Familiarity and Belonging
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Highlights
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Familiarity is a misunderstood virtue. Cultivating a sense of belonging is under-practiced and misunderstood. No matter where you live it is worth trying to improve the small things of your world. Romanticism has always elevated the pleasure of adventure over the pleasure of belonging,
- wherever you settle should also be a place you come to care about, and not a transitory thing.
- Places, institutions, and families are the things that may outlive us, we should build them whenever we can. Love and effort turn them into their glorious forms, like the princess and her frog.)
- Familiarity is crucially the maintaining of weak ties, or else the maintaining of strong ties in weak ways. Some things can only be made strong by binding one thousand tiny threads. So the problem isn’t that friends must hang out more, the problem is that they haven’t seen each other in forever (without hanging out).
- We cannot have as many of these small interactions because we simply dwell in fewer places than we did 100 years ago.
- (TV is so pernicious because it asks for nothing from you, except all of the time you’ve got to spare.
- The thing that familiarity affords is not having to awkwardly reach out to people, but simply existing alongside them enough until it no longer becomes weird to interact.
- Having a sense of familiarity first is what removes the awkward desperation that’s endemic to things like dating sites and meetup groups, which are quite stifling in comparison.
- I think that the best way to build new relationships of every kind is to do work together. Start a project, join an association, work with the garage door up.
- To love a place is to allow ourselves to contribute beyond expectations of material return.
- Once you are able to cast off the feeling that wherever you are living is somehow temporary, wherever you are living will begin to feel like home. To do this requires a kind of love.