Science Quote by Will Wright

There’s a quiet grief tucked into Wright’s plainspoken setup: the sentence begins as nostalgia and ends as a boundary line. “It used to be” doesn’t just mark time; it signals a broken social contract. The old default community, he suggests, wasn’t chosen so much as inherited. You knew your neighbors and “maybe” your coworkers because proximity forced repetition, and repetition is the underrated engine of trust. The word “physical” is doing the heavy lifting here, narrowing the frame to bodies in shared space, shared weather, shared minor inconveniences - the everyday friction that, over time, becomes familiarity.

As a scientist, Wright’s intent reads less like romantic yearning and more like an observational baseline: here is how networks once formed when geography was the main algorithm. The subtext is that something else now curates our social world - platforms, interest-based tribes, remote work, mobility, and the constant option to opt out. When “people in your physical vicinity” stops being your primary circle, you gain freedom but lose a kind of ambient accountability. It’s harder to demonize the person whose dog you’ve petted, whose groceries you’ve carried, whose bad day you’ve witnessed up close.

Context matters: late-20th and 21st century life has traded dense local interdependence for flexible, sprawling connection. Wright’s line isn’t anti-technology so much as a reminder that social cohesion used to be a side effect of living somewhere. Now it’s a personal project - and plenty of us are underfunded, overbooked, and living in places designed to keep us apart.