Comment by brailsafe

> But the minute you step into the suburbs, this habit disappears.

This is exactly the feeling I get in the suburbs of most places, and I think the nature of car-centric suburbs serves as a decent analogy for the Airpodsification of otherwise more urban areas. Suburbanites want their palace that they can tightly control, and it rarely matters where it is as long as they can drive to anywhere they need to go, but they don't really like people and it feels like a deeply antisocial liminal space. There's rarely any specific reason anyone would want to be there, and even if they did, they'd have to drive, and if they chose not to, people there use their cars as tools for avoiding interactions with strangers. You wake up, get in your motorized comfort bubble / killing machine, and then drive from point A to B and then back to Point A. If you wanted to go hangout, oftentimes the act of driving that you've chosen sucks all that time away anyway. Drivers then get dogs so they have some sort of excuse to interact with other people who have dogs, or kids or whatever.

Then if they're lucky, they wake up one day and realize they don't see any real friends that aren't their immediate neighbors anymore, and they've lost the ability to understand how to meet people outside of work. Their old friends didn't come out for that bbq because it's dead boring and the bbq master is the only one that doesn't have a commute back. The bar in their basement sits empty because it turns out people actually want to go to the pub instead of sitting in the basement. The novelty was never the drinking itself, but the feeling of coming together in the same space and place as other people hanging out having a good time.