Life involves taking risks and measuring people. Getting stuck with a shitty roommate is pretty low stakes on that spectrum.
> just a sign that people are getting richer (since this same trend is happening in all first-world countries)
Valid hypothesis. I’d posit Covid and the increasingly prevalence of single-child households are the more-proximate cause.
I lived in New York in an illegally-subdivided loft. Yes, I’ve had bad roommates. Yes, it felt overwhelming at first. And yes, I got over it, constraining the problem where possible and addressing it directly where necessary, a suite of skills that were probably instrumental in my start-up later working.
This is a sign of social isolation, not wealth.
But that’s also the point. Low risk situation to practice things that later in life become much higher risk. Better to figure out how to cohabitate with a few random roommates than a SO down the road.
I guess living alone can be a sound decision, but it depends on context.
It's not (just) about the absolute number, but the trend as well; see "Chart 2. Rise of single-person households, 1990–2025".
One is a friend. The other an acquaintance.
If someone is doing that while living with someone whom it’s bothering to the point of wanting to change living situations, there is a disconnect of empathy that betrays that it isn’t a friendship.
(Granted, my original comment was honing in on the “few hours a month” bit. That’s fine for maintaining a friendship. But not for building one. Again, it’s perfectly adequate for making acquaintances.)
I have/had friends whose pickiness/slovenliness was fine until we tried to live together, and then all that became a personality clash. It's entirely possible to have strong friendships with people you couldn't live with.
If my friends fell on hard times, they’d have a place to crash. I cannot say that of everyone I hang out with because not all of them are people whom I’d (a) enjoy being around and (b) trust to respect my boundaries (and trust myself to be tolerant of their incongruities with my preferences).
People can seem perfectly fine, until they seem to spontaneously turn into hoarders, or start eating all your food and lying about it, or start being aggressively in your face about a bunch of antagonistic culture bullshit, etc.
I think what we’re seeing is Americans increasingly fed up with (or even terrified of) other Americans.
It’s possible there are more unhinged people today, but I think that’s also a consequence of us spending so much time alone in the first place (and sycophantic bots are only going to make that worse).
I was also thinking of everyone, not just US Americans.
There is a reason for this, and it isn't because they hate their mental health.
The issue here is how hard it is to protect your own mental health when someone else refuses to respect yours, and how a co-living situation can make that hard - because you literally are all up in each others business.
No, of course not. But that doesn’t also mean it can’t have an effect. Social media is harmful to many of us who still partake. Sometimes what we do isn’t what’s best. Some of those people who live alone could benefit from living with someone else, others might not. It’s not an absolute, just worth considering.
> The issue here is how hard it is to protect your own mental health when someone else refuses to respect yours
Right, but I feel too many people are focusing on dipshit housemates. Good and understanding people do exist. Like, would you be one of those disrespectful people you describe? Probably not, which proves people like you do exist.
There's some truth in what you're saying regarding social cohesion, but you're skipping some very important steps like the media fanning reactionary flames by scaring rural dwellers that "diversity" is going to come for them, etc.
Meanwhile people who are confronted with actual diversity in their day to day lives are less likely to buy into such simplistic and destructive narratives in the first place.
This implies that the lack of social cohesion is better thought of as a result of hostile media convincing everyone they are under attack by some "other", than slightly different humans in people's real-life communities.
I realize hearing that or seeing that others may read that, may anger people who are deeply invested in the fraud that diversity is good, but all the legitimate research into the topic all tells us the same thing; that “diversity” is detrimental to any and all human communities all around the world, even for the very group that pushes it on others while aggressively rejecting it for themselves and their own.
edit: No amount of downvoting will change reality, whether you shoot the messenger or not. It's a shame, because good does not actually prevail, especially with brainwashed fools who assist those seeking the demise of others. Support of "diversity" is no different than the support of the genocide the jewish state committed and is to this day still committing in Gaza... the support of evil without the intelligence to understand that.
But it's getting harder because of the housing market.
Neither are threatened by living with a friend or someone else near your age. Sure, move out of your parents’ home, but that doesn’t mean you have to live alone.
The difference between sharing a 2BR and living in an apartment building are more exercises in cultural than physical difference.
This reminds me, yesterday I was walking down the hallway of my apartment building, and one of my neighbors passed by me but neglected to even acknowledge my existence, because their head was down staring at their smartphone.
Sharing a house is a good way to combat that. Sometimes you move in with people you tangentially know. Sometimes you won’t be huge friends with them but can still interact, or may even meet some of their friends and hit it off.
Living in suburbia has definitely made me yearn for this: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/should-more-of-us-...
At this point I think she's well past assisted living, and relies on being in a familiar environment. So those concerns plus the non-winning finances, my advice is to stay there as long as she can. Because from what I've seen of nursing homes, they're basically grueling slow-motion assisted suicide.
[0] It's actually 3 units, one in a state of paused remodel. I haven't been able to tell if it started its life as 2 units each with an upstairs and downstairs and a shared stairway, or as 4 separate units even.
One piece of advice of my own that I will throw out is to act quickly after someone's spouse dies to get them to sign the appropriate papers and get those details in order. Otherwise as the depression settles in they tend to "clam up" shortly thereafter and become extremely negative on doing anything like that. If you're an honest person you might feel bad doing this, like you're picking the bones of the dead, but just get over it and do what's best for everyone - dishonest people will have no such reservations.
(thank you for throwing out the advice in case I didn't know, though!)
And others just want to stay in their same home they know and love even as they slow down and do less and less. I myself feel I'm going to be in this latter camp, and I don't know what I'd do differently to change that.
I wrote another comment elsewhere in this topic about the lack of multi-generation households, and I feel that is directly part of the problem here too. Of course it's a very tall ask to expect your kid(s) to stick around in the American individualist culture. Although the economics of this might change with where we're headed...
We just need to get better at redistributing our economic activity instead of concentrating everything in the same place and then wondering why everyone wants to live in the same and its unfeasible to house them all
The culprit is not the concentration of jobs to a geographic area, it’s NIMBYs and crap like California’s Prop 13 artificially constraining supply.
No one here seems to care about the objective number (40 million) - they instead care about the relative amount (29%). If you look at the graph and track the percent, it's been at or over 25% since 1990. Having your share go from 25% to 29% in 35 years is not really that meaningful.
This isn't a new phenomenon in the US. The graph sucks because it hides the fact that the US population has been growing steadily.
29% seems like a fairly neutral number.
How much of a choice is it that they made willing? The number has doubled over the last few decades:
* https://www.self.inc/blog/adults-living-alone
* https://thesocietypages.org/graphicsociology/tag/living-alon...
There are health (and happiness) consequences to not being connected to other people:
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...
I'm not seeing evidence that 15% is the correct number and 29% is automatically bad.
Considering there are both housing and loneliness crises going on, and that being lonely or socially isolated leads to an early death and radicalisation, I’d say it’s fair to categorise it as a bad thing, yes.
Sure, not every single one of those people living alone will be lonely, but I think it’s fair to deduce that many people who are lonely and isolated live alone.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/19/health/loneliness-social-isol...
https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/lcdocs/other/21402/Delany%...
Only a king or simpleton believes this.
I think we could naturally fall back into this pattern as housing, elder, and child care continue to get ever more expensive... but for the fact that the baseline suburban house is built with a single common living space, meant for a single family all constantly interacting with each other. You have to get into much more expensive houses with "in-law apartments" and whatnot before you regain the breathing room to have multiple generations living together. And now even houses with that extra space have become economic-grindstone legible due to short term rentals.
How do you know it's by choice?
Even from an atheistic standpoint, current levels of liberty and agency are clearly evolutionarily unfit. The fertility rate of Christians (and other conservative religious people) are at or above replacement level, which means that the unlimited liberty and agency folks are substantially below replacement levels.
In a society where people only have enough children to replace themselves, having people without children means that society will slowly fade away and disappear.
There are a bunch of modern ideologies that don't try to understand or even deny that having children is the most powerful kind of democracy in life. When you are having children, you're essentially saying "I want more people like myself in this world". Under this premise, the western world is saying "I don't want to be here anymore".
According to bible you can be single or have family, be happy or miserable. The matters is to not commit sins.
After living with parents, roommates, spouses and others for most of my life, I'm super happy to live alone.
Has anyone stopped to think that possibly people live alone because that's what they want to do?
I can only think of a quote from one of my favorite youtube videos of all time:
"The monkey's feel alone, all 6 billion of them..."
From: Ernest Cline's spoken word reading of Dance Monkey, Dance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQOdNY-HdG0
Watch it, it's worth it...
Even so, splitting rent, utilities, and furniture was a significant financial advantage and helped set us up for long-term success.
We had our disagreements, and eventually a falling out with one roommate, but I’d do it all again. The other roommate and I are life long friends and you learn lessons and form bonds in addition to the financial benefit.
individualistic
And men too... lots of them stay adolescent well into their 30s and require a caregiver or a substitute mom more than a gf/wife. Men exclusively blaming women for their problems tend to be basement dwellers or other kind of failures who don't want to take any responsibility
What do you actually mean by this part?
I know people my age (30+) who spend 8 hours a day gaming and the rest of their free time collecting pokemon cards, funkopops, scifi books they never read and have the audacity to complain about women not being """traditional""" anymore. They're basically out of shape teenagers with money, and they don't understand why it's not attractive. Some of them actually do live with their parents.
Something I’ve noticed recently is many college graduates living alone. That’s fine. But it’s a weird default for early in one’s career. If I had one general piece of advice for anyone starting their career, it would be to seek out a living situation with roommates.
Side question: are more college students staying in solo dorms?