![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
From Vox: How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult.
http://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friendship
This article gets at one of my many objections to car-centric sprawly development. It's an important one. As I said to my undergrad advisor, whose post brought the article to my attention:
-The concept of repeated spontaneous contact is, I think, so critical to creating friendships. Maybe it's like those studies about how so many ideas in professional settings come not from formal meetings, but from people who meet in the break room for coffee (the proverbial water cooler) and talk. Like ideas, perhaps friendships are things you can't specifically plan for; you can only create environments that foster their generation.
This kind of largely unnoticed, unintentional, but widespead and systematic degradation of the social environment makes me sad, and a bit angry. People shouldn't have to be isolated in the ways that we are. We can do better than this.-
What I didn't say there in Facebook land is that social isolation and my overall life priorities are something I think a lot about lately. For a lot of reasons, through most of my twenties, I was really bad at making friends and being social. I was finally developing those skills and making real progress at forming a social network. Going to events, meeting new people, making friends. Then I went back to school, and that slowed things down. And I got involved in two relationships with people who lived relatively far away. I wouldn't trade those for anything, but they slowed things down more. The time I wasn't spending on school was going to them. But I kept thinking that once I was done with undergrad, even if I was in grad school somewhere, I'd be settled in one place and I could be social with a recurrent group of people while I wasn't occupied with school. I could be part of a real, local social network.
But now that I'm here, school takes so much of my time that I can't. I have no time to be social. And it's intensely frustrating. It makes me increasingly resentful and unhappy. I'm hoping my time-management will improve, or workload will reduce, or I'll otherwise get settled in and this will seem less insurmountable. If it doesn't, I honestly don't know if this is worth it to me. And knowing how many hours most academics put in to their work, I have to wonder in general whether this is a path I really want to be on.
But that's a major divergence from the article, which is addressing car-centric sprawly development.
----
From the article:
"But I do not think we should just accept that when we marry and start families, we atomize, and our friendships, like our taste in music, freeze where they were in college. We shouldn't just accept a way of living that makes interactions with neighbors and friends a burden that requires special planning."
http://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friendship
This article gets at one of my many objections to car-centric sprawly development. It's an important one. As I said to my undergrad advisor, whose post brought the article to my attention:
-The concept of repeated spontaneous contact is, I think, so critical to creating friendships. Maybe it's like those studies about how so many ideas in professional settings come not from formal meetings, but from people who meet in the break room for coffee (the proverbial water cooler) and talk. Like ideas, perhaps friendships are things you can't specifically plan for; you can only create environments that foster their generation.
This kind of largely unnoticed, unintentional, but widespead and systematic degradation of the social environment makes me sad, and a bit angry. People shouldn't have to be isolated in the ways that we are. We can do better than this.-
What I didn't say there in Facebook land is that social isolation and my overall life priorities are something I think a lot about lately. For a lot of reasons, through most of my twenties, I was really bad at making friends and being social. I was finally developing those skills and making real progress at forming a social network. Going to events, meeting new people, making friends. Then I went back to school, and that slowed things down. And I got involved in two relationships with people who lived relatively far away. I wouldn't trade those for anything, but they slowed things down more. The time I wasn't spending on school was going to them. But I kept thinking that once I was done with undergrad, even if I was in grad school somewhere, I'd be settled in one place and I could be social with a recurrent group of people while I wasn't occupied with school. I could be part of a real, local social network.
But now that I'm here, school takes so much of my time that I can't. I have no time to be social. And it's intensely frustrating. It makes me increasingly resentful and unhappy. I'm hoping my time-management will improve, or workload will reduce, or I'll otherwise get settled in and this will seem less insurmountable. If it doesn't, I honestly don't know if this is worth it to me. And knowing how many hours most academics put in to their work, I have to wonder in general whether this is a path I really want to be on.
But that's a major divergence from the article, which is addressing car-centric sprawly development.
----
From the article:
"But I do not think we should just accept that when we marry and start families, we atomize, and our friendships, like our taste in music, freeze where they were in college. We shouldn't just accept a way of living that makes interactions with neighbors and friends a burden that requires special planning."
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
