End of the Year Issue
By Marly Fisher
January 31, 2024
Drunk on camaraderie and laughter, we mill about the shops we’ve been to hundreds of times before; we argue about the state of the world and how much more heavy cream should be added to our pasta dishes; we soak in the time winter break has allowed us, because for now, that’s all we have.
My friends are my home. So why did we all leave it?
In the age of the modern family, we are quick to move. For school, for careers, for our partners… my own mother (albeit reluctantly) traded her community of friends and familiarity in the suburbs of New York for the empty tumbleweeds of New Mexico and my father’s career. The Land of Enchantment is its motto. The Land of Entrapment is what she (perhaps not so) affectionately calls it. It seems that in a world of constant motion, our friends are the first to be left behind. Not truly, of course — technology makes for an easy way to stay in touch — but the physical location of the people closest to us is no longer as important.
Living with companions — roommates in college, apartment-mates during internships and first big jobs — are a cherished stage of life. But it is seen as nothing more than a liminal space between childhood and the real world. There is a kind of time limit on these types of living spaces, at least until the purported love of our lives comes around to sweep us off our feet and we can create our true homes together. Our lives and purpose are structured around the love we build. So why don’t we live with our friends? At the very least, why don’t we make an active effort to be near them?
One of the purest parts of the university experience, as profoundly demonstrated by the construction of the living spaces in Sciences Po, is its community. We cook together, we swim together, we laugh and talk until the sun is up. There is a unique sense of togetherness here, a promise that your favorite conversationalist is right next door. It is when college ends that separation begins. We leave the bonds we’ve created in search of the vague and inevitable next step. It is — was — what I’ve been preparing for my whole life. But I don’t want to. My best friend and I have a pact that we call the Brooklyn Brownstone, a promise that if we are unmarried by age 40 we will buy the most lavish brownstone in the city and live out the rest of our lives in companionship. But it rests on the assumption that our future would require a separation in the first place.
I want to live near my best friend always. I want to live near all of my close friend always. It would make me happy. And statistically, happiness spreads, according to Atlantic writer Adrienne Matei:
When one person becomes happier, their next-door neighbors' chances of also growing happier rise by 34 percent; friends living within a mile of each other are 25 percent more likely to feel happy, and their friends have a 10 percent chance of feeling happier too.
Moving away from our chosen families does not just affect our personal wellbeing, however; we have lost kinship in the workplace, as well. Modernization and industrialization have taken away time as an entity that belongs to us. Where leisure and labor were once intermingled, where the workday ended on the family farm with the sunset, now an employer's time is acutely different from that of those who are employed. those. In the words of historian EP Thompson, the “employer must use the time of his labor, and see it is not wasted: not the task but the value of time when reduced to money is dominant. Time is now currency: it is not passed but spent.”
Existing with my friends need not not be temporary. When, or if, I do begin to raise a family of my own, I want to be surrounded by a community I have built myself. I want my children to know and love my companions the way I do. Especially after having lived with a roommate for the past few months, I have little desire to live alone. Ever. What good is independence if we are lonely? If we miss those we love the most?
At the time that this article is being written, I’m sitting in the airport returning home after visiting my best friend at her college. Mark my words: in fifty years, a cluster of beautiful Brooklyn brownstones will be deemed the happiest square mile in America. We will change the world together.