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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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I agree so much. Sadly it's hard to reach out with how entire neighborhoods are designed. They're designed like solitary domiciles that only exist because employees need a place to be stored when not in use.
Ours is designed where cars just disappear into garages and only people walking dogs and delivery drivers (or solicitors) use the front door. So everyone hides behind those stupid ring cameras.
I'll admit: Not all of them!
Peoples' average temperament indeed seems set on being the "leave me alone miserable and lonely" default though.
... Or they're psychos. I live in a particularly transient city though, people move all the time, most rent, and you barely can tell there's completely different people next door one day.
I deleted all the details to avoid a wall of text, but we've lived through a couple neighborhoods where everyone knew each other, and now it's barred windows and cameras that shout "YOU'RE BEING FILMED" when you're 50 feet away.
I notice a common toxicity factor seems to be those "Muh property" NIMBYs that see a house as a "real estate investment" instead of a home. The ones who sic the HOA on people they've never met and are mad about everything. (They're probably also on Nextdoor posting about answering their door "with Smith & Wesson." Trolls.)
I randomly met a really cool neighbor on a bike ride though. He happened to have his garage open! Sadly we don't text a whole ton but he's pretty cool.
People tend to be pretty alright if you encounter them in the wild but nobody's opening their door to say hi anymore, and I also find that we're under so much immense pressure that just stopping for a chat feels like it eats a chunk out of a day. This is also not healthy...
I want community, and local friends and all that. But I dunno, I think everybody is just burned out and vulnerability is especially scary these days, especially with the violent polarization of our politics of late.
But I agree, people would be much less likely to vote to harm and oppress their neighbors if they knew more of them personally...
I don't know why you seem to think that extroversion versus introversion is the same thing as having emotional intelligence or not. I would consider myself to be a very sociable introvert and have no problem with empathic listening, but it drains my energy pool so I can only engage it for so long. People who are extroverts do not have this problem as much because interacting with other people recharges their energy pool and being alone drains it.
(I also have an additional problem that I have a very weird variant of bipolar that can cause me to get incredibly euphoric when talking to someone but then crash into a dysphoria afterward, which is extremely draining; this kind of thing is very unusual, though.)
Perhaps you should consider applying the same supposed listening and empathy skills to people on internet forums that you supposedly do to people in real life? Or would that interfere too much with your lecturing?
Speak for yourself. I am not hiding inside so I can be miserable and lonely; I just find social interactions to be energy draining, so I need a lot of time in solitude to recharge.
It isn't quite clear to me how burning myself out helps anyone.
"Oww! Oww! Oww! My broken arm still hurts!"
"Stop whining and keep doing those pushups, and you'll eventually get strong enough that those bones will knit themselves!"
This is more like my son telling me his legs hurt all the time, but he just got back from running around like a maniac, and he's about to go run around like a maniac. And I'm not even suggesting the pain isn't real, but sometimes you gotta push through.
And to bring it back to the example at hand, developing a community is hugely important. I know all of my neighbors and we all hang out and know each other. Half the time, I don't want to, but sometimes I just do it. Sometimes it's not great, but sometimes it is. But when we need a hand, I have a pool of people to pick from, and I know I'm in their pool.
Dehumanizing the morons on the internet forum you frequent is bad, but dehumanizing your neighbors is really bad. The door swings both ways, community is important. Make an effort. I'm sorry it's hard.
Is this the kind of thing that you also say to the people in your neighborhood when trying to build a community, and if so, how do people usually respond to it?
Not every conversation I have with my neighbors is surface level, and sometimes we talk about how just regular life shit can be difficult. It wasn't sarcasm, I meant it. Make an effort, despite the fact that I understand it's hard. I get it, it hard for me too at times, but you can't just shy away from difficult things all the time.
Gah, it is not hard for me to talk to strangers! It just burns through energy.
In particular, I have never had much trouble talking to strangers with my full empathy turned on. It gets a bit tricky when I don't actually care about what they are talking about, but I have a couple of abilities that help with this. First, I generally care about the person and making sure that they feel valued, regardless of what they are saying. Second, I have a mild form of bipolar so I am used to having raging emotions underneath the surface that are disconnected from the situation at hand and needing to regulate them, so I can keep up an expression of interest--and again, I am generally genuinely interested in the person--even while feeling very restless underneath. In fact, I have been so successful at this that in the past a couple of conversations with strangers have led to them asking me out, despite the fact that we were both men and I am not gay.
Again, though, all of this burns through energy. So the difficulty has nothing to do with me lacking a skill but more like being exhausted from having done hard physical labor all day, and then having a random person demand that you drop and do pushups or else they will declare that you are not trying hard enough.
Yeah, I didn't mean to suggest it was a "skill issues," as the kids say these days. And I think it's a pretty apt comparison to physically demanding tasks. Got a flex the social muscles or they atrophy, and the benefit is building a network.
I'm with you 100% though. I'm tired all the time, and sometimes the thought of going out and being "on" with people is daunting. And it's funny, because my wife is like, you're an ENFJ or whatever the fuck (I'm exactly as uneducated in that field as she is educated), and I try to tell her that despite how I was, how I am now is tired of social situations, generally. But I try to just eat it. And sometimes I don't eat it and I sit at home and unwind. I just know that theres benefits to maintaining relationships, and that for some folks a text chain isn't enough. I do wish that everyone was cool with texting, or even talking on forums like this, but I know that's not the case generally.
I do feel like we've gotten into the weeds here. I just really believe in community, despite the fact that I'm a curmudgeon. I just imagine a world where we can't perhaps communicate the way we do now. What are we left with? Well, the people whose homes I can walk to, essentially.
A lot of the people I regularly interact with are at a contra dancing venue. Does that not count as a community because I have to drive to interact with them instead of walking? (Genuine question; not intended as a gotcha.)
Also, keep in mind that my original comment to @ameancow@lemmy.world was responding to the following,
Funny how you go on and on about the importance of connecting with the people around you, but then when someone shows up who is different from you and talks about how they are different, you stop trying to connect and turn incredibly hostile instead.
So much for empathy.
It's less that I am defensive and more that I think, based on your comments here, that you are a judgemental self-absorbed asshole who does not understand people nearly as well as you think that you do. 😉
(Also, for the record, although I may be a troll online, I am not a troll in real life. Despite what you seem to believe, I do not actually live in a cave.)