be forced to move.

Renting, by definition, means you don’t own your place. While there are some people who are able to have stable renting situations, there are others who have the bad luck of receiving an eviction notice due to a sale. Owning a place means not having to worry about a landlord.

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

#76

Post by chasd00 »

dlisboa wrote: post #71

Coming from a Latin American the idea of re-starting your life across the country for college and then again for work (multiple times sometimes) while away from family and friends is very foreign. A lot of the conversation around modern American youth feeling isolated, lacking socialization and not building strong relationships seems that stem from this drive. Another thing that’s really weird and related is another…

Not sure if it’s just in America but people love to tear others down to lift themselves up by comparison. Once it clicks and you understand what is going on it’s easy to just ignore them.

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

#77

Post by kennyloginz »

williamtrask wrote: post #47
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 happe…

I’m curious, do you live on a farm, or a suburb?

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

#78

Post by lorax »

daedrdev wrote: post #25
wenc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tokyo seems to have done this. It’s not cheap by any means, but rent seems relatively affordable relative to pay (and very cheap compared to expensive cities in North America). I wonder if part of the reason is that housing is not an investment vehicle in Japan (probably due to the Japanese preference for newer, more modern builds and the fact that housing is a depreciating asset in an earthquake prone region). In mo…

I think it's simply illegal to build housing like Tokyo does in every US city, and often every project over 3 stories needs community input and faces environmental lawsuits over things like shadows

Japan has detailed zoning restrictions, including the shadow a building can cast on a neighbor's lot. Maybe there are fewer lawsuits because the law is clear so it is easy to know if you are following it. https://ranjatai.wordpress.com/2022/02/11/sunlight-on-japane...

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

#79

Post by theGnuMe »

wenc wrote: post #53
fragmede wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Tha…

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…

You can do all that online… however in-person networking is important.

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

#80

Post by wizzwizz4 »

kennyloginz wrote: post #77
williamtrask wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 happe…

I’m curious, do you live on a farm, or a suburb?

Villages and small towns exist.
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