I keep thinking about this day last summer when I started to question why people stay inside their homes. I made a commitment to myself to only go inside for sleep and food. I started imagining entire suburban neighborhoods where every family spent their evenings and weekends in their backyard, and all conversations were in muffled earshot through the fences. I got really excited about this "epiphany", but went inside when the mosquitoes came out.
It works when your neighbors are awesome. When they're lame, though, it all goes pear-shaped. Then you start imagining a yard so big that you don't have to listen to your neighbors and before too long everyone is living in a McMansion an hour drive from their jobs.
I've thought about that before, too. A couple years back I was considering what my life might look like once I'm on my own, and I realized that there were few reasons I couldn't own an apartment solely for the purpose of eating and sleeping. It'd be a lot cheaper in terms of material possessions, too, but in the time since I've started playing drums, which are harder to take around everywhere with you, and being on the Internet a lot more, which let's face it, is more pleasant on a desktop. I don't know, maybe if I found a practice space with drums and got a nice laptop it could still work out. Public spaces!