Walkable neighborhoods with affordable places to hang out.
Double the minimum wage and standardize a four day work week. People need more free time and resources in order to socialize effectively.
Couple this with providing safe and comfortable community spaces and every things peachy.
No, the local Starbucks/any place of business does not count.
Nationalizing dating sites.
These sites work great to match people when corpos aren’t allowed to fuck with the algorithms
Step 1
- Demolish all housing - everyone is homeless now
Step 2
- Mandate that everyone design their own silly costume - this is all you’re allowed to wear
Step 3
- Legalize and subsidize all the fun drugs - everyone gets a weekly allowance of shrooms, ecstasy, etc
Step 4
- Loneliness is officially replaced with several other problems
Just have a war. Nothing brings people together like necessity and shared trauma.
Don’t worry, that war isn’t far off.
For a lot of people in suburbia, the entire concept of indoor “third spaces” is mostly “pay to play” at the end of a drive. A big exception to this is/were shopping malls, but those aren’t always close by. To get to more a functional social fabric, we have to provide more convenient ways of interfacing with our neighbors that don’t always require money to change hands.
Perhaps this is a predictably orange-pill response, but we need to change zoning in a big way. Each suburban development has the street plan and infrastructure to support small businesses and common spaces, walking-distance from everyone’s front door. All it takes is to allow small-scale commercial development in corners of these collections of tract-homes and, just like that, you can have something like a functional village. Beyond that, encouraging more development of community recreation space, both indoor and outdoor, would go a long way to provide a place for people to mingle.
Edit: strip-malls don’t count. They’re often at the very edge of residential areas, and are tied up with way more capital than what I’m talking about. That’s why they’re made up of franchises, require ridiculous amounts of parking, and contribute to “stroads” and all the knock-on effects and hostile architecture that requires.
Legitimately stop treating phones like a necessity. Leave them at home more. Treat apps more like accessories and less like doorways.
Opt more for going in person to places to do things. By bike or transit whenever you can. Go to public events at your local parks and venues. Attendance is its own form of support, too. Anything we can do to purposely put ourselves in front of other people who share different perspectives than ourselves is good for us.
I think a lot of people don’t realize that there is a sense of responsibility when it comes to putting ourselves out into the world. If you think you’re capable of helping others, simply being a positive person in a public place, even just to have some fun meeting with friends, is a step in the right direction to building a better world. Nature will eventually setup a situation for you to be called upon. But this never happens from in your house or apartment.
For that first point let’s bring back phone booths, but somehow make them work with in the modern world.
Is it too harsh to say to outside and interact with people?
Get a personality. It worked for me!
Need to bring back Internet cafes.
Did those actually provide any sort of social outlet?
That’s similar to the reason my company gives for having to be in the office but I work on the computer and go home. The only people I interact with are my remote peers
For starters, Ubi, and then expansive and free public transit for all and accessible for all including disabled people, more free places to just go and exist, no facism and more community. That’s just for the beginning though
Healthcare too.
Need those antidepressants before I even have the energy to touch grass.
Fighting fascism, together.
what if we kissed next to the nazi we just curb stomped? 👉 👈
Less pants
Multi dwelling houses: a house with a central living area and apartments of different sizes linking in to it.
The central area has a big kitchen, dining, play area, halls link it to a 1-bed, 2-bed and 3-bed apartments each with a little kitchen as well.
You can be on your own in your apartment or go use the big kitchen, join trivia night, etc
There are some setups like this. It’s called co-living.
This is basically my uni dorm rn. It’s great until people leave their mess everywhere in the shared kitchen. Hence the tiny private kitchen, but we don’t have those ;-;
Parks full of cats?