You can fight with inconsiderate neighbors, and you can get along with them.
We are social creatures. That is the way we had been created. We cannot live alone for even one day, and we need the entire world to fulfill our needs. We need food and a roof over our heads and a partner to reproduce with, we need love and friendship and success in order to feel like we belong in the world that surrounds us, and we need learning and we need to have interests and growth in order for us to have meaning to our existence. That is the reason why we built different social frameworks that create the structure for our lives: family framework, couple relationship framework, parental framework, education framework, economic framework, employment framework, social framework, community framework, security framework, legal framework and so on.
However, there is one social framework we don’t notice, and don’t even consider as a social framework, although it is a very committing and very significant framework for our wellbeing: our residential building and the neighbors behind our closed doors. We might not feel like we really belong in that framework, and maybe we don’t even know most of the neighbors or want to know them, but we feel their presence very well when they have a party, when their dogs bark and during heated tenants meetings.
Neighbors can easily make our lives miserable: play loud music, make a mess, walk on heels above our head, hammer in nails during afternoon rest hours and many other disturbances that don’t allow us to live quietly in the fortress of our home. And unfortunately neighbors cannot be chosen, just like family members cannot be chosen, and the same goes for our children and colleagues. The concept of moving to a different building is not a good one, because in every building there will be neighbors with parties and dogs and objections to paying taxes.
We should get this into our heads: if we are dependent on our neighbors’ consideration in order for our lives to be peaceful and quiet, we are in big trouble, because there will always be someone whose music is too loud, or someone renovating. So there is no choice, the only way to ensure quiet and cleanliness in our home is to know how to deal with each one of the tenants without fighting or caving in, and this goes for any social framework we find ourselves in.
So first of all, remember you are dependent on one another, and that things won’t be good for one side if they are bad for the other. You are allies, for better or for worse, in this boat, and with this concept in the forefront of your consciousness you can search for ways of cooperating.
How can it be done? It’s true that each of the tenants has personal interests, and true that each of them is looking after their own good, and this of course invites a great many disagreements. But each of the tenants also has shared interests in this building, and this is something they have to be reminded of sometimes. So instead of being angry and fighting and letting out the air from an annoying neighbor’s tires, get up and call the tenants to get together and cooperate in doing the things that are important for everyone.
It is possible, and it is difficult to imagine that any of the tenants will object to it. All that is missing is for someone to take it open themselves to get the tenants on board, one by one. So why can’t that be you?