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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?

#361

Post by JustExAWS »

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…

Exactly how was I going to find a job that was computer science related in small town south GA in the mid 1990s?

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

#362

Post by extr »

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…

Not really the case in my situation. We moved to be closer to family (both sets of parents had coincidentally had relocated to the same area of the country late in life, but before we met). The choice between friends vs family complicates my situation. Love my family, but it's not the same as having peers in a similar stage of life.

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

#363

Post by JustExAWS »

phil21 wrote: post #288
nox101 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is your definition of "high trust society". I don't consider the USA a high trust society having lived in Japan and Singapore. In Japan and Singapore, I trust that others won't steal my stuff. I trust that I won't be mugged. I trust that my packages won't be stolen. I trust that my car will not be broken into. In the USA and Europe I trust none of that. I've had cars broken into 5 times, bikes stolen 5 times, ca…

The US is slowly (rapidly?) devolving into a low-trust society. What used to be pockets of low-trust are spreading rapidly by my estimation. It's been sad to watch it slowly get worse every year. It goes for all things, not just petty/street crime though. Everything from business owners not prioritizing doing good work and building local reputation, employees slacking off as much as possible, investors demanding extr…

America has always been a low trust society when it came to “others”. Jim Crow was the law when my still living parents were growing up.

They literally didn’t trust people to drink from the same water fountain

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

#364

Post by JustExAWS »

wholinator2 wrote: post #307
dsign wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What really needs to happen is we need to figure out ways of facilitating friend formation/maintenance in this brave new world of the internet and atheism. We are going to need some new social technologies to really combat this. I wonder how in your opinion atheism enters in the picture? My first guess (of your reference) is that certain religions frighten people into remaining in a marriage they would otherwise no…

No one said that the religious belief itself is the important factor, and your first guess of it enforcing terrible marriage is insultingly reductive. Your second guess only comes close. It's literally the church, the meeting place where you see the same people every week. Kids meet other kids, adults meet adults. If you think that every person in the building actually believes what the pastor says then i think you h…

When I go back home to South GA, I see first hand the majority of people in my own extended family believe everything the Bible says literally as well as people who I went to private Christian school with.

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

#365

Post by extr »

james-bcn wrote: post #194
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…

Do you think the "you" at highschool and college was "the real you"? Because that is definitely not the case for me. You grow older, you learn, you change views, you mature...

Eh, maybe the "real me" wasn't the right choice of words. I just know these guys in a way that when I see them I inevitably fall into fits of laughter in about 5 minutes. I know they aren't going to ask me a bunch of bullshit about my job or how my life is going. They're not going to try to out-compete each other on hot takes about the political topic of the day. They're not going to try to impress me, or expect me to impress them. More likely they take the piss out of me. I can just relax.

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

#366

Post by crtified »

veunes wrote: post #195

It was very hard for me to make friends. Even now, I only have two. When I didn’t have a family of my own, I was heavily dependent on my friends. Such "friendships" often didn’t end well for me. That’s why, at some point, I started striving to ensure that my mental health didn’t depend on my "social connections" (I’m not sure, maybe I misunderstood something in the article).

I can relate. There's something about the human group dynamic that, by default, isn't kind to certain types of personality.

Internet-only friendships and acquaintances and groups can be deceiving too. They can be great and full of wonderful people, but the reality is usually that even if you spend 20 years in a particular internet community, you could leave tomorrow and few (if any) people would be talking about you for longer than a week.

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

#367

Post by everly »

lolinder wrote: post #331
everly wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you're thinking inside of a fairly small bubble. If you picked 10 people, at random, from the 800k residents, I assure you that there would be substantial differences. Off the top of my head, you might get SF State students, tech bros, Chinatown senior citizens who have never left an 8-block radius and don't speak english, Marina moms, Mission District multi-gen families. I mean, come on. Maybe if you wer…

The point is that no one in practice selects a random sample of the people living near them. Everyone they meet is from some self-selected sub-group—the people who live close to X park, the people who work at Y place, the people who shop at Z store. And the larger the city, the more people there are nearby you who are like you, so your total variety experienced will be smaller unless you're actively going out of your…

I just don't agree (aside from the part about small towns, I guess, but that's not relevant to SF).

If OP can't find differing personalities in a place like SF, it's a skill issue, sorry to say.

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

#368

Post by nradov »

odyssey7 wrote: post #306
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…

Remote work could have solved this. The higher-ups had other thoughts. There’s a parallel to sending your kids off to war. Get them away from their sense of stability, to a place where it’s too expensive to live, for years at a time, to fight for the United States’ GDP. It’s not just the young adults who are affected. In some cases their family members grieve the separation. And yet it seems like the only way to get…

Remote work couldn't have solved anything. It's a great option for some people but it can only ever be possible for a tiny fraction of jobs where everything is done online. So basically nothing in agriculture, mining, construction, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, military, transportation, utilities, tourism, hospitality, primary education, sports, etc. Even in the tech industry a lot of employees will always have to at least occasionally work at a certain physical office in order to access specialized or security controlled hardware.

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

#369

Post by bdangubic »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #37
bdangubic wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmmm I don’t think I want to be THAT close to my family… don’t want any pop-ins :)

I enjoy pop-ins. Someday nobody will pop-in because they'll all be dead.

not sure why this is being downvoted… the fact that I’ll be eternally sad when older members of my family are no longer roaming the Earth has no bearing on whether or not I enjoy the pop-ins. I think perfect distance from your family is one which you can do a day trip (come for lunch, leave in the afternoon) but far enough you’d call to make sure we are not hiking/biking/snorkeling/…

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

#370

Post by pas »

grumpy-de-sre wrote: post #226
pas wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, people moving away is not new and not surprising, and happens all over the world, it's basically the main driver of urbanization. What's new was (rich) people moving "back" (to suburbs for the American Dream, and nowadays to have kids). Though it's better than what used to happen - which was lots of kids, and high infant mortality, plus poverty driving kids to find jobs in cities, where bad living conditions and…

It's easy to blame the decline of organized religion, but it curiously coincides with the same time-frame in which the car was invented and modern suburbia sprung up. Having to move to allow for a family is definitely a new and worrying phenomenon. My gut feel is that having to maintain close family ties and living with parents until adulthood are an adaption to poverty, poor social mobility, and low trust society. P…

As far as I understand the recent decline in the numbers is that people stopped lying about which church they don't go to. Because church-goer numbers are stable.

What happened during the last century is ... complicated. For one thing religion was never really that organized in the US. (Maybe except in Utah. But that's also relatively new.)

I think simply WWII, and the post-WWII economic boom (plus the GI bill), plus then the heating up Cold War slowly but surely transformed society. For the new generations the various Christian belief systems offered by churches were simply not a real option.

People got an appetite for different answers whether be that science or pseudoscience based. Cults and other ideology-based groups filled some of the vacuum. (And of course the counterculture eventually and then after Vietnam and the race riots came the backlash. The Southern Strategy, which platformed evangelicals, but as a political group, not as organized religion. Basically emptying out the spiritual part, etc. And of course it still works.)

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