Why Don't We Live Closer to Our Friends?

Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Long Run. This week we dive into a question that has always puzzled me — “Why do we live where we do?” We also have a little life update towards the end.

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Let’s hop into it.

It’s an average summer Thursday evening in LA. Gorgeous, 70 degrees, a soft breeze, birds chirping, and the sun setting over the Pacific coast. As has become a sort of habit, I’m out for a stroll by myself after dinner. Looking out over the ocean, I can’t help but smile. “How did I get so lucky to be living here?”

But at the same time, something seems slightly off. In another world, I’d share this experience with someone else. Maybe I’d pop into a friend’s house to drop something off and say hello on my way home. I could give them a call over the phone instead, but it feels like these days everything needs to be so scheduled… there’s no longer much room for spontaneity.

There’s something special about living within close physical proximity to the people you care about, something that can’t be replicated digitally.

If there’s a period designed for spontaneity, new experiences, and just plain human connection, it’s during college. It’s no surprise that many people cite their college years as some of the most formative and most memorable of their lives.

On college campuses, life is optimized for third places.

In college, it’s nothing to text a friend and see if they want to meet up to study in the library. Even just going about your day — going to class, walking between events, grabbing lunch, studying somewhere new — you’re bound to run into someone you know, which could lead to anything from a few minutes of small talk to hanging out with them for the next several hours.

That’s part of the beauty of college — there’s a sort of ordered chaos to thousands of people each going about their days, with any number of possibilities to interact people.

In many ways, after college, life becomes more structured. Relatively speaking, we lose control of our time, and our opportunities for spontaneity become more limited. Meanwhile, we spend less time in third places when nearly all of our time is spent either at work or at home.

What changes? We start to value different things. Where we choose to live (at least to start) is almost always a function of where we work.

The stereotypical post-education life goes something like: learn a specific skill, get a job that pays well in a big city, toil away in the early years so you can “get ahead,” make a lot of money so you can afford fancier things, get married, buy a nice house, have kids, rarely see the kids because you’re continuing to work to fund your expensive lifestyle so you can send the kids to expensive schools, and eventually retire so you can finally have the time to do all of the things you said you always wanted to do “when the time was right,” only to now realize you’ve spent your whole life chasing something you didn’t actually want, but you were just fulfilling what you thought society expected you to do, and now you’re questioning why you even cared about any of those things to begin with.

Maybe this is a bit of an exaggeration, but for some people, it’s not far off. What’s missing from this story? Friendships. Relationships. The people whose love we care about.

As young adults in the modern world, we’re taught to focus on a few priorities:

1. Our career

2. Getting married

3. Starting a family

And I’m not here to say there’s anything wrong with any of these things. In fact, there’s a whole lot of good that comes out this cultural prioritization, as well. Biologically speaking, it makes sense to focus on these three things, since for most of human history, gaining access to scarce resources (food in the past, but money today) and reproducing (i.e. marriage and a family) were the most important things needed to keep the species alive.

Today, we’ve moved past the point of worrying about the human species surviving (at least at a primitive level), and it seems like our problems have shifted to become the more high-level type — finding purpose, meaning, happiness, the usual woo woo type things.

It’s well-known that having close friends and meaningful relationships is the top predictor of happiness and longevity. In fact, having close friends has been proven to prevent mental health problems and memory loss as we age. If we look at older people who are thriving and seem as sharp as ever, chances are they’re socially active.

All of these facts were true long before the pandemic. Post-pandemic, however, we’ve seen a few stark shifts that would appear to remain permanent. First among those is remote work (even with some return to office mandates, a good chunk of remote work is here to stay).

But with remote work and generally more of our lives being conducted digitally, we also have record highs in loneliness — and this trend is particularly pronounced in young adults.

61% of young adults are experiencing “serious loneliness,” according to a Harvard study. For young people who were in their prime identity-forming years during COVID (let’s say ages 15-25), they essentially had 2+ years of a halt in visiting any third places. No parties. No going out to restaurants, coffee shops, or bars. No going into an office. No classrooms. No sports. Everything was limited to Zoom, FaceTime, social media, and the few one-off socially-distant planned gatherings, where you certainly weren’t meeting anyone new.

Personally, I experienced the worst of COVID during my junior and senior years of college. While, blatantly, it sucked, I feel even worse for those a few years younger or older, who were just beginning a new stage of life. I was lucky to already have a group of friends I had made earlier in college. But if you were just starting at a new school, or you just moved to a new city to start your career, you were sorta stuck in the dark.

No social events, no classes, no office — anyone you spent time with in-person had to be someone you already knew. And if you just moved somewhere new to start this new phase of your life, you were just SOL.

A 2021 study found that 22% of Americans say they haven’t made a new friend in the past 5 years. More and more time spent on our digital devices, a period of pandemic lockdowns, some stickiness of remote work, and the ever-increasing importance of career over all else (particularly when conducted digitally), and we now have a generation of young people that feel isolated.

I think the solution is increased physical proximity to friends, co-workers, family, and more meaningful human interaction in general. How this actually happens, though, is another question entirely.

Research is starting to show that happiness spreads with physical proximity — friends living within one mile of each other are 25% more likely to be happy than they otherwise would. Having roommates sounds like an obvious solution, but interestingly enough, the number of single-person households is higher than ever. In 2022, there were nearly 38 million single-person households in the US, which is 29% of all households (up from 7 million and only 13% of households in 1960).

So why the increase in loneliness?

Trading connection for convenience

We typically choose what’s easy. Isolation is easy. Working remotely, staying in to watch Netflix or scroll social media instead of going out, ordering food delivery rather than going to restaurants, calling in over video rather than physically going in — these are all the easy choices.

But in choosing the easy options, we’ve traded connection for convenience. We’re so stuck in the comforts of modern life that we’ve lost the script.

As a result, we’re spending less time in the physical proximity of others, reducing the surface area of opportunities to just simply meet new people. But it’s not just new people we’re seeing less, it’s even our own family and close friends.

Here’s a thought-provoking question: Do you have any friendships that matter so much to you that you’d prioritize them to the extent of moving?

If that question makes you quiver inside, you’re not alone. Unfortunately, in the modern-day US, we aren’t socialized to prioritize friendship. And I think this is especially true for guys. As guys, most of us can’t justify sustaining friendships above our careers or finding a spouse. This isn’t necessarily right or wrong, it’s just a reality.

For many of us, our friend groups tend to become scattered once we start our careers. Many of us fantasize about all moving to the same city, but we never do.

I think a driving cause behind this is economic. As we’re taught to prioritize career, and as inequality continues to grow both amongst generations and within generations, it becomes more important to not fall behind. As is often the case, money complicates things.

So as a result of a number of factors, many of us are tied to a city where our jobs keep us. I don’t think this alone is a particularly bad thing — many people make best friends (or even find their future husband/wife) through work.

What is troubling is the decline in in-person interaction broadly amongst young people in their most formative years, and I think it’s worth discussing how we might be able to reverse this trend.

Life update

This is probably as opportune a time as any to say that I’m moving to New York.

Why? I’ll keep it brief, but as we’ve talked about before, certain experiences are best had at certain phases of life. I’ve always wanted to live in New York at least once, and who knows if there will ever be a “right time.” Plus, I’ll be physically closer to many people I care deeply about — family, friends, co-workers.

As much as I’ve enjoyed my time in Los Angeles over the last 2 years, it’s time to begin a new chapter. Don’t get me wrong, I love this city and all that it has to offer.

But when I moved here near the end of the pandemic, I didn’t know anyone. I went to college on the East Coast, and nearly all of my friends and family now live several hours away by plane. I’ve made a lot of new friends in LA, but there’s something different about the reliability and intimacy of your family and closest friends you’ve known for years.

While theoretically these people were just a short 5 hour plane ride away, the reality is that getting coast-to-coast across the US is a hassle, and it’s not convenient at all. And that friction has resulted in seeing those people I care about much less than I had originally hoped.

So that’s the existing relationship piece, but another big driver of this decision was meeting new people. New York is full of young, ambitious people looking to make a dent in the world. And then of course there’s the fact that everything is literally within walking distance, if not a short subway ride away.

Probabilistically speaking, living in New York City, one’s luck surface area increases dramatically. The odds that you come across someone at random who can have an outsized impact on your life — whether that be a professional opportunity, a new friend, or a future spouse — are exponentially higher when you have millions of interesting people within just a 5 mile radius of you at all times.

So what will change for me? Not a whole lot. But this entire process of considering moving forced me to think about some of these more complicated questions and ask why we choose to live in the places we do, and how we can create more human connection broadly.

As I wander around this beautiful place, with the ocean, the mountains, the palm trees, and all of the wonderful things it has to offer, I can’t help but think I’m going to miss it. There’s no iPhone app or VR headset that can recreate this feeling.

Despite living at a time where we’re more digitally connected than ever before, real connection still happens in the real world, and our physical proximity, where we choose to live, is one of the few decisions that makes an outsized impact on our lives.

Maybe, just maybe, if you’re doing what you love, surrounded by the people you love, it doesn’t matter where you are in the world. You’re already winning.

-Owen

Fresh Finds

Cultural Moneyballism (Poor Billy’s Almanac)

Article | 30 minutes

If you’re in for a thought-provoking read, this piece (I’ll safely call it that with how long it took me to digest) by Billy will really make you question what’s going on across American culture. I literally spent an entire flight across Colombia reading and pondering this one a few weeks ago. Billy makes a compelling argument that the world is converging to an age of “average” and losing what we might have traditionally called “art” or distinction. A lot to consider and worth the read.

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