On Neighborliness & "Friends"
Sitcom Neighbors, Emersonian Friendship, and the Mutual Care Cocktail
If you are or have ever been a TV-head, you have sunk into the world of a classic sitcom or two (or twenty). Many of these involve or are based on characters who are neighbors. It’s so commonplace—these daily in-person run-ins on our screens—that we barely register it as a “load-bearing wall” (one of my favorite writing-craft metaphors) in the plot.
Some old-school favorites: I Love Lucy, Fat Albert, Three’s Company, The Jeffersons, Good Times, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, What’s Happening. In these shows, doorbells were constantly ringing and visits were spontaneous, though not always welcome (enter level two of the plot device).
Then for a time it seemed the workplace supplanted the apartment building or neighborhood as the site of endless drama and comedy. Hospital, law-firm, media, and precinct dramas still proliferate, and in recent years sitcoms like The Office, Parks and Rec, Superstore, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Abbott Elementary have drawn massive viewership. The underlying messaging of this shift: Most of what happens to us happens at work.
In between those eras, the neighborly setup had a ‘90s comeback. I am thinking in particular of shows like Seinfeld, Living Single, Martin, and Friends—all wildly popular and culturally influential in their time. This was my own young-adult era, so these shows made an enduring impression. Over two decades since their season finales, they are widely viewed in syndication by both my generation and younger ones. Old school for sure—dated, yet still resonant.
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Who still forms primary community with their neighbors? How often do friendship and neighborliness overlap these days, by choice or circumstance? Does a collection of virtual friends share the qualities of a group of neighbors?
What the hell is a friend anymore anyway?
My ears perk up when I hear of a connection with a neighbor that is closer to friendship than not, noting the practice of meaningful neighborliness in real life with both envy and a kind of wonder. It reminds me of what these old school TV shows knew and reflected back to us—that you can’t have real human connection without both spontaneity and consistency, over a sustained period of time.
In my 50s now, I am only for the first time1 engaged in that kind of neighborliness. In my adult life, most of what has happened to me indeed happened at work. And because my work has required major interpersonal investment, and time with friends has involved commuting; by day’s or week’s end, all I’ve wanted from or offered to my neighbors is basic consideration.
In late 2019, a long-term relationship ended. I was also about to leave a job after 9 years. In these circumstances of middle-aged rootlessness, it became clear that I not only wanted but needed neighborly connection in more than a superficial way; and that it was up to me to prioritize. I picked a new neighborhood (my ex kept the apartment) and rented a tiny studio on a block that gave me a friendly feeling (trees, a school, a church, people from all walks of life2 walking dogs and washing cars and sitting on stoops) and scoped the neighborhood for a welcoming coffee shop, a couple of good-vibe bars, and a local music venue. It was (is) a vibrant and dynamic neighborhood; and I was hopeful about getting to know my neighbors.
Then: the pandemic hit. And for a long time we all avoided strangers (literally) like the plague.
What the hell is a “friend” these days? What turns a friend into a neighbor, a neighbor a friend, and are we losing valuable, old-school fluidity between these? What does it mean that “friend” is a word we now commonly put between quotation marks, lest the label be mistaken for something more substantive than it is?
A thing that happens after a six-year soul slumber (see “The First Post”)3 is you look around, behold your trail of neglect, and wonder to whom you still matter and vice versa—“friends” or friends? That process for me was daunting; so I started instead with books. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s4 Essential Writings, including his essay “Friendship,” was one of my first stops.
Emerson’s old school, elevated concept of friendship is no casual affair. A friend is someone
Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine... High thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths, and enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts.
For Emerson, friendship is romance—a mutual possession and a merging—and an expansive meeting of minds and hearts. It is serious and demanding and, like most everything the Sage of Concord cares about, inextricable from moral character.
The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit to suck a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God, which many summers and many winters must ripen.
The “we” of this essay is not casual either: Emerson admits his own tragic complicity in the capriciousness of human relations.5 How easy it is to become narcissistically infatuated with a charismatic, attentive stranger who becomes a potential friend. But then what?
Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart… What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.
What a perpetual disappointment is actual society (I laughed out loud at this). How many times have I come home after a gathering or event and been utterly relieved by solitude? We genuinely want invigorating and meaningful connection; we get our hopes up; but our friendship fibres indeed prove thin.
Emersonian friendships are tough and extraordinarily honest—
When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know… A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought.
—and they commit, for better or worse:
[Friendship] is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution.
Friendship is “rare and costly”: The holistic truthfulness required clashes with our preference for smooth, bright, and easy relations.
We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet requires some civility, requires to be humored... Let [my friend] not cease an instant to be himself… I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance6, to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.
As lofty and rarefied as Emerson’s real friendship is, it also converges with the mundanities of life—the stuff of neighborliness.
I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub.
And yet he warns against too much of the quotidien, wishing for just “a little” citizenry, its “exchange of gifts, of useful loans.” On the one hand, the grounded element of friendship is necessary, “it is good neighbourhood; it watches with the sick; it holds the pall at the funeral”; at the same time it “quite loses sight of the delicacies and nobility of the relation.” In this vein, Emerson goes even further:
Why go to his house, or know his mother and brother and sisters? Why be visited by him at your own? Are these things material to our covenant? Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but not news, nor pottage.7 I can get politics and chat and neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions.
Here, Emerson loses me. Here, the forever impact on humanity of a seminal historical event—a lethal worldwide pandemic—is clear.
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During that year and a half, we all spent a lot of time being “spirit” to one another. The 60-90 minute call—talking talking talking about all the meaningful things of the heart and mind with friends—became my almost daily norm. By the time all that came to an end, I had really kind of had it with phone and Zoom dates—with narrating the state of my soul: I wanted to do stuff with other people who were physically proximal and shared my day-to-day reality.
I wanted to pet their pets and chat on their stoops and complain together about traffic cops and shop at their small businesses. I wanted relational paths that crossed naturally and did not require three weeks advance appointments or 45-minute commutes. I wanted to spend time with people who could get to know my new partner. I just wanted to live life with other humans—spontaneously, consistently—and yes, visit their houses and have them visit mine, exchange gifts and useful loans (an egg, a snow shovel), maybe even talk politics and serve hearty pottage on a cold winter day.
I realized—reflecting on friendships before and friendships after—how much of intimacy is in muscle memory.
Living within 5 or 10 blocks or minutes of each other, by choice or by circumstance, seems as good a common ground8 for building connection as cultural background, occupation, education, politics, or hobbies. And yet many of us today are more likely to join a chat or activity group based on one of the above than to spend more time with our neighbors.
Ultimately it is a privileged position—Emerson was a wealthy man, by inheritance—to devalue the relational interdependencies of daily life. When we have everything we need, materially, we have the ability to detach from neighbors and prioritize the abstract. I am reminded of old school greetings, in contexts of scarcity, when running into a neighbor: “What’s goin on?” “Nothin’ but the rent.” Or, in Korea, the literal translation of a traditional how-are-you morning greeting is, “Have you eaten breakfast yet?”
At my gym in Harlem NYC, Friends plays on continuous loop on two TVs mounted above the treadmills. At a rest stop in San Antonio, TX this past week, I came across the above T-Shirt. And in a Superbowl ad a few weeks ago, Friends icon Jennifer Aniston (Rachel) rehashed with Ben Affleck (playing David Schwimmer’s character Ross) the ubiquitous Rachel-Ross “We were on a break!” meme.9 For better or worse, the lasting cultural impact of Friends is undeniable. There was some kind of there there.
How would Emerson have assessed the friendships among the six Friends friends?
I think he would affirm they are completely themselves—vulnerable, sincere, dropping “even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought.” They practice both compassionate and tough love, as much “nettles in each others’ sides” as they are “aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death”—citizens as much as cherubs. Over 10 years, they go through marriages and breakups and more breakups and job changes and health issues and a range of pretty traumatic family messes; some babies are even born.
They are also, through it all, neighbors. Ross’s sister Monica (Courtney Cox) welcomes runaway bride and high-school friend Rachel to live with her—taking the bedroom that street-smart, New Age-y Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) once occupied. Ross’s college roommate Chandler (Matthew Perry) lives across the hall with struggling actor Joey (Matt LeBlanc). Ross and Phoebe live, presumably, nearby—joining the gang at Monica and Rachel’s apartment daily. And, they have a “third place” right downstairs—Central Perk, the coffee shop that allowed for even more spontaneous consistency—carrying on the third-place sitcom tradition of Arnold’s (Happy Days), Rob’s Place (What’s Happening), and Cheers.
There is much to critique about Friends, from a cultural studies perspective; you could certainly dismiss the show, as many have, as white-centered classist heteronormative shite, or even an inferior knock-off of the underrecognized Living Single,10 which premiered a year before Friends.
The basic setup for both shows is undeniably similar and, I would argue, at the heart of their staying power: A family of choice, melded with actual family—siblings Ross and Monica, cousins Khadijha and Synclaire—who anchor the group with their affable stability and permanent hospitality in a large West Village apartment and a duplex in a Brooklyn brownstone, respectively.
The group members are like you but also not like you, and—unlike in many families and small-town communities—there is acceptance of those differences, as well as of your individuality and freedom to fail (from the Friends theme song: your job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s DOA).
With a group of friends who are also neighbors, you are living the individuated life of self-actualization, and you have Emerson’s “aid and comfort” through “rough roads and hard fare.” You have familial and small town interdependence and big city freedom; Mayberry11 in The Big Apple. Even cozier: you have Sesame Street for grown ups.
In a 2025 podcast on the topic of unconventional friendships, political commentator Ezra Klein revealed the loss and loneliness of moving across the country for work, away from his closest friend. He pointed out that it is more common to move for a job than to move—or stay put—for a friendship, and questioned why this is. It would seem that Emerson’s disembodied ideal of friendship, all mind and soul, predominates when it comes to negotiating the priorities of modern life. Surely a real friendship can thrive virtually or epistolarily, says the culture, in service of professional imperatives or dreams.
What would be the alternative? These TV friends lived in the same buildings and apartments—with varying rotations—for the life of the series. In real life, as they ascended professionally and financially, they may have more likely graduated to bigger and better apartments, in different neighborhoods and cities. Because that’s what modern people do. And isn’t modernity at its core the steady expansion of choice?
What then would it mean to choose the old school limitations of neighborliness and to prioritize consistency and spontaneity over time, in relationships?
This conscious choice to limit choice—to reject the assumption that freedom equals maximizing limitless choice—is very new old school. Klein’s podcast guest Rhaina Cohen, in her 2024 book The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center, profiled individuals who prioritize friendship proximity in unconventional ways. And, according to a recent Business Insider article, Gen-Z is embracing this self-limiting lifestyle:
Young adults in America are now looking closer to home for something you can't promote on Instagram and TikTok: their own version of Central Perk or Cheers. These local bars, restaurants, and coffee shops where everybody knows your name are most notable for what they mean to their regulars more than what they're selling to anyone outside of the neighborhood.
Maybe the trend will last, maybe it won’t. But as long as it benefits its practicians both psychically and financially, regularmaxxing may continue to foster the friendship-neighbor Venn diagram intersection.
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Once the world opened up again, I did begin to frequent a local bar, a cafe, live music spots, a regular grocery store, and a gym. All within a three-block radius. I volunteered with a community garden focused on neighborhood food security and got to know people in my building, along with other neighbors we’d run into at the above places or en route to them. My partner and I even began to invite neighbors we didn’t know very well over for meals, urging ourselves to take risks and get over our fear of rejection. I know it should be simple and obvious and is much belated; but I am grateful and in a way proud—the way you’re proud of overcoming a lifelong phobia, or an Achilles heel—to be sloughing off anonymous hyper-independence and getting to know my neighbors…
That when we walk into the bar, Tommy the owner greets us, and Ricardo the bartender knows our names and our drinks (rye Old Fashioned, light on the simple syrup); Yannick the cafe manager always lights up and says, “Hey, how you guys been?” and we ask “How’s business?” and he actually tells us what’s good and what’s hard; Max, who’s lived on the block since the ‘70s and whom people call The Mayor, chats us up when we walk past his house and shares health wisdom and real estate tips; we swap dog-care with Anne when we travel; Randall the imperious stoop sitter and sidewalk sweeper sometimes says “Allll right” when we say “Good morning” on our dog walk despite his overt canine aversion; and Alice entrusts me with garden responsibilities when she is out of town.
At the heart of what we’ve lost—what’s been thoughtlessly tossed to the discards pile in the mad rush of social and technological progress—is mutual care, on a daily basis. We have subsumed both our profound need for that care, and our availability to provide it from/for those right in front of us: The result is a fraught cocktail of loneliness and shame.
“Proud” isn’t the right word. When you get down to and expose what’s two or three layers beneath your fear or distress—which, more often than I’d like to admit, is loneliness and shame—what you feel is relief. You can stop performing what modern life expects of you and start inhabiting your most original (in both senses of the word) humanness. In the end, we are here together for a limited time, and there is so much need, in ourselves and all around. Mutual care—today, right where you are—is really all there is.
I did try, and had a couple of earnest false starts in my 20s—which I will write about anon.
It is both true and oversimplifying to say my neighborhood, then and now, was/is gentrifying.
If this is your first read at The New Old School, you’ll see that the essays here are meant to to be read serially and/or cumulatively.
Case in point re: footnote 3—Emerson made the first of what will be several appearances in these essays in a previous post, “My Bread and Butter”
Much ink has been spilled about the Concord, MA community at which Emerson was the center. You might start with either Susan Cheever’s American Bloomsbury or Megan Marshall’s biography of Margaret Fuller.
Normally Emerson’s patriarchal lens would irk me, but here I will grant that women are more plagued by the need for harmony and to be liked than men are. Which is not to say such need is unwarranted or irrational.
Soup or stew.
A new reality show on HBO Max, Neighbors, takes a darker view: Neighbor relations as turf wars. Haven’t watched it; not eager to. The documentary The Perfect Neighbor by Geeta Gandhbir, on the other hand, is well worth watching.
A dating litmus test that persists to this day, i.e. is it cheating if you sleep with someone else during a relationship time-out?
This is an important debate. Here are a couple of interesting takes by Brentin Mock and Living Single actress Erika Alexander.
If you live in a close-knit small town or among extended family, I understand this may all be nonsense to you. But, you are an increasing minority: The American “loneliness epidemic” is a real thing.
In retirement (more than half a year in), I’m thinking a lot about social connections - cultivating new ones and honoring old, earned friendships. For me, your essay clarifies how both precious and “regular” relationships nourish us. Looking forward to more posts. Great start!
Ah, Emerson’s mushiness vs nettle! Loved this whole long juicy essay, Sonya. So happy to be here. Thank you.