If more people lived together with friends, that’d make a dent in both the housing and loneliness crises.
Living close to friends and having a community that knows/supports each other helps a lot but living with friends is a good way to end up with less friends. Someone you can stand being around all day is very different than someone you really enjoy spending a few hours a month with.
Then again how many more people would live alone if they could afford to rent or buy on a single income?
You know how you can tell if you have a really good friend? They will help you dispose of your roommate's body, 24 by 7, no questions asked.
Living close to friends seems like a good idea as well.<p>Living in suburbia has definitely made me yearn for this:
<a href="https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/should-more-of-us-be-moving-to-live-near-friends" rel="nofollow">https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/should-more-of-us-...</a>
Both directly, by providing a social circle, and indirectly, by training people to live with a partner.
Part of the loneliness crisis is the difficulty of making friends.<p>This reminds me, yesterday I was walking down the hallway of my apartment building, and one of my neighbors passed by me but neglected to even acknowledge my existence, because their head was down staring at their smartphone.
> Part of the loneliness crisis is the difficulty of making friends.<p>Sharing a house is a good way to combat that. Sometimes you move in with people you tangentially know. Sometimes you won’t be huge friends with them but can still interact, or may even meet some of their friends and hit it off.
The issue is the number of people who ‘surprise’ you with out of control behaviors that are a huge issue with room mates. And getting out of living situation with someone like that can be extremely difficult.<p>People can seem perfectly fine, until they seem to spontaneously turn into hoarders, or start eating all your food and lying about it, or start being aggressively in your face about a bunch of antagonistic culture bullshit, etc.<p>I think what we’re seeing is Americans increasingly fed up with (or even terrified of) other Americans.
There’s definitely some risk, but the alternative is not a panacea either (high rents, loneliness). You can also get closer to people and enrich your life, and it’s positive to practice tolerance for the behaviours of others (within reason).<p>It’s possible there are more unhinged people today, but I think that’s also a consequence of us spending so much time alone in the first place (and sycophantic bots are only going to make that worse).<p>I was also thinking of everyone, not just US Americans.
Except for a very, very small number of people, everyone I've ever known who can afford to not have room mates - doesn't have room mates. Young or old.<p>There is a reason for this, and it isn't because they hate their mental health.<p>The issue here is how hard it is to protect your own mental health when someone else refuses to respect yours, and how a co-living situation can make that hard - because you literally are all up in each others business.
I moved in with one of my closest friends a few years ago, someone I considered a brother. In less than a year, I got someone to sublet and have not spoken to him since. I had no idea someone could be such a tool.
It’s something europeans don’t yet understand, that “diversity” has utterly destroyed community, trust, and tranquility in the US; mostly because it has been forced upon people against their will in direct contradiction of the core tenets of the Constitution and founding principles of America.<p>I realize hearing that or seeing that others may read that, may anger people who are deeply invested in the fraud that diversity is good, but all the legitimate research into the topic all tells us the same thing; that “diversity” is detrimental to any and all human communities all around the world, even for the very group that pushes it on others while aggressively rejecting it for themselves and their own.<p>edit: No amount of downvoting will change reality, whether you shoot the messenger or not. It's a shame, because good does not actually prevail, especially with brainwashed fools who assist those seeking the demise of others. Support of "diversity" is no different than the support of the genocide the jewish state committed and is to this day still committing in Gaza... the support of evil without the intelligence to understand that.
It’s something europeans don’t yet understand, that “diversity” has utterly destroyed community, trust, and tranquility in the US; mostly because it has been forced upon people against their will in direct contradiction of the core tenets of the Constitution and founding principles of America.<p>I realize hearing that or seeing that others may read that may anger people who are deeply invested in this fraud that diversity is good, but all the legitimate research into the topic all tells us the same thing; that it is detrimental to any and all human communities all around the world, even for the very group that pushes it on others while aggressively rejecting it for themselves and their own.