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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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I loved growing up in the suburbs. I knew everyone on my culdesac. We were a ten minute drive from various friends of my mother who had children around my age. We went to church activities every week, sports, library events, etc. We weren't bored or bereft of social interaction.

To some extent this is just what being settled in a place looks like, though. My parents have lived in Greenwich Village since the early 1980s (late ‘70s in my dad’s case) and sure enough they know all their neighbors, get greeted at their coffee place, brunch place, deli, cheesecake place etc by name, are part of many local organizations, can’t walk down the street on a busy warm weekend afternoon without meeting multiple people they know walking around.

But that’s a completely different experience to the one I have, let alone the one someone would have moving there from somewhere else with no friends.

Highly sociable people can make friends anywhere. If you were the kind of person in college who signed up to 20 clubs in the first week to see what they were about and to make friends then you’re never going to be friendless. But I think for the default person, who isn’t a recluse and enjoys company but who also isn’t highly motivated to make friends, living in a more atomized suburb exposes you to far fewer people in the natural course of daily life.

You talk a lot about your parish/church, but of course ever fewer people are involved in a local religious organization. I think generally you encounter more people in a city, and for people who are weirder there are also more likely to be others like you around relative to a small town where out of necessity social organizations are largely going to cater to the modal kind of person. Cities involve more incidental encounters with other people, for better or worse.

To some extent this is just what being settled in a place looks like, though.

My parents moved into the state when I was 4. Six years later, they moved into a new-build neighborhood. My mom talked up the opportunity with friends and a couple of her friends also moved into the same neighborhood. I. Those six years in between, she had made friends with dozens of families, just by exchanging phone numbers with other moms at the playground, meeting their friends, arranging play dates, going out to coffee, etc.

My experience with cities, apartments, and dorms is the physical proximity creates emotional distance. People don't even look each other in the eye, let alone learn each other's names. It's too intimate by default, so people take steps to create boundaries.

My experience with cities, apartments, and dorms is the physical proximity creates emotional distance.

This is greatly put, and matches my experience perfectly. Have people talking about how suburbs are isolating ever lived in a mid rise apartment building? Nobody ever talks to anyone else, people move every 1-2 years, your neighbors are entirely unknown.

On the other hand, when you live in a SFH neighborhood, just looking at people’s houses and yards and cars makes you wonder about the kind of people who live there. When you go out on a walk, you meet people who are your neighbors, and not random passersby, like you do in dense, busy areas. Because of lower density, you see the same people over and over, which facilitates remembering. When you ask them where they leave, they tell you something like “a green house with an American flag”, instead of “uhh in 1201”, which you’ll immediately forget.

There is nothing more alienating than living in a dense, vibrant city.