Shut the front door. Remember that? It was really popular a few years back. It’ll be an indicator of age eventually.

In the last I didn’t use the front door much. In this one I use it less. Nobody in America really uses the front door anymore. (At least here in Minnesota, maybe different regions of the US do.) Instead we tend to have a large door specifically for our vehicles. That door is generally opened and closed automatically via a button in the vehicle. It leads to an under-insulated room of our house which is attached. There usually is a wall with similar thickness and insulation to the outside walls in-between the main living spaces and this room, and not generally any HVAC service. Because of the button in the vehicle it’s not unusual for the big door to be closing before anyone exits the vehicle, and not opened until people are already in it.

Further reducing the use of the front door is the fence around the back-yard. Instead of letting the kids out front to play, or heading out the front to the neighborhood park, we let them loose in the backyard.

This loss of the front door is, to me, tied directly to the lack of neighborly connection. Since we’re always isolated near our home we are no longer meeting our neighbors. If we assume that this is a major cause then we next have to decide if that is good or bad, and if bad how do we change it?