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Comment by clarry | Hacker News Reader

> Suburbs are structurally lonely

My European perspective. I wouldn't blame it on suburbs in particular. I would blame most if not all forms of city living. Most people live in flats where nobody wants to have anything to do with their neighbor and there is no communality. People move in and move out, nobody cares. The less you have to hear of your neighbor, the better. FWIW I would rather have a 'burb castle than a flat where I have to smell and listen to idiots drink, smoke, fight and blast music. And I think I'd rather get to know the neighbors over at the adjoining castle than the scum in these neighboring flats.

Now farms and other isolated & rural towns are a different deal. There you're no longer mass of people. You actually get to know the community around you, and people don't come & go nearly as much.

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I dunno about that, having grown up in a rural area I can distinctly remember newcomers to the area (especially if from abroad) never being accepted unless they had young kids going to the local school (who would be accepted by the other kids much faster). There was one couple who tried extensively for years going to and organising events but never became anything more than "the dutch couple"

You also get a lot of weirdness where everyone knows a bit too much about everyone else. ...and, yeah, there's a really strong push towards conformity. If you're at all unusual it's pretty isolating. Some people will help you if you're in trouble but you'll never make anything resembling friendships.

If you grow up in the community, your direct family are pretty accepted within it, and there are other people within your age range, it's highly unlikely to be a lonely experience. in my case we had two neighbours that got married around the same time as my parents but neither could conceive, which both resulted in no other kids in the area at all and a kind of strained awkwardness between them and my parents

Yeah I think it’s not just a suburb problem, they just so happen to be (I think) the most common living situation for Americans. And if not in actuality, certainly culturally we are indoctrinated in a suburb mindset (own a home, go to college, American dream yada yada). It’s one of the reasons moving to a city after college is so exciting for us- it’s usually the first experience we have that challenges that mindset.

The reason your city is so bad is in large epart because the families move away to suburbs. In the burbs, you still get disturbances like constant lawnmowers and leaf blowers, at least in lawn-crazy USA.

Also planning laws - apartments for singles and couples are cheaper to build and higher density than apartments for families. If planning law mandates sufficient accommodation for families the dynamics change.

The constant lawnmowers get on my nerves for sure.

But even the families with loud kids and dogs and late night backyard parties never managed to disturb me as much as what I've come to expect as the norm in flats.

> The reason your city is so bad is in large epart because the families move away to suburbs. In the burbs, you still get disturbances like constant lawnmowers and leaf blowers, at least in lawn-crazy USA.

In the USA a lot of neighborly socialization is associated with yard work. The lawnmower is a signal your neighbor is out, and the polite thing to do is to chat when you run into each other. That's how I got to know my neighbors. If you weren't aware, you do shut off the machines when you talk.

The level of contempt you show for lawn work makes me thing you have little experience with it or some idiosyncrasies that cause you to hate it in an atypical way.

> And I think I'd rather get to know the neighbors over at the adjoining castle than the scum in these neighboring flats.

Don’t worry — I’m sure the scum feel pretty much the same about you.

The language might seem harsh to you, but you'd understand it if you'd ever lived with or near such people.

>The language might seem harsh to you, but you'd understand it if you'd ever lived with or near such people.

I understand it perfectly well, I've lived in densely populated cities my whole life. It's a naked display of something called misanthropy and it's a core tenet of an ethos of self-obsession plus empathy absence that persons in technology AND lifelong US suburbanites far, far too often are afflicted with. Zero mystery here.

Then what is its root cause?

Typically our view of the outer world is a reflection of our view of the inner world, and usually that state is obscured and perpetuated by fear/clinging to an idea of security.

>Then what is its root cause?

I can only guess. I'll be thinking about it.

I will say that fear -- useful fear, wielded as a whip of control in various ways -- is central to any process of de-socialization.

And I know who surely has the greatest interest in de-socialization: the persons at the top of our economy.

> I can only guess.

Then you shouldn't say "Zero mystery here".. or you could trick yourself and become upset later.

>then you shouldn’t say “Zero mystery here”

There’s zero mystery about OP showing misanthropy, but I can’t say where it comes from.

Let me know if there’s anything else I can clear up for you as you struggle to remain current in the discussion.

Lol typical response of someone who wants to believe they know something. You'll find out one day. Meanwhile you missed the answer implicit in my reply.

Yeah, you’ve clearly never had bad neighbors. Be grateful for that, but it doesn’t give you the right to tell others that the real problem is their frustration.

>you’ve clearly never had bad neighbors

No, I’ve had bad neighbors. What I haven’t done is to generalize the experience to seek to avoid neighbors as a class, which is exactly what misanthropy is, as well as exactly what white flight and suburbanism is.

Also, as long as you’re prattling about “rights”, please notice how easily you assumed the right to mischaracterize and invent a convenient and false history for me.

Nope, you clearly stated that there is no such thing as a bad neighbor, and anyone perceiving one has a defective moral character, that there is “no mystery here.” You want to complain about generalization, that’s another thing, but so far the only generalization here is yours, that the parent’s experience can’t be real.

Me:

>I’ve had bad neighbors

You:

> you’ve clearly stated there’s no such thing as a bad neighbor

I wish you luck managing the effects of your wild imagination in the future.

> Don’t worry — I’m sure the scum feel pretty much the same about you.

Quite possible, and that's part of the point I'm making. There's no communality, everyone just wants to have as little to do with their neighbor as possible. Even if it turns out that quite a few of these neighbors (me included) do not throw parties, do not smoke inside, do not drink and fool around, do not have loud kids or animals, do not throw trash around and break things in shared spaces, don't blast music at 3 AM...

There's too many people for people to care, kind of? And a bunch of bad apples ruin it for everyone.

YMMV. I got to know my neighbors in my 5-unit building in NYC, as well as the owners/managers of the restaurants and shops next door. The advantage the city has over suburbia is the density. I don’t have to get in a car to see any of my neighbors, we’re more or less forced to see each other on any given walk.

You nailed it. I live in a ‘burb castle’. I was grateful to get out of my apartment. The woman in the adjacent unit would burn a dozen candles and stumble in drunk every night. The guy below would scream and break stuff during football games. Another would blast rap music at 4 AM.

Screw apartments. Now I can put up ham radio antennas, have a nice lab, garage for bike, etc.. I could not fathom living in a dense city.

But cities provide you with a means to find a community if you really want one. It's a lot harder and/or less convenient to find groups that do what you like to do if you live in a suburb.

> But cities provide you with a means to find a community if you really want one. It's a lot harder and/or less convenient to find groups that do what you like to do if you live in a suburb.

I think there's a problem with equating community with "groups that do what you like." That sounds like a definition that's been infected by the "personalization" the npunt was talking about in his first note.

Real communities have a lot more diversity than that, and they're usually not very personalized. It's often no so much about finding community, but forming communal bonds with the people already around you.

Why would it be bad if things were this way? I mean, I have a very varied social circle but enjoy the company of a select few the most.

"Personalization" as you called it, has existed since immemorial times and I don't think it's something new.

Sure, it always existed and isn't necessarily always a problem. But, as with anything, it can quickly become a problem once we get better at it and turn it to eleven.

Last century, forming a sect was hard work. Now this kinda seems to happen accidentally all the time when someone tries to launch a new social media platform. For those examples the problem isn't preferring a select few, but shielding yourself from others.

But yes, favoring select few can end bad as well. When you network with and thus effectively give positions or contracts to only your select few, you can end up with a self-reinforcing feedback loop and thus quite homogeneous subset of people. And then end up with e.g. woman complain they cannot obtain senior positions or more frequent conspiracy theories about how jews run the world. Having lots of people think they are treated unfairly is generally bad for a society, especially our democratic ones.

Sure, that has historically been the case.

I will argue that communities of space is always inferior to communities of interest. We can see that historically when those communities of interest are big enough, they spend most of their time together, buy in their own shops, etc.

With the current state of society, it is a lot easier to create smaller groups, provided you have a big enough base to work with.

Thats not particularly a European perspective. Sounds like its just yours.

It is just mine, and I am European. I believe it is informative to spell it out in a discussion that points fingers at the (American) suburb.

your statement sounds like this is a point of view taken by the majority of people who live in Europe. Simple facts about the number and density of cities through out the history of the continent point to the exact opposite.

And they already told you they didn't mean it that way. Maybe listen to them, adjust your expectations, and move on?

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