Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

Post by jacob »

Side-note:
It's likely for the better not to think of the social sphere in terms of skills and capital, since the analogy to the substantially more mechanical fields like money and technical work is likely to hurt rather than help. IOW, the social sphere should be thought of much more as something that is part of you and you're part of (cf. meaning-making, faith, beliefs, identity, ...) rather than something you add onto your tech-tree (soldering electronics, changing a tire, writing covered calls, learning the names of birds,...).

That said, some theoretical knowledge might be helpful but it also might not. Long and boring discussions about just how helpful such theory is mirror the diet-wars in that "what works for you works differently for me".

If you're "a normal person" in the sense that you're like the most common person, that is, a Kegan3/4, Guardian/Artisan, concrete-operational, in the 80-120 IQ range, your Venn-intersection with any random encounter in terms of how you think and what you think about will be large. Most people will be like you and you'll connect with them easily w/o needing to "translate". In terms of theory of mind, you already own the standard model and so you can presume everybody is much like you except perhaps with small quirks. Because you're already at the center of the "territory" (downtown so to speak), you have no need for "maps" and would easily but naively conclude that no maps are needed.

If you're not "a normal person" then the less normality you express, the more desperately you need such a map lest you buy into what everybody else is presuming---that this should be trivial---and proceed to conclude that you're just terrible at connecting. Whereas the "normal person" is a native in their own country, you'll be communicating in a foreign language in a foreign culture. Thus a "mental grammar" is helpful.

I've mentioned my favorite "grammars" before which in both cases have been life changing.

Still, this is not a "skill" that one can book-learn one's way into. It requires practice. But practice with a map/system might be more productive than random practice or practice that presumes that everybody is like you insofar they aren't.

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

Post by Alphaville »

jacob wrote:
Wed Jun 02, 2021 9:02 am
It's likely for the better not to think of the social sphere in terms of skills and capital, since the analogy to the substantially more mechanical fields like money and technical work is likely to hurt rather than help. IOW, the social sphere should be thought of much more as something that is part of you and you're part of (cf. meaning-making, faith, beliefs, identity, ...) rather than something you add onto your tech-tree. This is different from learning how to solder electronics or change a tire.
yes! this is very good.
jacob wrote:
Wed Jun 02, 2021 9:02 am
If you're not "a normal person" then the less normality you express, the more desperately you need such a map lest you buy into what everybody else is presuming---that this should be trivial---and proceed to conclude that you're just terrible at connecting. Whereas the "normal person" is a native in their own country, you'll be communicating in a foreign language in a foreign culture. Thus a "mental grammar" is helpful.
and this as well.

i should add also that this attempt to understand the "other" must rest on the very important pillar of self-acceptance. because not-normals are often rejected/misunderstood/miscast, this rejection is often introjected and becomes the basis of toxic shame ("i am wrong").

when the feeling of one's difference is shame-based, it leads to many scenarios such as:

-wishing desperately one were normal, and feeling like a failure for not being able to be normal

-hiding from shame with grandiosity, acting like "the little people" are somewhat inferior and one is superior

-overcompensating for feelings of inadequacy with ultra-competitiveness and workaholism/overachievement, always having to be right, or other addictions

a healthy and cheerful acceptance of one's differences provides many benefits, such as:

-the ability to explain one's self better to others, and gain their acceptance as a valuable eccentric, rather than staying outside the group as "a weirdo."

-the dissolution of shame and the accompanying grandiosity

-the realization that intelligence is not everything in life, and the recognition of many other human qualities such as love, loyalty, generosity, selflessness, courage, humor, kindness, grit, sensibility, honesty, strength, tolerance,good will, etc etc

-the ceasing of empty striving to fulfill one's wounded self-esteem

-the consequent development of humility, and the ability to also accept others as they are, which leads to:

-better relations with people from all walks of life, and

-the reintegration to humanity, a bit like in hesse's steppenwolf

theoretical frameworks of understanding are of course important, but these issues of self-and-other acceptance are deeply emotional, and must be worked through at the emotional or "spiritual" level.

e.g. developing compassion for one's self AND others goes beyond mere intellectual understanding, and must be realized on one's own life.

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

Post by jacob »

Alphaville wrote:
Wed Jun 02, 2021 9:22 am
i should add also that this attempt to understand the "other" must rest on the very important pillar of self-acceptance. because not-normals are often rejected/misunderstood/miscast, this rejection is often introjected and becomes the basis of toxic shame ("i am wrong").
It is for sure much easier to connect/relate to others from a mentally healthy level. While I'm not a super-fan of enneagrams, https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-descriptions contains the most useful description of how mentally healthy one is (scroll to near the bottom of the description of each type) at any given moment in time.

INT*s, which describe 80%+ on this forum (and ~3% IRL), are almost always 5s. So for example, compare
the link's type 5 description wrote:Level 3: Attain skillful mastery of whatever interests them. Excited by knowledge: often become expert in some field. Innovative and inventive, producing extremely valuable, original works. Highly independent, idiosyncratic, and whimsical.
to
Level 6: Begin to take an antagonistic stance toward anything which would interfere with their inner world and personal vision. Become provocative and abrasive, with intentionally extreme and radical views. Cynical and argumentative.
They go from 1 to 9. It's pretty obvious that someone in the former mode is much more pleasant to deal with than when in the latter mode; even if the latter can be entertaining to watch engaging in mud fights on social media as long as you're not the one moderating or doing damage control.

Enneagrams describe not so much "what you are" but rather "what motivates you" and so this is useful for gauging how healthy one's motivations currently are. In the moment, solutions to either side i.e. N+1 or N-1 seems like a way out.

However, in general, positive experiences tend to beget more positive experiences and increasing mental health and vice versa, but one particularly bad experience can send one back down just as one particularly positive experience can send one up(*). As always people have ups and downs and so it's proper to think of it as a range when someone is at their best and when someone is at their worst. Experience, self-knowledge, and tables can provide some perspective and reduce volatility.

(*) A socialization super-power is the ability to send other people up. This is essentially what therapists charge money for(?)

Add: It's also more likely that one is at a healthy level when connections to others are working well and vice versa. Unfortunately, this positive feedback mechanism is part of what creates the trap if things start heading south. Mentally unhealthy motivation -> increased social distance -> more unhealthy behavior -> more distance. And so on.

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

Post by Scott 2 »

I'd encourage framing this in the context of - "who is the person I want to be? what is the role I want to fill in my relationships? Is that a realistic need other people have?" Ideally that aligns with the person you are or enjoy being. The social capital emerges from a strong fit.

Adopting a persona for expected yields and capital... I don't think it's intended in a negative light, but many would take extreme offense.

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

“jacob” wrote: It's likely for the better not to think of the social sphere in terms of skills and capital, since the analogy to the substantially more mechanical fields like money and technical work is likely to hurt rather than help
Generally true, but depends on where you are coming from on quadrant graph such as Ego created. As an eNTP female who is naturally socially open (Ne) and warm (Fe), it is very often to MY benefit to be as blatantly mechanical/technical/nerdy/dismal-style-economist (Ti) in social relationships as I can muster, because it is my best/only means of boundary maintenance and/or being attractively bitchy. For example, for ME (and zero percent of you young INTJ males) it is example of very high functioning to present a man with a spreadsheet correlating his repeated terrible behavior with my decline in lifestyle enjoyment. I feel like I am being mean when I do something like this, but my experience is that it is always good likely to be quite successful practice unless the man to whom I present it is not very high functioning IXFP, in which case his response might be something like scaring me by breaking something and saying “You are too nerdy to fuck.”

ETA: The question an ENTP should always ask herself towards higher functioning is “Does this make sense?” Ergo, an ENTP should also strive towards investing in social relationships that “make sense” rather than those that are novel or interesting (Ne) or in which she makes other people happy/harmonious at her own expense (tertiary Fe.)

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

Post by Alphaville »

jacob wrote:
Wed Jun 02, 2021 11:54 am
It is for sure much easier to connect/relate to others from a mentally healthy level. While I'm not a super-fan of enneagrams, https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-descriptions contains the most useful description of how mentally healthy one is (scroll to near the bottom of the description of each type) at any given moment in time.

INT*s, which describe 80%+ on this forum (and ~3% IRL), are almost always 5s. So for example, compare


[...]

They go from 1 to 9. It's pretty obvious that someone in the former mode is much more pleasant to deal with than when in the latter mode; even if the latter can be entertaining to watch engaging in mud fights on social media as long as you're not the one moderating or doing damage control.

[...]

(*) A socialization super-power is the ability to send other people up. This is essentially what therapists charge money for(?)
right, but those enneagrams health levels look like checklists to verify where in the health spectrum one fits. a therapists' job is not merely to provide theories or benchmarks, there is a lot more to therapy.

psychotherapeutic theories are generally not enneagrams, but are different more "accepted" or verifiable theories (eg evidence-based). here for example, the concepts of self-esteem or toxic shame or dysfunction are well-established in psychotherapy and its accompanying literature. so one could operate productively from that paradigm.

but besides the offering of new paradigms, the therapist has to perform the hard interpersonal work of helping the patient overcome resistance to change and offering the emotional support when old images of the self or the world are discarded. this is heavy stuff, and no easy feat."the return of the repressed" can bring about breakdowns. the quality of the practitioner matters--a lot. the work takes a toll on them too.

...

anyway, the reason i offered the idea of toxic shame is because you offered the model of mental grammar to people who, being outliers, lack a way to connect with others.

so i wanted to add that, besides the mental grammar, one needs to recover from the years/decades of hurt and damage from being disconnected from others. because disconnection in itself (from family, from friends, from society) posits damage.

we are social animals, and rejection is painful, especially in childhood, and so we outliers grow up to neurotically overcompensate and/or persist in isolation. perhaps not everyone, but a good number of "gifted" people suffer problems due to their own outlier nature. eg see the work of alice miller.

so the idea of a mental grammar, while useful to "see" how others may operate, does not cure feelings of social alienation and inadequacy and toxic shame. acceptance, by one's self and one's group, is what does that.

this is why support groups for so many conditions exist: by creating an environment of acceptance of their condition, they allow members to accept themselves, and thus overcome the secret shame that fuels their dysfunction in the first place.

ps this is some heavy shit when one lives through it rather than talk about it intellectually. it's not like a puzzle that one solves. there may be a puzzle aspect to it, but it's not the hardest thing about it, by far.

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

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Much of what is evidence-based or evidence-driven is an experimental cul de sac encapsulating a narrow interpretation of what "evidence" is. Less closed and more open "theories" or "grammars" are required to integrate these dead-ends into a main-street. For instance, Enneagram integrates shame, fear, and anger while differentiating three flavors of each. Good luck finding a nearly closed-loop experimental setup that can verify/falsify claims made across three rich and complex emotions, let alone nine. Thus, these tools serve a slightly different purpose, to help integrate that which we do not have time to verify/falsify objectively (i.e. narration). Whether they are encoded in a particular grammar for transmission or hard-wired into action, they are still compatible with science/rationality and necessary [in absence of spontaneous insight(*)] to start seeing how it all works together.

A psychotherapist without access to main-street will certainty be projecting things that just aren't there the majority of the time. Sometimes the recipients replace what they hear with their own interpretations and end up reaching a placebo-driven outcome. The main street is different in every town, so integration of these primary paths requires going beyond any single representation.. forming the highways of form-less intuition(*).

Everyone starts with a slightly different collection of dead-ends, and so the paths that each person must take to reach the highway vary.

(*) Using vision-logic or platonic-forms or whatever.. which is totally possible by the way and much more enduring than anything that can be said.

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

Post by Alphaville »

daylen wrote:
Wed Jun 02, 2021 2:36 pm
Much of what is evidence-based or evidence-driven is an experimental cul de sac encapsulating a narrow interpretation of what "evidence" is
ok, fine, but i didn't mean for the sidebar to become the main subject.

however, yes, i take some of what i said back: i did a search and some therapists will use enneagrams. as a way of excuse i'll offer that this is the first time i hear about it, while "abuse, toxic shame, dysfunction" are common language and part of the mainstream culture at this point. so, new to me anyway, i was ignorant.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=enneagram+the ... pad&ia=web

nevertheless, the subject i'm trying to introduce to the conversarion is that isolation = damage, and that years of isolation will cause emotional damage and social dysfunction, and that the work of healing said comdition is spiritual/emotional, no so much intellectual/abstract, and i hope that's the part of my contribution that stands out and does not get ignored.
Last edited by Alphaville on Wed Jun 02, 2021 3:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

Post by daylen »

@Alphaville Right, I was attempting to extend onto that theme. It's isolating living in a cul de sac.

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

Post by Alphaville »

daylen wrote:
Wed Jun 02, 2021 3:00 pm
@Alphaville Right, I was attempting to extend onto that theme. It's isolating living in a cul de sac.
ah, im sorry, i read what you wrote as a dismissal of evidence-based therapy. which i'm not trying to debate here...

i was just trying to explain that my understanding of social shaming as suffered by folks that fall outside standard deviations of iq (and thus the point i am trying to make) comes from a different therapeutic model than enneagrams. in the process i said also something false about enneagram theory. but ok. i was just trying to talk about internalized shame from social rejection.

eg see

http://polymatharchives.blogspot.com/20 ... luded.html
Because of the dearth of objective evidence, the cause of the exclusion cannot be determined directly. Garth Zietsman has said, referring to people with D15IQs over 152, 'A common experience with people in this category or higher is that they are not wanted - the masses (including the professional classes) find them an affront of some sort.' While true, it is more likely a symptom than a cause of the exclusion. We need to understand why they are an affront.
this of course begins in childhood

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

Post by daylen »

Alphaville wrote:
Wed Jun 02, 2021 3:14 pm
which i'm not trying to debate here...
I pretty much never am so we can avoid that bump down the road. People often think I am disagreeing with them, but mostly I feel like I am playing around in a sandbox of ideas. :)

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

Post by Alphaville »

daylen wrote:
Wed Jun 02, 2021 3:28 pm
I pretty much never am so we can avoid that bump down the road. People often think I am disagreeing with them, but mostly I feel like I am playing around in a sandbox of ideas. :)
ah ha ha... i understand now--all good! one thought triggered another thought... yes.

anyway, to follow up on the previous: here is a different theory about why people far from the mean are socially excluded:

https://shynesssocialanxiety.com/socially-inept/

comparing both articles... ok i repost here: http://polymatharchives.blogspot.com/20 ... luded.html one blames "us," the other blames "them." (doesn't matter which group is which-- i mean each piece blames "them").

but the point i'm trying to bring up is that, one way or another, smart people tend to end up being socially isolated to different degrees. the farther from the mean, the bigger the isolation it seems. this leaves emotional scars, which require their own healing beyond the intellectual level.

i guess what i'm trying to say is, it's important to work on the emotions, not just on the intellectual aspect of emotional problems. intellectualization can be a form of avoiding the hard work of grappling with actual pain. but in this, a good group and a good therapist can offer the emotional support one requires to lug that load.

and now for a classic star trek interlude:

Image

the difference before and after therapy perhaps is that the latter is conscious pain that enables clarity and compassion, and the former is unconscious pain that hides in darkness to drive and reproduce dysfunction.

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

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(haven't read the thread yet, but:)

here is one example. This is an American guy who lives in Vietnam. He's lived in the same neighborhood for, IDK, a few years at least. Basically, he walks around the neighborhood for 10-15 minutes, and ~40 people who know him say hello and many want to start conversations. This situation is a bit 'special' since this is foreigner living in Vietnam, who knows their language well (a rarity there). But you could contrast this with the thousands of Americans who live in Vietnam, don't know Vietnamese, and don't integrate with their community much. If they go walk around, not many people say hi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1PStrd4ZxE&t=70s

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

Post by Qazwer »

Physician, Judge, Professor, Scientist, Corporate Executive are jobs. They after a while are not intellectually that hard. They require work. Being a genius does not help you do the work - often repetitive and mind numbing. Of course higher IQ are not needed (once you reach a certain threshold). Social isolation may or may not occur. It helps if you find your own ‘tribe’ however you define that. If you are high intellect and want to explore that, then you need to find similar. If you like skateboards or surfing or whatever then likewise you need to find that. High IQ only limits you if you find enjoyment only in those activities that require that IQ (which BTW is rarely in the listed professions).

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

Post by Alphaville »

Qazwer wrote:
Wed Jun 02, 2021 9:27 pm
Social isolation may or may not occur. It helps if you find your own ‘tribe’ however you define that. If you are high intellect and want to explore that, then you need to find similar.
that sort of thing locks you into a "tribe of outsiders" which perpetuates tribalism. "we're the smart ones, over there are the stupids with their skateboards." just like an american high school with its cliques. https://www.metroparent.com/parenting/t ... dentified/

if you want to really have a high level of social development you need to learn to connect with all sorts of folks. sure, they may not all be your best friends, but at least connect as a human, be able to see yourself in others, know how to relate across cultures and social classes.

i once had a philosophy professor who tried to joke with me about the fact that the parents of one of his graduate students (they were vising from abroad) were "low budget." what a fucking asshole! dude may have been intelligent at reading certain types of texts, but he was very stupid at others...

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

Post by Qazwer »

‘ that sort of thing locks you into a "tribe of outsiders" which perpetuates tribalism. "we're the smart ones, over there are the stupids with their skateboards."’

I meant that you can be the high IQ person who likes skate boards or anime or drugs or whatever - you can pick whatever tribe you want
You can also pick the high IQ tribe too. But most people and most interests fall into these at some level. As you get older you see that people fall into more than one and so you have friends with different interests. But you only pick the high IQ tribe if you want to. You pick the groups with interests simmilar to your own. Most of these groups (like most jobs) do not require genius level IQ. They involve whatever the shared interests are.
You may or may not care about the Clippers chances or the kardashians or the end of democracy as we know it. Or you may decide to join the Alex P Keaton Young Republicans - whatever. Finding your tribe is only dependent on IQ if that is what you choose your tribe to be. But finding people with similar interests is helpful in learning how to interact with others. That is often a step in learning how to develop social capital. After learning how to socialize in your tribe, it becomes easier to socialize in general or you may find that you have a large enough group in whatever your tribe is.
True, that can isolate you too. People are interesting and fascinating on multiple levels. Learning socializing skills has to start somewhere though and we are a tribal species. The tribe can even be an an interest in the application of systems theory to lifestyle design with the grander desire to improve human impact on future generations.

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

Post by Alphaville »

Qazwer wrote:
Wed Jun 02, 2021 11:16 pm
I meant that you can be the high IQ person who likes skate boards or anime or drugs or whatever - you can pick whatever tribe you want
You can also pick the high IQ tribe too. But most people and most interests fall into these at some level. As you get older you see that people fall into more than one and so you have friends with different interests. But you only pick the high IQ tribe if you want to. You pick the groups with interests simmilar to your own. Most of these groups (like most jobs) do not require genius level IQ. They involve whatever the shared interests are.
yeah of course many people have their many interests, but one is not always free to pick what group one joins. more often than not the group is picked for one by others. i.e. people size you up and categorize you. it's not just a matter of interests. people get sorted not just by iq but also looks, wealth, social class, culture/ethnicity, dress and fashion, family ties, speech patterns, general attitude, etc. you might not want to join the emo kids, but maybe that's who you end up stuck with regardless.

and of course relating to other people by interests is a good thing, but interests don't solve every social question. there are hierarchies within interest groups too, and those aren't always necessarily benevolent--it really depends on the group and the kind of people in it.

the other thing is that the older you get the less rejection matters, provided thar you already have developed a base or group where you have strong ties, including a family. socialization happens during adolescence, and yes, it begins with tribes, but then it starts to open up into a more cross-tribal/universal thing. tribes become more inclusive or at least more tolerant of each other because adults realize they live in a bigger society and need to function with different people, not just their besties. but still we move into different spheres where one is welcome or unwelcome depending on all manner of social performance.

but if you get to adulthood without a basic ability to relate to others, you have problems that aren't merely intellectual, and there needs to be some emotional repair work. that doesn't mean one can't be a good person at the margins, but isolation and marginalization create non-trivial difficulties for individuals. e.g, dostoevsky's "notes from underground" being a classic example. or the unabomber.

-

edited for many typos, and i'm sure many more remain
Last edited by Alphaville on Thu Jun 03, 2021 7:25 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

What they don’t seem to realize is that their valued embrace of heterarchy is itself a hierarchical judgment...
They are articulate on the lamentable value judgments of others, but strangely inarticulate- totally silent, actually- as to how and why they arrived at their own. Their self-ethic of inarticulacy and their other-ethic of vocal condemnation combine to form a large club with which they simply bash others in the name of kindness. This does little to articulate the nature of human value systems, the nature of how men and women go about choosing the good, and the true, and the beautiful, choices that involve ranking, and choices that these critics make and then deny that they have made...

Why are qualitative distinctions built into the fabric of human orientation? Why is trying to deny value itself a value? Why is denying ranking itself a ranking? And given that, how can we sanely and consciously choose our unavoidable hierarchies, and not merely fall into the ethics of unacknowledgment and suppression and inarticulacy?
-Ken Wilber-“Sex, Ecology, Spirituality “

Currently reading. Seemed somewhat relevant to discussion.

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

Post by jacob »

@7wb5 - If you liked that, you're gonna love "Boomeritis".

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Re: Methods and examples of highly developed social capital

Post by jacob »

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html again. This applies to the wider renaissance work. While there's overlap between different areas getting to a highly developed level in any of them does require taking energy and time away from other areas. In particular, the capital cost may be split into acquisition and maintenance. Unlike, say, investment capital, the maintenance of social capital grows proportional to the amount especially when it comes to strong links.

I know someone similar to C40's block neighbor who literally can and will spend an hour walking <half a mile because they talk with several different people---basically everyone they meet along the way---inquiring what's up/how the family is/what's happening/... This requires an active interest in people. Another important factor here is having lived in the same place for decades while being involved in the community. Both of these factors are required. In particular community involvement that ties into the city, e.g. school board, fire department, politics, neighborhood watch, library, ... seems to pay particularly high dividends. But again, it's a lot of time and energy and so one may decide that other work gets priority.

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