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I don't think I'm alone in that I find it impossible to find common ground with most normal people. I am a proper weirdo and my neighbors near my current home

by sneak 3y ago

I don't think I'm alone in that I find it impossible to find common ground with most normal people. I am a proper weirdo and my neighbors near my current home are basically randomly selected suburbanites. I would struggle to talk to them for 3 minutes. My friends are my friends because they have the right values, priorities, and culture. My culture has almost no overlap with that of the "community" in which I live. They don't know my music, my food, my memes, my values, my lifestyle. We're not even awake at the same time. All we share is geographic proximity. Pretty much every time I talk to random people in the US for more than a few minutes, they drop inflammatory remarks to see how I respond, to identify which side of the culture war I am on, so they can (based on my identifying responses) either antagonize or befriend me. I ignore these comments, as I am disinterested in the American culture war and its political sports-teamism. The article is right, and I think yours is a casual dismissal.

munk-a 3y ago
> My neighbors near my current home are basically randomly selected suburbanites. I think that's an understated problem right there - suburbs are awful for fostering good relationships. Some suburbs have gone out of their way to have events like block parties - but most have no real common every-day interaction and the infrequency of common tasks like shifting grocery shopping to a once a week task and minimizing interactions outside of PTA meetings is really hurting our ability to form strong social bonds. I live in a city so my neighbors are a metric ton of randomly selected folks who I pass often walking on the street and doing life tasks - additionally the population density is high enough that I have multiple different board game events hosted by stores and a plethora of choices for D&D groups to choose from. I think that density makes a very big difference.
- sneak 3y ago
  In the summers I live in a real city with fair density (Berlin) and love talking to strangers, but even there the people directly in my building are mostly conservative immigrant families who give me dirty looks because I'm a man with hot pink hair. I am pretty against neighbor relations these days. I spend a lot of energy and money maintaining relationships with my friends from the scenes in which I inhabit, who are in many different cities.
  - paxys 3y ago
    You know what they say...if everywhere you go smells like shit, maybe it's time to check your own shoes.
    - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
      Conformity is not the most important virtue. I’ve been a weirdo my entire life, and if people are judgmental about me, that’s their failing, not mine. I bet most people on the spectrum know what I’m talking about.
      - paxys 3y ago
        Being friends with someone or generally getting along with them doesn't mean you have to "conform" with their views or lifestyle. That is something we seem to have lost as a culture in today's political environment. 99% of people out there aren't looking to get into a fight with you no matter how different you are. They aren't looking to change your views on things or have their own views changed. The sooner you accept that, the easier building new relations with them will be.
        amanaplanacanal 3y ago
        I have no problems meeting and talking to people. The person you insulted said that they were getting dirty looks because of their non-conformity. Somehow in your mind that became their fault.
  - CalRobert 3y ago
    :-( that's sad. I wish you luck in finding something that works for you. We're an immigrant family in the Netherlands and we could do with more colourful hair around here.
- irrational 3y ago
  What helped my suburban neighborhood come together was putting in a community garden. We have apple trees, thornless blackberry plants, grape vines, strawberry and blueberry plants, and a raised garden bed for everyone. People talk when they come down to weed, water, plant, etc. It gets people out of their houses in the evenings and gives a gathering place where we also host the block parties. My opinion is every suburban neighborhood should be planed with a central community garden place.
  - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
    That's good for gardeners. Maybe also a communal board game space, a communal maker space, a communal basketball court, and so on? We can perhaps put them together into a "community centre".
    - irrational 3y ago
      It turned out that even people who don't want to garden would come out and just hang out and talk around the garden. Most humans just like being around green growing things. Probably from millions of years of evolution.
      - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
        Indeed, parks are also a good idea.
- kaashif 3y ago
  Yeah. For all the hate density gets, living in e.g. Manhattan has made it really easy for me to find like minded friends. I live within like 10 minutes of millions of people so it would be weird if I couldn't connect with people locally. You just have to consciously try to speak to the same people, it's easy to float around and never see the same person twice.
pwatsonwailes 3y ago
I can't be bothered to try and meet people whom I could, because I think they might be different to me isn't the flex you seem to think it is. If you want to be a misanthrope that's fine, but that's on you, not your local community.
- sneak 3y ago
  "they might be different to me" is not the same as "they will be actively hostile to me when they learn more about how different I am". In the US I find conformity to be widely regarded as desirable, and being "weird" to be seen as a negative. I am weird. This lowers most normal people's opinions of me.
  - c22 3y ago
    On the contrary I think many people desire conformance in themselves because they are afraid to stand out. However, often weirdness is admired when it is observed. This is why 'artists' are a thing. Granted, the specific ways in which you are weird could definitely influence this, no one likes a creepy person.
bcrosby95 3y ago
> Pretty much every time I talk to random people in the US, they drop inflammatory remarks to see how I respond, to identify which side of the culture war I am on, so they can antagonize or befriend me. I ignore these comments, as I am disinterested in the American culture war and its political sports-teamism. Weird. Everyone in my neighborhood avoids politics like the plague. I think my favorite part about where I live is my neighbors. The thing we have most in common with is our community, kids, and the troubles that come with home ownership. We invite eachother over for pool parties and BBQs. My neighbor, who I'm pretty sure is exactly the opposite of me politics-wise (I've heard him talking in the backyard before), nevertheless invites everyone over for labor day and 4th of July. We talk house and neighborhood problems. His kids are only slightly younger than me but we still talk kid stuff. Another neighbor is on a fire safety council (a non-profit) and helps deal with some of the issues with that, and I've helped them with tech stuff before. You wouldn't think it, but he's kinda a nerd himself. This is a 60 year old retired firefighter with a garage full of motorcycles who could probably bench press me but his house is full of legos and star wars stuff. In general, people are very happy to help with problems and cordial. We have a text message thread with about 15 houses on it.
LeifCarrotson 3y ago
The interesting part of the whole discussion is whether your response is reasonable. 100 years ago - the blink of an eye on the timeline of humanity - it would have been ludicrous. Now it's become commonplace for the friends you make in your youth to experience a global diaspora out of convenience and personal preference, and to try to maintain a relationship using technology and occasional travel. It also seems reasonable for people to make friends with reasonable success to the small fraction of people geographically scattered over the globe who happen to share your taste in music and all your other hyperspecific personal preferences, connecting again through technology and travel. The big question is whether this is reasonable. I thought in 2006 that I'd maintain friendships with the friends I made (due to physical proximity!) in my high school classes and athletic teams using Facebook. Instead, Facebook decided to use my attention on their platform due to those friends to sell ads, and the relationship maintenance got harder, and eventually went by the wayside. The handful I still maintain contact with happen to have physical proximity more than commonality of values/priorities/culture. The friends I have on forums, Discord, Reddit, and in Rocket League/Minecraft due to shared interests are real people, probably perfectly nice, just physically located on the other side of the Internet connection and a screen (or microphone), but if I've never shared a handshake, hug, meal, or home with them are they the same kind of friends as my neighbors, members of local rec leagues and hackerspaces, workplace friends, and other people who live near me? The big experiment of social media is whether nonconformity to local community, and instead forming virtual communities online, performs the same function to bring a happy, healthy life to the humans who practice it. You may say that it's too early to tell, that present failings are just growing pains, but I think the early evidence is quite strongly pointing towards "no".
- sneak 3y ago
  I don't use social media, so I don't think this applies. I also think the corporate-mediated friendship model is toxic and disgusting. I'm not on IG or FB and my IRL friends from "back home" I connected with first on interest-based email mailing lists before we ever met in person.
sjducb 3y ago
> I would struggle to talk to them for 3 minutes Have you tried talking to them for 3 min? Your statement is written as if it’s a hypothetical. When I talk to the parents at my kids school (5min from my house) I’m amazed at how much we have in common. 50% of the dads are computer programmers. I’ve found things in common with most of the other parents. When I talk to my neighbours the one on my right has a PhD from the same college as me and the one on the left went backpacking to the same places as me. You live where you do because of “reasons” your neighbours live there for similar reasons. We’re all random suburbanites.
- sneak 3y ago
  I have tried. There are a lot of career military people around here (the cold half of the year I live not extremely far from Nellis AFB) and people who moved away from SoCal because of rising costs and perceived political shifts. I think it would be less of an issue in a more homogenous place, but southern Nevada is pretty firmly "purple" and people seem to try to classify you as friend or foe immediately upon meeting.
  - foobarian 3y ago
    I'm on the weird spectrum and have a similar experience with neighbors. I suppose the more of an outlier you are, the less likely it is to randomly land in a compatible community, and therefore the harder you need to work to make it happen. Of all the places I've lived, high density residential areas near high densities of colleges were the best at making this possible. The problem is, settling in such areas tends to be expensive (NYC/Boston/Bay Area/etc), so you look further out, and wherever you can afford tends to be majority townies/normies.
    - Tarball10 3y ago
      Referring to other people as "townies/normies" seems like you're already looking down on them and not wanting to make any effort in getting along with them.
  - titanomachy 3y ago
asdff 3y ago
This is why you move to somewhere without the whole culture war bullshit in the local lexicon. Like the "liberal hellhole of california," a statement that serves as a great filter towards a lot of ignorant people spending much time around you there. Not a sure thing you won't see these folk, just that they've been relegated into de facto containment zones in the more rural parts of the state.
CalRobert 3y ago
For what it's worth, when I lived in rural Ireland I didn't click with _anybody_. I live near Amsterdam now and have already meet two people who could grow to be good friends. "to identify which side of the culture war I am on" I _HATE_ this aspect of casual conversation with strangers in the US (or people in the Irish midlands trying to suss out if I'm Catholic or Protestant) and I do not miss it at all. Will the US have their own version of the Irish Troubles?
Gibbon1 3y ago
> I would struggle to talk to them for 3 minutes. I'd suggest thinking of that as a skill to be developed.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
Rather than reacting with knee jerk derision, I took a moment to read your blog's "My Context" page, and I think I do have to conclude you're living in the right way for yourself. Someone who puts freedom from coercion first and foremost in their ethical thinking, to the extent that you do, is going to find themselves at odds with the Overton window almost anywhere they go. I'm not sure you're doing something in your own life that's much different here from what those people in the States are doing to you. You too are dropping hints and observing responses to decide whether to befriend or antagonize a given person. Hence the tone of some of the other comments - you've successfully antagonized a few people by what you've written here. I can't really tell whether you just dislike this "cultural war" you have going on (whatever that is) or whether you also have a distaste for this whole befriend/antagonize mechanism in general. In any case I'm glad you've got a group of people you can pal around with online. It's good to have friends.
JPws_Prntr_Fngr 3y ago
> drop inflammatory remarks to see how I respond, to identify which side of the culture war I am on Very real, and very hilarious. I called a tow truck recently in rural CO, and the driver asked where I lived. Upon hearing NYC, the first words out of his mouth were "I hear that's a real shithole. My phone's been telling me murders and robberies are way up." God bless America.
Tarball10 3y ago
It might be healthy to socialize with people who don't share your music, food, memes, and lifestyle (values perhaps being the exception where you'd still need to align). Living in a bubble and interacting only with people exactly like you seems pretty limiting. There's no reason you can't be friendly with people that live very different lives, but your phrasing makes it sound like you're not even giving them a chance. Perhaps you have more in common than you'd think!
YeBanKo 3y ago
Sorry to drop an inflammatory remark on you, but you sound like an extreme version of a total snob. I call it “everyday fascist”. Only your way of life, only your values, etc. are superior. No one cares about your weirdness, but also no one likes your holier than thou attitude.
iteratethis 3y ago
Sounds like you're only interested in a clone of yourself.
Arubis 3y ago
If you're interested in finding more of an in-person community (and you may not be! Primarily online might be your preference, and there's nothing wrong with that), I'd recommend finding a bigger, denser city. It almost doesn't matter which; the more people there, the more of _your people_ you'll find there. This is effectively a smaller analogue of finding your people online, since the Internet has the most people—but making a compromise to be able to connect locally. That said, your profile suggests you're in Berlin, which as a complete outsider (I've never been to Germany at all) I would've presumed would be sufficiently urban.

by sneak 3y ago

munk-a 3y ago

> My neighbors near my current home are basically randomly selected suburbanites. I think that's an understated problem right there - suburbs are awful for fostering good relationships. Some suburbs have gone out of their way to have events like block parties - but most have no real common every-day interaction and the infrequency of common tasks like shifting grocery shopping to a once a week task and minimizing interactions outside of PTA meetings is really hurting our ability to form strong social bonds. I live in a city so my neighbors are a metric ton of randomly selected folks who I pass often walking on the street and doing life tasks - additionally the population density is high enough that I have multiple different board game events hosted by stores and a plethora of choices for D&D groups to choose from. I think that density makes a very big difference.

sneak 3y ago
In the summers I live in a real city with fair density (Berlin) and love talking to strangers, but even there the people directly in my building are mostly conservative immigrant families who give me dirty looks because I'm a man with hot pink hair. I am pretty against neighbor relations these days. I spend a lot of energy and money maintaining relationships with my friends from the scenes in which I inhabit, who are in many different cities.
- paxys 3y ago
  You know what they say...if everywhere you go smells like shit, maybe it's time to check your own shoes.
  - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
    Conformity is not the most important virtue. I’ve been a weirdo my entire life, and if people are judgmental about me, that’s their failing, not mine. I bet most people on the spectrum know what I’m talking about.
    - paxys 3y ago
      Being friends with someone or generally getting along with them doesn't mean you have to "conform" with their views or lifestyle. That is something we seem to have lost as a culture in today's political environment. 99% of people out there aren't looking to get into a fight with you no matter how different you are. They aren't looking to change your views on things or have their own views changed. The sooner you accept that, the easier building new relations with them will be.
      - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
        I have no problems meeting and talking to people. The person you insulted said that they were getting dirty looks because of their non-conformity. Somehow in your mind that became their fault.
- CalRobert 3y ago
  :-( that's sad. I wish you luck in finding something that works for you. We're an immigrant family in the Netherlands and we could do with more colourful hair around here.
irrational 3y ago
What helped my suburban neighborhood come together was putting in a community garden. We have apple trees, thornless blackberry plants, grape vines, strawberry and blueberry plants, and a raised garden bed for everyone. People talk when they come down to weed, water, plant, etc. It gets people out of their houses in the evenings and gives a gathering place where we also host the block parties. My opinion is every suburban neighborhood should be planed with a central community garden place.
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  That's good for gardeners. Maybe also a communal board game space, a communal maker space, a communal basketball court, and so on? We can perhaps put them together into a "community centre".
  - irrational 3y ago
    It turned out that even people who don't want to garden would come out and just hang out and talk around the garden. Most humans just like being around green growing things. Probably from millions of years of evolution.
    - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
      Indeed, parks are also a good idea.
kaashif 3y ago
Yeah. For all the hate density gets, living in e.g. Manhattan has made it really easy for me to find like minded friends. I live within like 10 minutes of millions of people so it would be weird if I couldn't connect with people locally. You just have to consciously try to speak to the same people, it's easy to float around and never see the same person twice.

pwatsonwailes 3y ago

I can't be bothered to try and meet people whom I could, because I think they might be different to me isn't the flex you seem to think it is. If you want to be a misanthrope that's fine, but that's on you, not your local community.

sneak 3y ago
"they might be different to me" is not the same as "they will be actively hostile to me when they learn more about how different I am". In the US I find conformity to be widely regarded as desirable, and being "weird" to be seen as a negative. I am weird. This lowers most normal people's opinions of me.
- c22 3y ago
  On the contrary I think many people desire conformance in themselves because they are afraid to stand out. However, often weirdness is admired when it is observed. This is why 'artists' are a thing. Granted, the specific ways in which you are weird could definitely influence this, no one likes a creepy person.

bcrosby95 3y ago

> Pretty much every time I talk to random people in the US, they drop inflammatory remarks to see how I respond, to identify which side of the culture war I am on, so they can antagonize or befriend me. I ignore these comments, as I am disinterested in the American culture war and its political sports-teamism. Weird. Everyone in my neighborhood avoids politics like the plague. I think my favorite part about where I live is my neighbors. The thing we have most in common with is our community, kids, and the troubles that come with home ownership. We invite eachother over for pool parties and BBQs. My neighbor, who I'm pretty sure is exactly the opposite of me politics-wise (I've heard him talking in the backyard before), nevertheless invites everyone over for labor day and 4th of July. We talk house and neighborhood problems. His kids are only slightly younger than me but we still talk kid stuff. Another neighbor is on a fire safety council (a non-profit) and helps deal with some of the issues with that, and I've helped them with tech stuff before. You wouldn't think it, but he's kinda a nerd himself. This is a 60 year old retired firefighter with a garage full of motorcycles who could probably bench press me but his house is full of legos and star wars stuff. In general, people are very happy to help with problems and cordial. We have a text message thread with about 15 houses on it.

LeifCarrotson 3y ago

The interesting part of the whole discussion is whether your response is reasonable. 100 years ago - the blink of an eye on the timeline of humanity - it would have been ludicrous. Now it's become commonplace for the friends you make in your youth to experience a global diaspora out of convenience and personal preference, and to try to maintain a relationship using technology and occasional travel. It also seems reasonable for people to make friends with reasonable success to the small fraction of people geographically scattered over the globe who happen to share your taste in music and all your other hyperspecific personal preferences, connecting again through technology and travel. The big question is whether this is reasonable. I thought in 2006 that I'd maintain friendships with the friends I made (due to physical proximity!) in my high school classes and athletic teams using Facebook. Instead, Facebook decided to use my attention on their platform due to those friends to sell ads, and the relationship maintenance got harder, and eventually went by the wayside. The handful I still maintain contact with happen to have physical proximity more than commonality of values/priorities/culture. The friends I have on forums, Discord, Reddit, and in Rocket League/Minecraft due to shared interests are real people, probably perfectly nice, just physically located on the other side of the Internet connection and a screen (or microphone), but if I've never shared a handshake, hug, meal, or home with them are they the same kind of friends as my neighbors, members of local rec leagues and hackerspaces, workplace friends, and other people who live near me? The big experiment of social media is whether nonconformity to local community, and instead forming virtual communities online, performs the same function to bring a happy, healthy life to the humans who practice it. You may say that it's too early to tell, that present failings are just growing pains, but I think the early evidence is quite strongly pointing towards "no".

sneak 3y ago
I don't use social media, so I don't think this applies. I also think the corporate-mediated friendship model is toxic and disgusting. I'm not on IG or FB and my IRL friends from "back home" I connected with first on interest-based email mailing lists before we ever met in person.

sjducb 3y ago

> I would struggle to talk to them for 3 minutes Have you tried talking to them for 3 min? Your statement is written as if it’s a hypothetical. When I talk to the parents at my kids school (5min from my house) I’m amazed at how much we have in common. 50% of the dads are computer programmers. I’ve found things in common with most of the other parents. When I talk to my neighbours the one on my right has a PhD from the same college as me and the one on the left went backpacking to the same places as me. You live where you do because of “reasons” your neighbours live there for similar reasons. We’re all random suburbanites.

sneak 3y ago
I have tried. There are a lot of career military people around here (the cold half of the year I live not extremely far from Nellis AFB) and people who moved away from SoCal because of rising costs and perceived political shifts. I think it would be less of an issue in a more homogenous place, but southern Nevada is pretty firmly "purple" and people seem to try to classify you as friend or foe immediately upon meeting.
- foobarian 3y ago
  I'm on the weird spectrum and have a similar experience with neighbors. I suppose the more of an outlier you are, the less likely it is to randomly land in a compatible community, and therefore the harder you need to work to make it happen. Of all the places I've lived, high density residential areas near high densities of colleges were the best at making this possible. The problem is, settling in such areas tends to be expensive (NYC/Boston/Bay Area/etc), so you look further out, and wherever you can afford tends to be majority townies/normies.
  - Tarball10 3y ago
    Referring to other people as "townies/normies" seems like you're already looking down on them and not wanting to make any effort in getting along with them.
- titanomachy 3y ago

asdff 3y ago

This is why you move to somewhere without the whole culture war bullshit in the local lexicon. Like the "liberal hellhole of california," a statement that serves as a great filter towards a lot of ignorant people spending much time around you there. Not a sure thing you won't see these folk, just that they've been relegated into de facto containment zones in the more rural parts of the state.

CalRobert 3y ago

For what it's worth, when I lived in rural Ireland I didn't click with _anybody_. I live near Amsterdam now and have already meet two people who could grow to be good friends. "to identify which side of the culture war I am on" I _HATE_ this aspect of casual conversation with strangers in the US (or people in the Irish midlands trying to suss out if I'm Catholic or Protestant) and I do not miss it at all. Will the US have their own version of the Irish Troubles?

Gibbon1 3y ago

> I would struggle to talk to them for 3 minutes. I'd suggest thinking of that as a skill to be developed.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

Rather than reacting with knee jerk derision, I took a moment to read your blog's "My Context" page, and I think I do have to conclude you're living in the right way for yourself. Someone who puts freedom from coercion first and foremost in their ethical thinking, to the extent that you do, is going to find themselves at odds with the Overton window almost anywhere they go. I'm not sure you're doing something in your own life that's much different here from what those people in the States are doing to you. You too are dropping hints and observing responses to decide whether to befriend or antagonize a given person. Hence the tone of some of the other comments - you've successfully antagonized a few people by what you've written here. I can't really tell whether you just dislike this "cultural war" you have going on (whatever that is) or whether you also have a distaste for this whole befriend/antagonize mechanism in general. In any case I'm glad you've got a group of people you can pal around with online. It's good to have friends.

JPws_Prntr_Fngr 3y ago

> drop inflammatory remarks to see how I respond, to identify which side of the culture war I am on Very real, and very hilarious. I called a tow truck recently in rural CO, and the driver asked where I lived. Upon hearing NYC, the first words out of his mouth were "I hear that's a real shithole. My phone's been telling me murders and robberies are way up." God bless America.

Tarball10 3y ago

It might be healthy to socialize with people who don't share your music, food, memes, and lifestyle (values perhaps being the exception where you'd still need to align). Living in a bubble and interacting only with people exactly like you seems pretty limiting. There's no reason you can't be friendly with people that live very different lives, but your phrasing makes it sound like you're not even giving them a chance. Perhaps you have more in common than you'd think!

YeBanKo 3y ago

Sorry to drop an inflammatory remark on you, but you sound like an extreme version of a total snob. I call it “everyday fascist”. Only your way of life, only your values, etc. are superior. No one cares about your weirdness, but also no one likes your holier than thou attitude.

iteratethis 3y ago

Sounds like you're only interested in a clone of yourself.

Arubis 3y ago

If you're interested in finding more of an in-person community (and you may not be! Primarily online might be your preference, and there's nothing wrong with that), I'd recommend finding a bigger, denser city. It almost doesn't matter which; the more people there, the more of _your people_ you'll find there. This is effectively a smaller analogue of finding your people online, since the Internet has the most people—but making a compromise to be able to connect locally. That said, your profile suggests you're in Berlin, which as a complete outsider (I've never been to Germany at all) I would've presumed would be sufficiently urban.