I value the social aspect, but honestly I just don't need help from people for the most part, so people helping me with stuff is not something I think about at all. I definitely do not borrow things from people - I'm not opposed in theory, but I can't think of anything I would want or need.
Don't you live dab center in a giant metropolis and thus have access to housing, food, and everything else you need due to the fact that other people are there to provide it/create a collective need for it?
Except that's not remotely what people are talking about here? This is a thread about social ties and friends helping each other.
I see your point - obviously it’s not the same as engaging with those people on a personal reciprocal level - but city living & especially renting in a multi-unit building (iirc you rent?) is itself outsourcing a lot of what people otherwise use those social ties
for, so saying you don’t participate in an informal borrowing economy is itself a spotlight on the fact that all the goods & services that make life (even a hyper-frugal life like yours) possible are
available for purchase (or publicly provided) from other people. You “don’t need help from people for the most part” because what you do get from others isn’t considered “help”, it’s either purchased or public service.
In the middle of nowhere, though, there’s often no choice but to seek help from people you know because services aren’t professionally available or new goods aren’t timely. So 2Birds was pointing out the potato-potahto of “help from other people” - your needful things still all come from other people - but most of the time, in no small part because of where you live, your needs can be (affordably!) abstracted into the transactions of paying others (or paying taxes, same thing) rather than forced reliance on informal social ties to get them.
I’m betting you see what I mean, so pivoting to how this relates to OP’s question: most forms of capital - density, social ties, personal assets, personal skills - can be partially substituted. Absent density, you need some combination of skills, a lot more money, or personal connections.
What the implicit wealth of dense urbanism creates is a
choice about whether to enmesh personally or not because cities offer
impersonalized “collective human capital.”
Say your high rise roof is leaking or heat’s out. Call the rental office or notify the building association - it’s paid by your rent or fees. A professional repairperson will be out with their equipped truck in hours. If you live in the middle of nowhere instead, you can be handy yourself, or be rich enough to pay extra for the extended service area... but your likely best & fastest bet is to call Jim from two doors over, & he’ll have to borrow Mary’s toolkit because his brother is using his that weekend.
Need to get 30 miles from home? Trains & buses are professionally operated, or an Uber driver can be there in a pinch. Unless you live in the sticks - either you have to fork out to own or rent a car, or you schedule for Terry’s day off.
Vacation’s coming up & you want a fresh read without paying sticker price, so you go to the library... unless you’re in an unincorporated area, where it’s either an extra week’s delay even with pricy shipping, or you call Sue, the only other reader in town, to see if she has anything you can borrow.
When the
impersonal relationships to get these things, with the roofer, driver, librarian, are on tap, you don’t notice them as dependencies; you don’t have to acknowledge & attend to them as a form of as “collective human capital” to get by day-to-day. Since the majority of humans on earth do live in cities, that’s the subtle bias you will hear most often on the forum. Hopping on a rental bike to a 24-hour grocery store can take the place of asking the neighbor for the proverbial cup of sugar, but either is the benefit of “collective human capital,” whether taxpayer-funded, market-created, or personally cultivated.
To OP’s exact question, although mustachianism promotes accumulation of several forms of wealth that
can be substituted for personal ties, such as personal skills & personal assets, mustachianism never suggested isolation was a desirable. Just the opposite - MMM blogged on many occasions about the joys of using the free time income-producing assets buy to make close friends wherever you live or move, helping each other in neighborly & friendly fashion with learned skills.
The relationship between assets & ties also becomes a feedback loop, allowing the mustachian community to replace spendy nights out on the town with social backyard barbecues or costly plumber calls with clever friends. Part of the ongoing commitment to frugality comes not from a desire to conserve money but from the genuine opportunities for human connection or learning which would be missed out on by a non-frugal person who simply throws money at the problem. By not turning to money, we’re more likely to habitually turn to skills or connections.
Aside from the many construction projects/ work parties at friends’ homes he’s blogged about over the years, & the coworking space he founded, he even bought a house (wasn’t it next door?) to help a friend move into the neighborhood - he’s caught flack for saying people should make friends they don’t need a car to visit, so this was a good, if dramatic, example of commitment to the idea. Rich community is a core ideal in the original blog.
