What he means, I assume, is that Massachusetts people are very "cold" compared to people in the South or on the West Coast in the sense that strangers are very unlikely to greet you or chat you up. It always weirds me out when people start doing that but visitors to this area complain about the opposite.
Nobody will talk to you on the subway. Everybody will be very interested on whether your replacement garage door "fits the character of the neighborhood" though. If your kid gets off the bus and lets themselves into the house before you show up from work you are going to get really familiar with the local cops.
My favorite two anecdotes:
I once drove ~1/2mi home after getting a flat (in the tires' defense, it was older than me), mid-morning on a weekday. Less than 5min later, while I was in the middle of "screw these used pieces of shit, I'm ordering all new Firestones on Amazon" the cops, knocked on my door. Turns out someone had followed me home and then called me in to the cops as a possible drunk driver, on a weekday morning. And the cops were happy to oblige. They had no problem showing up and playing the questions game with me over a call they would have ignored in NH or ME.
Back when I was in middle school (decades ago) my parents got lectured by the school about how they were raising me because I kept getting in trouble for using pads of sticky notes to make short animations of car crashes, explosions, and other typical action movie stuff.
If those aren't hallmarks of a society that think's it's perfectly fine to get unnecessarily involved in someone else's problems then I don't know what is.
That seems like a phenomenon of upper-class neighborhoods. My neighbor has a roof with a bunch of missing shingles and has put a tarp instead of fixing it; I doubt anyone is that bothered what I do if it's not crazy.
> Back when I was in middle school (decades ago) my parents got lectured by the school about how they were raising me because I kept getting in trouble for using pads of sticky notes to make short animations of car crashes, explosions, and other typical action movie stuff.
You have to admit they were on to something though, here you are writing stuff on a forum for scary hackers.
