The question of living together

One completely shocking solution for many people who can't afford their own home is living with a second family, or your own extended family, in the same house and sharing the costs.

What is so shocking about this is that it is so shocking an idea.

Why is that? Where did that social norm come from?

Is this something psychologists working for Madison Avenue ad agencies came up with and have been spreading among us?

Like males who would rather drive forever than stop and ask for directions, it seems many of us would rather be homeless than "forced" to live with a second family in the same space.

Sure there are people you couldn't live with. On the other hand, with 6 billion people in the world, there are surely some you'd have a great time living with. And with the internet, it might be possible to help people find other compatible people.

This is a place public health might be able to intervene in social belief systems and norms and resolve several huge national problems in affordable housing and people who are way too far in debt.

Where did this distaste for living together come from? Why is it American's have trouble even imagining the idea of living with another family, sharing a house or car?

If we can't live with other people, it's not really surprising our country as a whole has a lot of trouble socially in figuring out why other countries "don't like us."

Yes, it's a long way to go to overcome that set of norms, and to figure out why we have such trouble with what would seem to be a natural solution. Yes, there are some things that can go wrong with such solutions.

But, just because you could drive a car off the road and get hurt doesn't mean you don't drive -- you just have to learn how to stay on the road.

Maybe, putting a few hundred billion dollars into learning how to befriend and live with each other would have more effect, in the long run, than putting that money into missile defense shields or other ways of institutionalizing the idea that people hate us.

Maybe the "American dream" of having your own home is actually a nightmare, if it means we're actually terrified of other people and the only way we can live with them is to put several walls and as many feet as possible between us.

Why not solve that problem directly? If we could figure out how to be more fun to be with each other, it would open up a whole new American dream of having many friends, and reverse this dangerous trend towards isolation and no friends at all.

In college, my friend Jim had this test for a potential roommate: If we could clone them and make two of that person, could they live with each other?

Are we trying to make a planet where the mortar between the bricks won't even pass Jim's test? If there were two identical USA's, could they live with each other? Hmmm.

Would they even recognize each other as friends? If not, there is something seriously wrong with the friend-recognition software.

For all we know about technology, it's remarkable how little we know about friendship, and how to make it work.