Looking at the small town where I grew up, people in the generations before mine had the luxury that the friends they made in kindergarten pretty much lived next door to them their entire lives. They went to school together, they worked together, they saw each other all the time around town, they played softball and pickup basketball together on town teams, they married into large extended families, and their kids went to school together. For my generation, that's broken down, ultimately because that local economy has faltered and died. We had to go out into the world and make our way in a mass of strangers, without that deeply ingrained commonality to fall back on. And that's hard.