How to Talk to People - How to Know Your Neighbors

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

Are commitment issues impacting our ability to connect with the people who live around us? Relationship building may involve a commitment to the belief that neighbors are worthy of getting to know. In this episode of How to Talk to People, author Pete Davis makes the case for building relationships with your neighbors and wider community and offers some practical advice for how to take the first steps.  This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank. Fact Check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smerciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The executive producer of Audio is Claudine Ebeid, the managing editor of Audio is Andrea Valdez. We don’t need you to bring along flowers or baked goods to be a part of the How to Talk to People neighborhood. Write to us at [e-mail]. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber. Music by Bomull (“Latte”), Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “Charmed Encounters”), Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip”). Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Julie, tell me about your relationship with your neighbors. In our apartment building, it's a huge apartment building. It's basically the size of a whole city block. And there are tons of people in there. The only people whose names I even know are my immediate neighbors because we share a roof patio. Like I can see them over the fence.

And when they first moved in, I remember my partner and I were like gardening on the roof and I was like, Joe, we need to introduce ourselves to them and he was like, nope, we're not going to. He's like, I don't want to, you can do that. You know, we did exchange names and say hi and that felt like a big victory. However, we immediately thereafter went back to ignoring each other every time we see each other on the roof.

Maybe there's a small wave, but like that's it. Hi, I'm Julie Beck, a senior editor at The Atlantic. And I'm Becca Rashid, producer of The How-To Series. This is How to Talk to People. It's really strange to think that neighbors are the people who are literally closest to you and yet so many of us don't know that at all. You know, I'd walk around town and I'd walk around the neighborhood and I'd be grumpy that everyone was so cold and what are people like these days that weren't like this when I lived

here 10 years ago. But then I started practicing, you know, well, I'm kind of like them too because I'm not reaching out to them. Yeah. Pete Davis, who is a civic advocate and the author of this book dedicated the case for commitment in an age of infinite browsing, he thinks one reason that neighbors don't always bother to get to know one another is he thinks our society has commitment issues. And what I noticed that all the people that were giving me hope had in common and given my peers out had in common was they were all people who decided to forego a life of keeping their options open and instead make a commitment to a particular thing over the long haul. So, what does keeping our options open have to do with our sense of feeling like we're

connected to our community? What exactly about committing helps us feel connected? I moved back to my hometown after a school, and I was gliding on the surface of everything when I moved back, just trying to get a sense of the place again, and I was feeling down on the place. I'm like, why did we move back? Maybe we shouldn't have moved back. Am I just moving back?

Because I have this nostalgia, you know, all these things. You know, when you think about becoming friends with a neighbor, those fears that I mentioned of commitment are fears that are present with you. If I have to commit to every Thursday at 7 p.m. to go to this meeting, who knows what I'll miss out on. And then I surprised myself when I got to know all these people and that every time I started passing by their house, I'm like, oh, I know what goes on inside that house.

I know who lives there. I do feel like there is a common refrain these days that people just don't know their neighbors like they used to. Is that true? Was there ever a time when Americans were really good at getting to know their neighbors? Yeah, I think it is true. I think, you know, there's always been a spirit of nostalgia, but we actually have data to show that this type of nostalgia might be correct. The great site here is bowling alone by Robert Putnam, the book that kind of was famous in the early 2000s about the decline of community in America.

And he has data set after data set graph after graph that shows that this is the case. So, you know, neighbors in the broad sense of the term, you know, people in your town, you look at any angle on it and we're seeing a decline. So between the 1970s and the 1990s, the amount of club meetings that we went to per year was cut in half. The amount of people serving as an officer in a club, the amount of club meetings that we went to per year was cut in half. The amount of people serving as an officer in a club, the amount of people attending public meetings, all major declines. Membership and religious congregations, it was 75% of Americans

at the mid-century mark, and now in the last few years it crossed under 50%. You know, you look at informal socializing, Putnam was able to find the National Picnic data set where, you know, in the mid 70s, we went on an average of five picnics a year with our neighbors. Oh my. And that was down to two by the 90s.

So. Bring back picnics. Oh my God. Bring back picnics, you know, amount of people doing dinner parties, the amount of people that say they have no friends, you know, in 1990, that was only 3% of Americans. In 2021, it was 12%.

And so we do have numbers that show we're in a neighboring crisis. And well, I know we've already been talking about this with the spicy picnic data, but can you give us kind of an overview of how Americans relationship with their neighbors has evolved in let's say, like the last 50 years. Yeah, you know, there was a famous essay even written back in the 70s about the early rise of backpadios.

It was by Richard Thomas. And you know, the front porch used to be the iconic, you know, appendage to a house and starting in the 70s and 80s, interests and backpadios started growing and then exploded in the 90s and 2000s. And now when you're watching HGTV or being toured in a new house or a new build by a realtor, they're going to talk more about the backpadio than the front porch. And both of those are socializing. The difference is the back patio is friends you already know, whereas the front porch

is an opportunity to meet the people that start as strangers who live around you and turn them into friends that you know, which is much less likely if the main socializing area is in the back of your house than in the front of your house. Yeah, I'm trying to think if I can even remember like an episode of House Hunters where they were really excited about a front porch

and nothing is coming to mind. Think about sitting on a front porch. This sounds really old foggy, like, but just think about it. You know, you sit on the front porch and someone walking by with their dog, waves at you, and then you notice that they're wearing a lead Zeppelin T-shirt,

and you like lead Zeppelin too, and then you can say, oh my gosh, nice shirt, and then they start talking, and they say they went to the concert, and then you say, oh, come on over, and sit on the porch for a second, I have I have iced tea out here. And because it's a front porch,

maybe you don't know this person yet, you don't feel comfortable to have them into your house. But we used to design our houses in a way that had this liminal space between kind of stranger and intimate privacy, where community is built. So what we've learned is we should have more pig nicks and we should holler at people from our front porch as they talk about.

Yes. OK, great, great, great. people from our front porch as they pass by. Okay, great, great, great. Maybe also part of the barrier to talking to our neighbors is that we don't have a lot of context for them beyond their geographical proximity. Maybe we know that they walk their dog at eight o'clock every morning, but we don't know what kind of person they are. A lot of the time.

One thing that's not giving me a great ton of faith in my neighbors is I join next door, perhaps misguidedly, just looking for, I don't know, you know, clothing swaps or something. And it's a really tough space of just like people's fears and like worst side really being on display. It's just like post after post about like crime and I'm afraid of this. Watch out for these two like young boys that were looking at my house the other day and I think people are often like very reasonably wary of interacting with their neighbors in the sense that like those people might be coming

to those interactions with a lot of biases, unwarranted fears and assumptions and racism or sexism or any of the things that can make our interactions with strangers and public, ranging from extremely uncomfortable to dangerous. Right. And so, I do want to acknowledge if people have that weariness of their neighbors not treating them as fully human, that is very fair. Simply getting better at talking to people is not going to dissolve racism or sexism or street harassment or any of those deep rooted societal problems that infect our relationships with our neighbors. That's a much bigger problem than just like, do I know my neighbor's name?

I don't want to be naive with all this messaging that, you know, every neighbor is going to be nice. And even among nice neighbors, there's going to be this layer just because of the culture that we're living in of seeing more, you know, I call it the ring camera culture of 2020s America, where everyone outside your door is like someone who's out to get you, whether it's like a politician trying to get your vote or a door to door salesperson. If that's your experience of the outside world, because we live in such a low community time, it's harder to form community now than it is in a higher trust society or a higher trust era. I don't think it's something we all have to do alone. If you're the type of person that knows three other people in the apartment complex and you're all friends,

you've been there a long time and you're more confident and you're more outgoing and you have less to lose and you're less scared of this thing, which doesn't make you any better, but it's just like a quality you have, you need to give a little bit that to everyone else by being the person who has a little bit more wiggle room to have the vulnerability to lead in breaking the ice. Yeah, as it becomes less common for anyone even to knock on your door, then it's like more alarming when someone does, or you're just expecting that when you're at home, you're going to be left alone. So how can you build relationships with your neighbors that are respectfully distant as they need to be, but also can be intimate enough to provide some support?

There's a lot of ways to invite people to come be part of your life. So one of them isn't knocking, it could be leaving an invitation that'll make them feel comfortable to kind of receive this message and then make an affirmative choice to join or not. No one wants that person who immediately is way too vulnerable and intimate with you. You know, back as sometimes I feel like there's this sort of invisible barrier that it feels almost physically effortful to push through before you can just say something to a neighbor. There was a sociologist named Irving Goffman who called that barrier civil and attention, and it's essentially, you know, the default polite posture that we have

towards strangers in public. It's like, essentially saying, I see that you exist. And then you completely withdraw your attention from them and look away and look at your phone and leave them alone. So this is like what always happens in the bathroom when you're both washing your hands. Yes, that's right. The brief eye contact in the mirror, the tight smile, and then you look down and you're washing your hands like very, very solidarily. That is exactly what happens in my building, right? You know, you were walking down the hall towards each other, we're looking down, looking down, and then there's like little smile, and then we pass each other, and we don't speak. That makes me feel like it would be invasive

to try to strike up a conversation with them. Like we're both signaling that we want to be left alone. I'm gonna tell you a little story about my neighbor who did invade my space. Okay. I'm safe, I'm fine. But, I was getting into one of two elevators in my building.

We have our big moving your couch from floor to floor elevator and then the small elevator that not more than one person should be getting into at a time. And it was the small one, I'm sure. It was, of course, the small one. And he lives next door to me and squeezed into the small elevator with me. And he just slightly turned his body and said,

so you're a singer. Ah! Ah! And I'm, I drew for the record. Which you are for the record. I think I am. And I just started profusely apologizing. I was like, I'm so sorry.

I had no idea that my YouTube karaoke was playing that loud and I was singing over it, but it made me extremely self-aware. As you said, someone popped that invisible bubble between us of never acknowledging that we have this relationship, whatever it may be. So do you wish he had just never said anything and continued the sort of fiction that you were just two strangers who know nothing about each other? I mean, as much as it was a bit j guy, I'm not a bad guy I'm not a bad guy, I'm not a bad guy Don't know what you love is everything so we can celebrate the joy it brings It's so much to protect in our lives That's why nation wide is on your side Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company and Affiliates Columbus, Ohio

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of the sort of small step that neighbors can take to kind of make the most of a moment and connect, but not, you know, get too intimate too fast. Pete is a big fan of the practical steps, so. Yes. You know, my direct neighbor, we kind of exchange pleasantries for like a year. And I had formed an opinion of him because I knew he was like, what was the opinion? I had formed some, oh, he's, you know, he's like a classic DC bureaucrat and, you know,

I'm a little weird and we're not like each other at all. And then one day, just in passing, I had played music too loud. And he said, oh, I heard you were playing Jason Isbel. And I love Americana music. And I'm actually in an Americana band. And my dad was this famous bluegrass band-jo player and we play at JV's restaurant,

which is like the coolest venue in our town. And then he led me inside his house and showed me, you know, his guitar, like classic, classic dude, show me your guitar room or something, like intergenerational dude connection. And because of that one moment of happenstance where we have this connection, we think completely differently about each other. There is a weird intimacy that we do have with our neighbors like he can hear

what you're playing through the wall. Yes, you share a wall. But if we pass each other, we sort of don't acknowledge that weird intimacy or we just pretend that we're complete strangers with no context of each other. Totally. And in some ways, sometimes people are relieved

when the intimacy is admitted to, because it pops the tension of it all, you know, I can hear you, I can see you, I saw that you didn't bring your trash out or something, you know. Without being nosy, you know, there's always that we don't want uber conformity and we don't want, you know, invasions of privacy, but there's something in the middle. Yeah, my building, God bless them, they're always trying to host these community events. So, you know, it'll be like, it's Valentine's Day, like, come down and get some, like, free drinks and cookies, and people will go, and then they'll just take the food and leave. Or they'll just talk to kind of whoever they live with that they already came down there with.

There's no mixing. They're not getting people to mix. What are they doing wrong? there with. There's no mixing. They're not getting people to mix. What are they doing wrong? Yeah, you know, we need to have some of these events run by the people themselves, and if kind of a faceless developer or property manager does it, if they personalized it by saying the real person that was hosting it, it might have more of an effect. You know, you also have to have an aggressive host, even though it seems like it's really annoying to be the host that says, hey, I got to know you and I got to know you. And so you should talk because you're both nurses and you two both have third graders, you guys should talk.

You know, that is the type of thing that brings people together. It's not just automatic of, you know, you lay out Valentine's Day cookies and everyone's gonna talk because you have to have someone that breaks the ice and brings people together. Well, this is where I struggle, right? Because I can see how when you first move somewhere that seems like a natural opportunity

to introduce yourself to the people who live next to you or something. But I've lived in my building for two and a half years now. I've lived in my neighborhood for almost 10 years. And I feel like it's too late. I don't have that excuse of being new anymore. Now so much time has passed that it just feels really weird to randomly try to get something going now.

Yeah, you know, it is nice when you just move somewhere that you have this excuse like, hi, I just moved here. And people are gonna give you the honeymoon period of that's not a weird thing to say. That get out of awkwardness free card is gone when you're not here. But, you know, I've always believed that this isn't something that we need to overthink. You know, you have to just walk up to a neighbor in some way and invite them to be closer to

you, which is obviously really awkward. It's so awkward that it's the reason we're all not neighborly with each other. But everyone is waiting for someone to do that to them. That's the funny thing. And in some ways, we're all playing a prisoner's dilemma with each other, where it's like, I don't trust them, or I don't trust them to trust me,

and they're thinking in their head, I don't trust them, or I don't trust them to trust me, and they're thinking in their head, I don't trust them, or I don't trust them to trust me, or maybe they don't trust me, or whatever. And the way to break that prisoner's dilemma with each other is for someone to go a little bit above and beyond to have an active vulnerability. And so a gift is one example of that, which is, I want out of my way to show you an active goodwill,

to show you not only that I'm trustworthy a little bit more, but also that I think your trustworthy a little bit more. Mention the concert you went to last weekend when you're passing in the hallway. Mention something about your family. It doesn't need to be totally too much information. It could just be the next level of personality. You know, Becca, even at the most sort of super benign and cliched neighbor interaction of going over to borrow something, I've actually had a negative experience with that myself.

Can you tell me what happened with that neighbor? Yeah, I mean, it was a really simple interaction. I had moved into my current apartment building. We had all of our taped up boxes for moving, but I realized that I had packed the scissors inside one of the taped up boxes, and I needed scissors to open up the taped up box to get the scissors. I thought, you know, that's fine. I'll just go ask a neighbor. Everybody has scissors. That's opportunity to introduce myself and also get something that I need. So I went on the hall and I knocked on the door

that had like a light on under it or something where seemed like somebody was home. And this very hairy woman came to the door and she had her phone at her ear and she was like, what, what do you need? And I was like, oh my god, I'm so sorry. Like I just moved in. I just needed to borrow some scissors.

Like I didn't mean to interrupt you, but do you have scissors? And she kind of like huffed and then like went off and got the scissors. And she did give them to me, but in like a very annoyed way. She probably wasn't expecting a rando to like knock on her door in the middle of the day when she was on a phone call. I just like went and used her scissors and then silently returned them. And then we never spoke again.

Did she apologize when you returned the scissors? No, she just like took them back and just was like, thanks. I think she probably felt sort of interrupted and having her privacy impeded upon, but also I had a very benign request and was met with open hostility. So it did not make me want to knock on more doors. That's for sure.

It was just a reminder, just because somebody lives near you We want to knock on more doors, that's for sure. It was just a reminder, like just because somebody lives near you doesn't mean they're going to be neighborly. How can you ask a next door neighbor for help without feeling like you're an inconvenience? Well, the amazing thing is that, you know, with relationships, it all works the opposite of what our fears are telling us the way that they work. So, you know, you think giving something away means you lose something, but actually giving something is a gain.

You think that when you reveal something about yourself, it'll make you hated because people will disagree with the particularities of you, but it actually makes you loved more and being generic is what alienates you from people. One of the things that's been relieving but also tough is that like on the one hand, the idea that having that kind of community you want feels so hard is not just your fault for not trying hard enough because there's a lot of institutional things that work. But then it also feels discouraging because there's only so much I as one person can do to change any of that. It is none of our faults and we shouldn't be accountable. This is not a finger wagging at individuals to solve this alone. Like the answer is just going to be all of us decide to be nicer and reach out more.

It needs to be a mix of us individually doing that and rebuilding the civic infrastructure that helps us do it. You know, it's not just reaching out to your neighbors. It's reaching out to your neighbors to talk about how we can reach out to our neighbors. And what are some things that you've done in your life to be committed and stay committed to your neighbors. Do you bring them cookies? What do you do? Yeah, you know, we are increasing our gift game.

Okay. What's your basket? We're mostly doing baked goods and flowers now. And actually, the flowers is a double commitment, which is our local farmers market. We've become friends with the florists there. And we're going to go visit the florist at their flower farm soon because we've decided so not just like treat them as, you know, the person we buy flowers from. And then we bring those flowers to our neighbors and try to have a connection there. Yeah. Okay, I just have one last question for you. It's very philosophical. What does community mean to you? The book that changed my life more than any other,

it's called I and Thou by Martin Boober, who is a Jewish theologian from early 20th century. He lays out these two ways of relating to the world, because it I and it and I and Thou are I and you. And what I and it is, is you see everything around you, you see other people, but also the whole world holds. You see them as objects, it's that have served purposes in your life, only reflecting what they are to you, how they bother you or how they help you, how they're different from you, how they're

similar to you. I and you relates to all the rest of the world. As you, they are fellow subjects, they are also players in the video game of life. They are full of life. They have a depth that you can't understand. When you really are engaging with them and you let all of the ways that they measure up or help you or facilitate you or bother you or compare with everything else. When you let that fall away, you're like bathed in the light of their shared reality with you. They're also there. And even just a small victory in that fight

by building a tiny relationship with one other person isn't a small thing, it's everything. Mm. That's amazing. Yeah. Pete, thank you so much. It was really, really great talking to you and having you on the show Thank you so much. So appreciate what you're doing with us

Yeah, back I appreciated Pete talking about like tiny steps and the importance of small relationships. I think I can get stuck in black and white thinking sometimes where I'm like, oh, this stakes are really high because either my neighbor's going to hate me like the scissor lady or if I just do all the right things then we're going to be best buds and we'll share beers on the roof in the evening and like as with most things I think the truth is often somewhere more in the middle. And there's this concept called Dunbar's number. The psychologist Robin Dunbar has theorized that people are only able to actually cognitively handle maintaining so many relationships at once.

About five deep intimate friendships at a time, but you can actually handle about 150 or so friendships total in your sort of larger web of the friends of friends in the college friends. So I feel like neighbors maybe fall into one of those outer rings where it's okay that you just sort of know their name and the name of their dog. And you know, that type of relationship is enough. So my very small update on my own neighbor relationship is the other day I saw those same roof neighbors who we introduced ourselves to like a year ago and then never spoke to again and I sort of made myself go over there and say like hey you're so and so and so and so right like

I remember your names. I just said, you know, I just wanted to offer like, since we share a roof and it would be really easy, if you're ever out of town and you need us to water your plants, like we would be happy too. And they were like, oh great, like, same. We would be happy to do that too. So, we did make that tiny step towards a very small plant watering relationship. I hope you're proud of me. I'm very proud of you. And that may soon segue into rooftop drinks.

Ooh, well we'll see. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. It's actually a lot more than nothing to have someone right next door who's a little something more than a stranger. I mean now every time I sing I know someone is listening.

That's all for this episode of How to Talk to People. This episode was produced by me, Faker Rashid, and hosted by Julie Beck, editing by Jocelyn Frank, fact check by Anna Alvarado, engineering by Rob Smersiak. Special thanks to AC Valdez. The executive producer of audio is Claudina Bade. The managing editor of audio is Claudina Bade. The managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdes.