I don’t know much about what it’s like to live in Brooklyn. Would you be able to say more about your experience living there? When I’ve walked around Brooklyn and other areas of NYC I haven’t run into people I know, but I also don’t know many people in NYC. Does it feel impersonal for reasons other than not seeing friends?
(I also suspect a lot of people have different experiences, and, still going on the basic model in the post, would predict a much higher fraction of residents experience NYC the way I described than the US average.)
I don’t know much about what it’s like to live in Brooklyn. Would you be able to say more about your experience living there? When I’ve walked around Brooklyn and other areas of NYC I haven’t run into people I know, but I also don’t know many people in NYC. Does it feel impersonal for reasons other than not seeing friends?
It feels impersonal for many reasons, I guess.
For one thing, the sheer size of the city means that your friends ending up living in the same neighborhood as you, or even anywhere close to you, is low. The likelihood of making friends with people who live in your neighborhood (as opposed to somewhere else in the city) is low, because the city is not arranged geographically by interests or by personality or any such thing. If you do make friends with people who live nearby (e.g., if you are a child, and make friends at school, and the children at said school live locally instead of being bussed in from all over the place), then people will eventually move to other parts of the city (or you will), and now you’re no longer co-located.
Aside from friends as such, few people know (or particularly care to know) their neighbors. This is again due to many factors, among which demographics is probably the most relevant one. Because of the great diversity among the city’s denizens, it is very likely that you will have nothing in common (culturally, etc.) with your neighbors (and also, that they will be much too busy to wander around in the vicinity of your/their dwellings, chatting with you or whatever). (For instance, I don’t even know the names of most of the people who live in my apartment building, nor do I care to know them.)
The sheer number of people works against personal connections. It is possible to live in the same neighborhood for years or even decades, and yet for the great majority of the people you see on any given day (while walking down the street, in a store, etc.) to be people you don’t even visually recognize, much less are acquainted with. And people arrive and leave all the time; there is a great and constant churn. You are, at almost all times, alone in a crowd of total strangers.
I don’t know much about what it’s like to live in Brooklyn. Would you be able to say more about your experience living there? When I’ve walked around Brooklyn and other areas of NYC I haven’t run into people I know, but I also don’t know many people in NYC. Does it feel impersonal for reasons other than not seeing friends?
(I also suspect a lot of people have different experiences, and, still going on the basic model in the post, would predict a much higher fraction of residents experience NYC the way I described than the US average.)
It feels impersonal for many reasons, I guess.
For one thing, the sheer size of the city means that your friends ending up living in the same neighborhood as you, or even anywhere close to you, is low. The likelihood of making friends with people who live in your neighborhood (as opposed to somewhere else in the city) is low, because the city is not arranged geographically by interests or by personality or any such thing. If you do make friends with people who live nearby (e.g., if you are a child, and make friends at school, and the children at said school live locally instead of being bussed in from all over the place), then people will eventually move to other parts of the city (or you will), and now you’re no longer co-located.
Aside from friends as such, few people know (or particularly care to know) their neighbors. This is again due to many factors, among which demographics is probably the most relevant one. Because of the great diversity among the city’s denizens, it is very likely that you will have nothing in common (culturally, etc.) with your neighbors (and also, that they will be much too busy to wander around in the vicinity of your/their dwellings, chatting with you or whatever). (For instance, I don’t even know the names of most of the people who live in my apartment building, nor do I care to know them.)
The sheer number of people works against personal connections. It is possible to live in the same neighborhood for years or even decades, and yet for the great majority of the people you see on any given day (while walking down the street, in a store, etc.) to be people you don’t even visually recognize, much less are acquainted with. And people arrive and leave all the time; there is a great and constant churn. You are, at almost all times, alone in a crowd of total strangers.