[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.