Alone Together / NYM
I love Jennifer Senior stories like this, and I love living alone. At first, you’re like, ohmygahwhatwasithinking, and then later you can’t really imagine the freedom and the mindspace. It makes you more active to go out and actually see people and things and/or to host them with you.This is a trope as old as sand, but Jen does put it well.
“I’d argue that New York and the Internet are about the same, in the way that a large bookstore feels like it offers just as many possibilities as Amazon.com—maybe slightly less inventory, but more opportunities to stumble on things you might not have otherwise. Whichever the case, what the Internet and New York have in common is that each environment facilitates interaction between individuals like no other, and both would be positively useless—would literally lose their raison d’être—if solitary individuals didn’t furiously interact in each. They show us, in trillions of invisible ways every day, that people are essentially nothing without one another. We may sometimes want to throttle our fellow travelers on the F train. We may on occasion curse our neighbors for playing music so loud it splits the floor. But living cheek-by-jowl is the necessary price we pay for our well-being. And anyway, who wants to ride the subway alone?”
