Adults Should Live Next To Their Friends

Living next to your friends is awesome. To be clear, I’m not talking just in the same city, or only a 15 min drive away - I’m saying on the same block, if not next door. My friend recently moved into our apartment building, and it unlocked so many events & adventures I hadn’t expected.

Benefits of living next to friends 🔗︎

Some of you will have experienced this in college, but less will have experienced it as adults. Lemme hit you with some of the best parts:

• Spontaneity is now simple.
• It becomes easier to invite them than not.
• Ordering pizza? A quick call and you can have impromptu dinner with friends, no cognitive effort spent on planning.
• We can spend short amounts of time together, like a 45 min speed dinner, which wouldn’t be worth it if someone had to travel 15+ mins each way to get to you.
• I can invite them with no notice to join plans with other friends. If they’re busy, it’s not a big deal for either of us.
• We become a central gathering point. When there’s already 2+ of us in the same city block, people from around the city will often congregate in our area since we already have a group started.

Plus some niche benefits, which are nice if they happen to fit your lifestyle:

• we can host a bunch of shared friends visiting from out of town, since we can split them across multiple apartments instead of a jammed into one.
• Rideshare bills get cheaper, because you’re all heading to the same place.

What makes this work 🔗︎

It sounds a bit silly, or like I’m not trying hard enough, if a 15 min journey is enough to dissuade me from impromptu plans. You’ll just have to trust when I say I am a planner & instigator of connection, not a hermit. In my experience, even that short time adds enough overhead that it alters my brain’s idea of what is possible. I noticed that once my friend moved next door, now every time we have people over, I immediately think to invite them over. People who live ~15 minutes away though, I don’t.

My current theory is by having friends next door, the friction to hang out drops to almost 0. You end up doing more because you don’t have to invest cognitive effort to coordinate schedules & plan a dinner/drinks/etc. Now, maybe i can push back on this mental effect and be intentional about trying to spontaneously invite people to do things, but I only have so much willpower. I’m human, I want the easy option when I can get it.

In a way, the laziest thing you can do is all move next door. I’ll see you soon!