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Note that the only other human you have mentioned in your description of your quality of life is your child. The rest of it is all stuff. SUVs, guns, fences. If that’s what you care about, American suburbs have a lot to offer you. For people who want to experience natural and spontaneous human connection (that you don’t have to fight against the environment of huge yards and parking lots to obtain), they don’t, and most of the cities don’t either.
This says a lot more about your social poverty than about suburbs.
I have plenty of human connection. I live with my wife and kids. My parents are an hour away, my grandparents were two hours away from new house. I spend time with my friends, and once I finish moving, I'll spend time with old friends from high school again. My kids have birthdays and play dates and lessons. My life is full of my family, my friends, and my family's friends.
Yes, we visit most of them by car, and we drive by a lot of yards and parking lots to do so.
You might be so lonely that having an addict grunt a "fuck you" at you while you step around him counts as the social highlight of your life. You might survive on the thin gruel of the incidental pleasantries and perfunctory forced interactions caused by congestion. My social calendar is full enough, thank you.
I’m not sure what you’re objecting to in the statement you quoted. There’s nothing spontaneous about having to drive for an hour to see people, so it sounds like you’re agreeing rather than disagreeing, you just don’t mind it. If you’re okay with that, that’s fine. I’m not. But I’m not agitating for some sort of political change that would require you to live differently. I’m trying to figure out what I can do to live the kind of life I want to live.
My parents are an hour away. My grandparents are two hours away. My sister, on the other hand, is about ten minutes by onewheel, and a high school friend of mine is even closer, depending on how the light is timed today. My kids go to a local school, so the eldest can go see some of his friends under his own steam. We attend church only for Christmas and Easter, and only sparingly in those cases, but were we to do so more often, we would known even more people in our current neighborhood of three car garages.
You're the one with crushing isolation and boredom. I'm the one in the suburbs with the rich social fabric.
Maybe the problem isn't the cars and the yards and the strip malls. Maybe it's you.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me, I’m pretty easy to get along with. I just don’t like driving or long travel times so I tend to choose to avoid it, and don’t have many opportunities to meet people that don’t require that.
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It is a luxury to be able to avoid spontaneous human connection, to only have it when you specifically want it and shut it out otherwise. Americans are so rich that this luxury is available to most.
Public transport is a great example. It's true you won't get stabbed or robbed on the bus in most of Europe (though with all the migration this is starting to change in places). But there's still the teenagers with the obnoxious music, the people yelling at their cell phones, the loud and messy eaters, the couples all but having sex, the other couples fighting, the screaming little children, the occasional beggar. And the people who won't take showers, and of course the fat guy who insists on sitting next to you even though there's an empty bench available. It's a lot of spontaneous human connection, and all of it negative.
And if you can afford a car you can avoid it all. What you're really buying is isolation, and it's worth quite a lot. (Well, that, speed, and reliability.)
There are times when you need it, of course, especially when you still need to establish yourself and need to get into contact with a lot of people to find openings. Americans have college campuses, which of course have their own problems. Europeans tend to just use the city as a whole for that purpose. But once you've established yourself, mostly the negatives remain, especially since should you need something you can draw on your existing circle. The commenter above has a wife and a kid. What does he need to find out in the wild, another wife?
Europe has its suburbs too. They don't always look like American ones because people can't afford McMansions (rowhouses and apartments are more common), but they serve the same purpose. To be far enough away from it all to offer its denizens some isolation.
The places that are most well designed to further spontaneous interaction with relatively normal and stable people like Boston or NYC are some of the most exorbitantly expensive places in the whole country. So clearly there is much more demand for that sort of lifestyle than there is supply of housing to accommodate it, which suggests that’s a luxury too.
Community and making new friends. Or are you supposed to just be done with that once you have a wife and kids?
In America, this is what churches are for (not so much Catholic churches, which haven't adapted as thoroughly to the situation).
It is true that as America has become less religious, the social organizations have not kept up, and so there's a void that can't quite be filled by meetups. But that's also true in dense cities.
Catholic churches have plenty of opportunities for making friends, assuming one is either an established adult or a teen(their young/emerging adult ministries/groups are near uniformly terrible, and this is probably fallout from the broken dating market because the organizers do not want to be responsible for such things). They are, however, opt-in, not parts of the default experience. Almost every parish has a knights of Columbus council and a men's group, a woman's... something(could be called a bible study, could be called a spirituality group, who knows), and multiple clubs nominally dedicated to charitable activities but realistically mostly for socializing. They simply are not default parts of the experience for a weekly attendee and must be specifically sought out.
Fair enough, I had pretty superficial interactions, and didn't try all that hard.
A family member and also a good friend went to Catholic school for years and grew up Catholic, and also reported not having anything social to do, to the point of going to Evangelic youth group/LDS family events. It's likely this varies a lot by region/predominant culture.
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That's not just stuff: they are activities we do enabled by having a garage and a yard and a car. We are biking through trails and kayaking and gardening in a huge garden bed we built ourself. The kayaking is usually with another family or two and hanging out on the beach with similarly aged kids. It is social if we choose to make it social and just me or my family if we choose not to invite other families. I'm in good company loading bikes or boats onto an SUV and driving off somewhere.
I've spent a few months total living in major urban areas. I didn't much experience natural spontaneous human interaction. Every day I was surrounded with a new group of total strangers that don't much interact with you. It was more "alone in a crowd" than meaningful or friendly human interaction. But maybe that's just my personality or attitude as a suburbanite.
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