Kresz Géza utca 55: menekülés a magányba

Elbújni a hangyabolyban, alone together, urban loneliness, my balls are cold. Házilag barkácsolt térelzárók egy újlipótvárosi modernista társasház loggiái között. Ki kezdte?

"Ma itt vannak a leglaposabb modern paloták. A palotákban fiatal pszichoanalitikusok teregetik ki egymás lelkét a díványokon, a bridzs délceg amazonjai ábrándoznak hófehér fürdőszobák mélyén, rendkívül intelligens magántisztviselők Moszkvát fogják a rádión. Téli vasárnap az egész városrész hosszú fadarabokkal zarándokol a Sváb-hegy felé, otthon csak az elözvegyült borbély marad. Minden modern és egyszerű és tárgyilagos és egyforma itt." (Szerb Antal: Budapesti kalauz marslakók számára) In study after study, urban dwellers have a more substantial social network. In his 1982 classic about Californians, To Dwell Among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City, the Berkeley, California–based sociologist Claude Fischer found a 40 percent uptick in the size of friendship-based social networks moving from semi-rural areas into the urban core. Even the recent study that found we had fewer confidants found better news for city dwellers. “Based on what I’m seeing,” says Matthew Brashears, one of the authors of the survey, “networks in large communities may have gotten smaller, but people in large communities still appear to have bigger networks than people in small.”

“In our data,” adds Lisa Berkman, the Harvard epidemiologist who discovered the importance of social networks to heart patients, “friends substitute perfectly well for family.” This finding is important. It may be true that marriage prolongs life. But so, in Berkman’s view, does friendship—and considering how important friendship is to New Yorkers (home of Friends, after all), where so many of us live on our own, this finding is blissfully reassuring. In fact, Berkman has consistently found that living alone poses no health risk, whether she’s looking at 20,000 gas and electricity workers in France or a random sample of almost 7,000 men and women in Alameda, California, so long as her subjects have intimate ties of some kind as well as a variety of weaker ones. Those who are married but don’t have any civic ties or close friends or relatives, for instance, face greater health risks than those who live alone but have lots of friends and regularly volunteer at the local soup kitchen. “Any one connection doesn’t really protect you,” she says. “You need relationships that provide love and intimacy and you need relationships that help you feel like you’re participating in society in some way.” (NY Magazine: Is Urban Loneliness a Myth?)

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