[doe_eyes]

The rate of work-related moves is half of what it used to be in the 1960s. By all accounts, mobility is decreasing, not increasing.

The reality is that we just don't talk to each other much. If you want to look for the decline of one institution that provided some degree of community cohesion, then the answer is going to be pretty unpopular: we don't go to church anymore.

[a1o]

It doesn't have to be churches, local school with parents association making events, libraries that have spaces for the kids to hangout with others and work on projects together, open sports areas, parks and small festivities, farmers market that have a set periodicity. But it has to have one space where people can start to meet each other so they can talk and desire more things so they can build these other spaces or have some unified way to demand it from their local mayor.

[randomdata]

> It doesn't have to be churches

Strictly true, but if people aren't strongly compelled to show up somewhere, they aren't apt to. Historically, the "fear of God" ensured that people went to church, effectively forcing them to gather, meet each other, so on and so forth.

The only thing I see that comes close to that these days is youth sports leagues, where parents have a fear of failing their children if not heavily involved in such activities. While this does seem to establish some kind of community amongst parents of children of similar ages, it does not seem to expand out into parents with children of dissimilar ages even within the same sport, let alone an even larger community. Which is not terribly surprising as there is not much reason for someone unrelated to a participating child to show up.

I might even go as far as to say that because parents get stuck in those narrowly isolated communities, it contributes a fracturing to any larger community that might have otherwise been able to form. It is difficult to have a general community of only 20-somethings and the elderly with little in-between.

[jeffbee]

What I want to know is why people will get up on the internet and say something counterfactual like people are moving more today than in the past, a hypothesis without a shred of supporting evidence. All measures of mobility are headed down, whether intercity moves or job changes. American mobility has hit a new record low every year this century, accelerating a trend that has been in decline since the end of the War.

https://www.ft.com/content/96cb501d-b188-4e50-af21-ca7115878...

[nonameiguess]

An amusing thing about this is my reaction to reading this piece was that community was enabled in my own youth (which took place in the 80s) by something likely to be even more unpopular on Hacker News than church: sports. My dad was involved in adult softball leagues and many of my earliest friends were the kids of his teammates. We all went to tournaments together and played with each other while the adults played their softball. I was also involved in little league and youth basketball and made friends that way and spent a ton of time at the park with other kids playing baseball and basketball even outside of any kind of league. The neighborhood gathered together in one house even under the guise of television, which united us much more than it divided us, typically to do things like watch Lakers and Dodgers playoff games or major boxing matches that were only on pay-per-view, presumably because households didn't all want to have to pay separately.

Frankly, it's hard for me to imagine what could possibly create a community in my neighborhood today. Half the properties here are AirBNB party houses. The average tenure of a neighbor who actually lives in their own property feels like maybe three years. Hard to make any kind of lasting connections, with or without a church.