Eighth Salon: Quality of Life

[jenett]

Welcome to our eighth salon discussion thread. Wander in, invite a friend to come along, and chat! (Not sure what's going on? Here, have a brief FAQ.) You can find previous ones in my salon tag. Please take a quick look at the reminders at the bottom of this post, too.

Quality of life: what does it mean for you?

I was thinking, walking home from work the other day, that there's a lot of different kinds of things that make up quality of life, the "This is a good day" and "I like how I'm living".

In my current job, I don't make much money (especially given the amount of education required). But I live half a mile from work, in a gorgeous rural New England town where pretty much every view could be on a postcard. (And that's before you get to anything significantly scenic.) There's a downtown grocery store with local produce, and farmer's markets, and all sorts of other things.

I have a job that I mostly leave at work (I mean, I keep thinking about technology and libraries and information pretty much all the time, but that's because I love it, not because I have to bring work home). I have the world's most endearing and adorable cat.

But I also know that these things aren't necessarily what other people would choose (or what I'd choose at other points in my life, or if I lived in a different place, or had more money to play with.)

Things I'm watching: I'm currently rewatching season 3 of Doctor Who (I've been a fan since before I knew you could be: I grew up watching Tom Baker from under a chair in the living room.) Tonight, I'm going to go see the Joss Whedon Much Ado About Nothing for the second time so I can go with a friend (and because, on the whole, I would like to encourage people to do more projects of that kind.) What're you watching? Why is it interesting to or fun for you?

(This means I'll be out from 5ish until 9:30ish tonight. I assume you can all manage in my absence.)

Quick reminders

- jjhunter did a great guide to following conversations here on Dreamwidth. Also a roundup of regular Dreamwidth events.
- If you want to post anonymously, please pick a name (any name you like) that we can call you - it makes it more conversational and helps if we have more than one anon post.
- Base rule remains "Leave the conversation better than you found it, or at least not worse". If you're nervous about that, I'd rather you say something and we maybe sort out confusion later than have you not say something. (I've heard from a few people who worry they're going to say something that's going to be taken weirdly. If it helps, I am usually around and if there's a thing you'd like to get out in the conversation, but you're not sure how, feel free to PM or email or IM me, and I'll nudge the conversation that direction.)
- The FAQ still has useful stuff, and I added some thoughts about getting conversations going a few weeks ago.
- Comments tend to trickle in over the course of a day or two, with a few nearly a week later: you might enjoy checking back later if you're not tracking the conversation.

Comments

Re: Growing the communities we yearn for

[theora]

Hmm. When I said community, I was thinking less of local networks of friendships and connections and more the undifferentiated mass of people who live near enough to me to make an everyday difference in my life. I'd probably use the word community to mean both types of thing, which is maybe confusing. Or maybe they're not two different things, but degrees of the same thing? Hmm again.

I agree that it's possible to have some control over whether you have a community of friends and friendly acquaintances local to you. There can be barriers, definitely, as others have articulated, but it's not where I feel powerless. Where I feel powerless is all the people who affect my daily life simply by virtue of living near me. People who I have a connection with not by desire or compatibility but by circumstance. We're connected by the place and its vagaries (road construction, water main breaks, town politics, weather events, etc.), but beyond that are there any shared values? How would we even find out? What can we do about values which are incompatible, given that terminating the relationship (as you would with a person you had a choice about dealing with) is not possible?

I'm having a hard time getting at what I'm trying to get at, so will stop now and go to bed instead.

Re: Growing the communities we yearn for

[jjhunter]

There are ways of creating communities out of circumstance - see school districts, churches, community centers, libraries, and so forth - but yes, it is more difficult in some places to create a strong sense of community around 'people who live in neighborhood X', or even 'people who live on street Y'. I still think it's possible, and that sometimes contributing to growing it can be as simple as smiling or chatting briefly with the people around you.

Re: Growing the communities we yearn for

[theora]

I think, while I agree with what you're saying, that we must be talking about different things. What I wrote originally was in the context of trust: that my quality of life requires that I trust the people around me, including my community (defined as the mass of people who live near enough to me to make a difference). Maybe if I give an example.

So, once summer starts (or even on unusually warm spring or fall evenings), people around here sometimes set off fireworks. Fireworks are illegal in this state. There's no set time when this happens, could be anytime between dusk and 3am. Fireworks, when unexpected, cause me a very uncomfortable stress reaction. And since I don't know when they're coming, I often end up in a state of heightened arousal just waiting for the pops and bangs. I scan weather forecasts, hoping for rainy nights. I sleep with the windows closed and the AC on when I'd much rather use a window fan because I know I'll be woken up if fireworks start and I won't get to make up the sleep. I hate this.

The people setting off the fireworks are members of my community; I doubt anyone comes from far and wide just to do this in my neighborhood. I have no way of knowing who they are. I could, I suppose, try to go and knock on the doors of everyone within a mile or so radius and explain the effect that it has on me. And/or I could try some sort of public outreach campaign - flyers? letters to the editor? a presentation at the library? hold a placard outside Town Hall? - to try and persuade people not to do it. (In actual fact I probably couldn't do these things because I don't have the time and energy for them right now.)

But even if I did these things, would that mean 100% definitely no more fireworks? No. Or even most of them? I doubt it.

What I mean by trusting my community is trusting all these people (*all* of them) not do to things which are wrong and do harm. As I said above, I don't think that's possible without either drastically limiting the number of people (i.e. very rural indeed) or insuring that the people have a pre-existing agreement on acceptable behavior and communication protocols in case things go wrong, as well as a general orientation toward thoughtfulness and respect for others (i.e. cohousing, likely also in a rural setting).

It is probably the case that I desire a level of control higher than most people's (or I have lower tolerance for certain types of issue than most people).

Re: Growing the communities we yearn for

[jenett]

Some of this is size of community. One of the things I find fascinating about living where I do (after previously living in suburban or urban settings) is that the local paper is really interesting. There's an online version, and you hear *everything* that's going on (because there just isn't that much news) with a side of additional commentary from gossip.

Or if not everything, at least a fairly wide subset of it. There are comment sections, and those are like comment sections on any other newspaper (which is to say, the comment quality is highly mixed indeed) but even those are informative (and it's rare you get more than 20 comments on a piece, so it's usually not that dire even when the quality's iffy or people are being very stuck on their particular POV.)

I also love the New England town government thing of Town Meeting, but that's something that doesn't always transplant well elsewhere. (Reminds me, I ought to go this year: I feel like I finally have enough of an idea about the town it'd be relevant.)

Re: Growing the communities we yearn for

[theora]

Ah, town meeting. Something I have quite mixed feelings about. Does your town have an open town meeting, i.e. anyone can turn up and vote? That was, I think, the original model, and it's what my parents, in a town of ~8000, have.

Arlington is one of the biggest towns in Massachusetts, and, like most of the towns around here, we have a representative town meeting. So I can't just roll up to town meeting and have my say; instead, I vote for precinct representatives who in theory represent me. The problem is, not very many people run for town meeting, and not very many people vote in TM elections. Some precincts (not mine) even have vacant seats. I have written to my town meeting reps over issues from time to time. Some of them reply, some don't bother. Some will listen to arguments and discuss, but most just state their opinion and are done. At town meeting they represent their own personal views. Without competition for seats, there's no real way to pressure a rep to give you a hearing, nor vote out someone you disagree with.

In practice, in order to have a say in town government you have to *be* a town meeting member. (People actually say this: "if you don't like it, run for town meeting".) Which is all well and good as long as you're free 2 evenings a week for a period lasting anywhere from 3 weeks to 2 months in May and June (not to mention possible special town meetings which can happen, I believe, at any time). In other words, as long as you 1) work traditional hours or don't work and 2) have no evening caring responsibilities. I don't think there are records kept of the demographics of our town meeting, but I strongly suspect they trend older, whiter, more conservative, and more male than the town as a whole.

So while I like the idea of town meeting, ours is a source of frustration to me.

Re: Growing the communities we yearn for

[jenett]

Town of 8,000, so yeah, non-representative. Everyone who wants to shows up, and there is discussion and eventual voting.

(I grew up in Winchester, next town over from Arlington, which is also representative, but my impression when I was growing up was that pretty much, if you wanted to be a Town Meeting member, it was pretty easy to do. And there, it's two meetings a year, spring and fall, which is a lot more manageable schedule-wise, I'd suspect.)

Re: Growing the communities we yearn for

[(Anonymous)]

Venecia again:

I think of the first as personal community (your friends / family / etc.) and the second as social ecosystem (the general norms and broad characteristics of the people in the place you live).

Having lived in several different places in the US, I have to say that there are distinct differences in social ecosystems even regionally and that these differences affected me. They also had a direct effect on the amount of effort necessary to build a solid personal community. And unlike your personal community, which you do control, the social ecosystem is largely outside of your control.

So what do you do about an incompatible social ecosystem? In the long term, you can work to change it, but from a personal standpoint, you have to move.

But where do you move? This is the tricky part because most advice is based on very practical items like access to jobs, cost of living, etc. Social compatibility is very personal and more difficult to research. If you never live anyplace but where you grew up, you may never know how different, different places can be.