Are you finding that more and more of us every year are having difficulties with our neighbours?
All you have to do is check Google’s list of most searched questions in a certain year and you will see how many people are searching for answers to questions such as,
- How to deal with initimidating neighbours?
- What can I do about noisy neighbours?
- How can I stop my neighbour looking into my property?
- How can I block out my neighbours noise?
- What to do with a narcisstic neighbour?
And so on…
It appears that we really are, indeed, having more issues with our neighbours than ever before. And I’m wondering why this is.
Having good or bad neighbours can seriously impact how we feel and act in our own homes and they can have a huge impact on our health, both physically and mentally. And so to see an upwards trend in something like this is something definitely worth looking into.
Why are we having so many issues with our neighbours, all across the world? And why aren’t we a community anymore?
Let’s talk about it.
Pandemic Stress
Let’s face it, the pandemic was enormously stressful for all of us across the world.
One of the most stressful aspects of the pandemic was the fear of meeting other people in case you would get the virus or spread it to someone else. We were under fire from constant messaging that being around other people was bad and could cause harm.
Unsurprisingly then, it seems that many of us have found it difficult to reintegrate into community life after nearly two years of this consistent messaging.
Notably, the pandemic has also led us to spend much more time at home than we ever have done in the past. Even while some of us have enjoyed this, we have also been realising how close our neighbours really are to us and how much of an impact they can have on us during the day, especially when we are trying to work.
We might never have noticed before how loud our neighbour’s children are during the day, screaming, playing, and banging toys off the floor while we try and concentrate on a Zoom meeting. We might never have been around in the mornings and so didn’t know our neighbours have a very loud and vibrating treadmill morning routine. We might not have heard the blenders, dogs, Peleton workouts, and everything else our neighbours get up to when we are normally at the office.
And this has been pretty difficult for a lot of people.
Once you notice noise, it’s pretty hard to go back to not noticing it.
Too Close for Comfort
On a similar note, our modern living situations are closer than ever.
More and more of us are living in apartments and flat complexes, or terraced housing. Due to simply how many people there are in the world, more and more building works have intended to put as many people as possible in as small of an area as possible, especially in big cities.
And we pay a lot for those small areas too, but the housing crisis in general is probably a topic for another blog…
The point is, we are very often living on top of each other like sardines and this can be difficult to manage, especially when it comes to things like loud or antisocial behaviour. It is a lot harder for our neighbour’s parties to annoy us whenever they live half a mile down the road, not so much when their walls are attached to ours.
It can be much harder nowadays to have our basic needs of space and peace met. How many of us even have gardens anymore, or free space to play and enjoy nature? So much of that has been replaced by tiny balconies and dark back alleyways, even in expensive establishments.
When we feel cramped, we can’t thrive, and we can’t approach other people around us with our best selves. Putting so many people together in one small place breeds stress, anxiety, and poor relationships between neighbours.
Where there used to be communities, there is now only overcrowding and an excess of hostile energy.
A Loss of The Community Spirit
And that last point leads on well to this one, too.
It is our lack of general community spirit that has caused such issues between neighbours, I think.
Social media, celebrity fame, and capitalist culture have made us all believe that we need to be special, honoured individuals. We need to be set apart from other people and have something better than all of them. We need to be unique and we need to be celebrated for that.
This culture has bred a system of people not caring about other people and not seeing things from other perspectives.
We have always had issues in the world, that would be a massive understatement at least. But, before, we met more in communities and bands of society. We came together in the good times and the bad and that meant that even though things went wrong, they could be fixed and tended to.
Now, hardly any of us even know our neighbours’ names. We pass each other in the streets or hallways and that is usually the end of it. Most of the time when we do talk, it is because one party has an issue with another and their behaviour.
It is funny that while we may be more physically cramped together than ever before, we feel farther apart than ever before.
If all our small (but stressful) issues are ever to be dealt with, we need to act like communities again. We need to communicate and work together to solve problems.
While we are all kept worlds apart from each other (by our own doing), we will always have these issues.
We need to connect, consider, and communicate with our neighbours.
How do you think we can start to do that?
I would absolutely love to hear from you with a comment below, let’s get involved now and have this discussion together.
And, hey, while you’re here, why not check out our other lifestyle and lifehacks blogs? We’d love to have you here for a little while longer!