How to tell your neighbor they’re annoying you

Your anonymous note probably isn’t going to help.

Tens of millions of Americans live on top of, below, or directly next to their neighbors — which means, statistically speaking, some of us are going to end up in close proximity to an extremely irritating stranger.

The source of annoyance could be someone who appears to be hosting illegal raves every weekend. Or it could be a neighbor whose kids enjoy lobbing balls, toys, trash, food, any object in sight, over the fence. Ugly lawns, heavy-footed walkers, driveway blockers, early morning vacuumers…these everyday exasperations come in all shapes and sizes, and exist everywhere: big cities, rural areas, college dorms, upstairs, downstairs, next door, or across the street.

While phone calls, texts, and friendly in-person conversations are all tried-and-true ways to address proximal nuisances, many partake in the dreaded form of communication known as the neighbor note. Judging from the multiple, hand-wringing posts on social media and Reddit about the labor of writing one, as well as an unfathomable number of messages about the anxiety of receiving them, these letters are a bit of a trap. Most people don’t really want to scold another adult, or be scolded — especially anonymously — for things they’re not aware that they’re doing.

“Neighbor interactions tend to be difficult for people when they don’t necessarily know the individual personally,” Elaine Swann, a lifestyle and etiquette expert, told me. “The thing about it is we’re not going to our neighbor with something positive like, Have a great day! or Happy anniversary! or Happy baby! — whatever. You’re going to them with something that’s bad.”

Swann explained that a lot of the anxiety and awkwardness about dealing with neighbor problems would be alleviated if you had a relationship that exists beyond complaining, and an understanding that this one complaint isn’t going to eternally define the relationship.

What makes things complicated, Swann said, is that we live in a culture where it’s becoming increasingly easy to live happily isolated. Doorbell cameras tell us who’s out front and any visitors that we might have missed. It’s now possible to know which packages we’re getting and when. If you run out of sugar or need cold medicine for your kid, you can simply pay a stranger to deliver it. Message boards and forums have made gossip easily accessible, and require no buy-in or relationship building. These major changes have eliminated a lot of the small interactions we might have had with people next door.

Your Ring camera isn’t stopping crime. But it might be making you paranoid.

All of this means that we don’t know each other, and many of us feel like a note is our best bet to get through to people. And while these notes are often about petty things — about someone making too much noise or parking in the wrong space or not picking up dog poop — they speak to an anxiety about having a conversation with someone you see every day. That apprehension is so pronounced that it makes a neighbor note an appealing option, even when they tend to be a completely futile form of communication.

A neighbor note often feels like the only viable option

To live a day in this world and have not one person annoy you would be an anomaly. But think about it this way: many of us are actually extremely fortunate that the small things that other people do to bother us are, relatively, fleeting. Whether it’s someone cutting you off in traffic or open-mouth coughing on a display of baked goods, there’s some relief — as difficult it may be to realize in the moment — in the fact that you likely won’t see this person or their obnoxious oddities again.

The actual horror story is a nuisance that follows you home, or is in your home. Like a geyser of soiled toilet water erupting into your apartment.

This is a woman named Sam’s reality. (Vox agreed to let Sam and other people interviewed for this article use pseudonyms so that they could talk about their neighbors freely.) She and........

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