City life
Private renting in a city means moving every year or two, living with strangers, never quite putting down roots. The social life that stability provides doesn't materialise, because nothing is stable long enough.
Private renting in a major city often means moving frequently — when leases end, when landlords sell, when the rent increases beyond what you can afford. Each move breaks whatever neighbourhood familiarity you'd built. The coffee shop where the barista knew your order, the walk that felt like yours, the sense of knowing a corner of the city — gone, and you start again somewhere less convenient.
The transience also affects the emotional investment you make. If you know you might have to leave in a year, it's harder to put the energy into building community where you are. The rational response to impermanence is to hold lightly — which also means holding at a social distance.
Shared housing means living with people you didn't choose and might have nothing in common with. You share a kitchen but not a life. Some housemate situations produce genuine friendship; many produce a polite coexistence where you pass in corridors but never really connect. Living with people who are effectively strangers, in the intimate proximity of a shared home, is its own kind of loneliness.
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