Walkable neighborhoods with affordable places to hang out.

Legitimately stop treating phones like a necessity. Leave them at home more. Treat apps more like accessories and less like doorways.

Opt more for going in person to places to do things. By bike or transit whenever you can. Go to public events at your local parks and venues. Attendance is its own form of support, too. Anything we can do to purposely put ourselves in front of other people who share different perspectives than ourselves is good for us.

I think a lot of people don’t realize that there is a sense of responsibility when it comes to putting ourselves out into the world. If you think you’re capable of helping others, simply being a positive person in a public place, even just to have some fun meeting with friends, is a step in the right direction to building a better world. Nature will eventually setup a situation for you to be called upon. But this never happens from in your house or apartment.

For a lot of people in suburbia, the entire concept of indoor “third spaces” is mostly “pay to play” at the end of a drive. A big exception to this is/were shopping malls, but those aren’t always close by. To get to more a functional social fabric, we have to provide more convenient ways of interfacing with our neighbors that don’t always require money to change hands.

Perhaps this is a predictably orange-pill response, but we need to change zoning in a big way. Each suburban development has the street plan and infrastructure to support small businesses and common spaces, walking-distance from everyone’s front door. All it takes is to allow small-scale commercial development in corners of these collections of tract-homes and, just like that, you can have something like a functional village. Beyond that, encouraging more development of community recreation space, both indoor and outdoor, would go a long way to provide a place for people to mingle.

Edit: strip-malls don’t count. They’re often at the very edge of residential areas, and are tied up with way more capital than what I’m talking about. That’s why they’re made up of franchises, require ridiculous amounts of parking, and contribute to “stroads” and all the knock-on effects and hostile architecture that requires.

Fighting fascism, together.

Multi dwelling houses: a house with a central living area and apartments of different sizes linking in to it.

The central area has a big kitchen, dining, play area, halls link it to a 1-bed, 2-bed and 3-bed apartments each with a little kitchen as well.

You can be on your own in your apartment or go use the big kitchen, join trivia night, etc

Just have a war. Nothing brings people together like necessity and shared trauma.

Nationalizing dating sites.

These sites work great to match people when corpos aren’t allowed to fuck with the algorithms

The reason there were mountain men in the old days is that they appreciated nature and they didn’t feel alone though they often were. It’s not that hard to rekindle that feeling you only have to work at it a little. I was taking walks in the woods back when I was in grade school and I seldom feel alone though it’s harder to feel like that in a city.

Is it too harsh to say to outside and interact with people?

Increase taxes on places that sell take home alcohol and decrease tax on alcohol sold from licenced venues.

It should be cheap to go out.

Get a personality. It worked for me!

Need to bring back Internet cafes.

Less pants

Live with friends.

For me, working in human services does the trick. Over the summer I take a vacation to heal body/mind, and swap to spending more time on MMOs, a Mud, and making sure I go “out” somewhere at least once a day. Even just to the library.