Moved here a couple years ago, initially met the neighbors and know their names, but haven’t had more than a handful of couple sentence interactions since then.
On the one hand, I do want a little distance: I’m not trying to hang out all the time or necessarily make new best friends. But still seems like the neighborly thing to know each other a little bit more, to have someone to call in case of emergency, or hey your dog got out, hey the global order has collapsed let’s band together to keep out the raiders, etc.
So interested to know, if you do interact with your neighbors, how did you get started? What is the extent of your interaction?
My interaction with my neighbors is just to the extent of saying “hi” when we bump into each other and that’s it. They have a friendly dog and I love dogs, so I did offer them that I could dog sit for them if they ever needed it, but they never took up the offer. I’ve spoken way more to their dog than I ever did to them.
Oh well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I believe the era of “love thy neighbour as thyself” is long gone. Back in the day there were many reasons to interact with your neighbors, such as for keeping up with the local news and gossip, borrowing rations when you’ve run out of stuff, or keeping an eye out on your place when you’re away etc. But these days, in the era of the Internet, home deliveries and security cameras, there’s very little need to interact with your neighbors. Which is a bit sad, but I guess that’s the way the world works now.
Lots of people still do all of these things. My wife and I are friends with all of the neighbors around our house and I’ve even given milk to one of them when they were cooking and discovered they were out. We do all the things that you mentioned, plus have little neighborhood parties.