I always find it beautifully familiar to see people informally gathered on a sidewalk or small street, spending the night relaxing and conversing.
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We all have scenes that bring back fond memories, and for me this is one of them. It reminds me of walking through my grandparents’ villages in Greece, where people would chat and drink and eat and laugh and gossip with neighbors late into the night.
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This informal socializing, this sense of community, is something we tend to lose as we get into “richer” or more urbanized communities. Everyone is so keen to get a bigger, more walled off house, to cut out leisure and social time in favor of 24/7 work, to shut themselves up in their spaces. It almost seems like one of the end goals of moving up the socioeconomic ladder has become needing other people as little as possible - creating your own little bubble of a world.
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I always think that kind of lifestyle is lacking. And people who live it end up missing something grand. After all, even science has now found that loneliness takes just as many years off your life as smoking or obesity.
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Life is about connection, life is about community, life is about relationships. Instead of seeking to escape them, we should seek instead to build the healthiest versions of them we can.
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