I had a comment on Anne Hellen Peterson’s Substack post, “You’d be Happier Closer to Friends,”
The reasons we don’t spend time with friends are always the same:
Money
Jobs
Relationships
Family
But the biggest reason we don’t spend more time with friends?
Society tells us it’s not a priority.
We are socialized to not prioritize friendships.
When’s the last time you received advice to, “spend more time with friends?”
Now, when is the last time you were told to work on yourself, self isolate, and surround yourself with hard working and ambitious people? If you spend anytime on Twitter, it’s every day.
The relationships we’re told to prioritize are familial. Yet, we can’t choose family. And friendships are so different. In many ways we get our personalities, tastes, beliefs, and identities from our friendships.
While our families give us unearned love, our friends are the people we chose.
Nothing will replace lunch with a friend or a hang out session where you don’t do shit. Friendships are different than families and for a lot of reasons better for you.
The science backs up it up:
When one person becomes happier, their next-door neighbors' chances of also growing happier rise by 34 percent
A friend who lives within a mile and who becomes happy increases the probability that a person is happy by 25%
Funny enough, I just started re-reading Hemmingway’s, “The Sun Also Rises,” before I knew I was writing this post.
It’s a book about the friendships of ex-pats in Paris. The men are authors in their mid 30’s, yet they hang out with friends every day, have spontaneous rendezvous at cafes, and live like their in college.
(We’re going to ignore the fact they are all rich artists for just a moment).
When I read the book I get hopeful I’ll go back to living in college (less beer pong games and more coffee shop sessions than my first time around). I get excited when Jake Barnes makes lunch plans with Robert Cohn after a night cap in the middle of Paris, or when Barnes runs into Harvey Stone on the patio of a favorite restaurant before an evening out.
What if running into friends wasn’t a one off, but the norm?
This is why I propose a Living-Near-Friends-As-A-Service (LNFAAS). An attempt to mock the servificiation of Silicon Valley and use it to create social cohesion at the same time.
Here’s how I see it working:
A group of friends decides they want to live together
Sign up for LNFAAS
LNFAAS asks a bunch of questions (income level, rent or buy, climate preference, etc.)
Pay LNFAAS an upfront fee
LNFAAS sources options
Group chooses one
LNFAAS does everything to make it happen
You pay an execution fee
This would have been a silly thought before the pandemic. But work-from-home has made it go from a silly thought to a silly blog post. Most white collar workers can choose where they want live because our offices exist in the cloud, not a skyscraper.
There are baracades to LNFAAS that will probably never make it a viable business:
Income gaps
Needing to live near families
In-person work
Like so many things in America. Money and systems make it implausible.
But, if we don’t direct life toward the future we want, then who will?