The Great Good Place

This reading was a little bit harder to read/follow along with. I get what they were trying to say, how people today don't socialize at all, they keep to themselves and have a lot more added pressure/stress than they really should, but i felt like they could have said it in fewer words. In the end, it was an interesting topic.
Ray Oldenburg stated that "there is little sense of place and even less opportunity to put down roots" in today's "automobile suburb"...he talks a lot about how the neighborhood taverns and corner stores are no longer present, so there is not a place to "hangout"; he believes that all of this combined is adding to people's seclusion. I liked the Gruen's story, how their lives in Los Angeles is completely different from their lives in Vienna. In Vienna they are persueded to go out often because of their easy access to their social surroundings.
Oldenburg also argues that we, americans, "proceed as though a house can substitute for a community if only it is spacious enough, entertaining enough, comfortable enough, splendid enough- and suitably isolated..." I don't feel as though, just because my family has a "spacious" house, we are substituting it for a social life, outside of the house. I still believe that there is a sense of community, maybe not everywhere, but in baton rouge. People are a little more reserved than they might have been in the past, but we are not completely inverted, like Oldenburg makes us out to be.