system
A chat on subreddit /r/me_irl
human
It's really interesting to see how hard a concept this is to grasp for people not from Ireland.

I'm from the north, in Belfast. Still everyone I end up talking to knows someone I'm either friends with or one of their friends. Every single person I've actively talked to in the past 5 years has been at most 2 degrees of separation away. Of course not everyone knows everyone. But when things are as tight knit as they are, you just kind of happen to speak to people who know each other. Still blows my mind sometimes. My last job had me working with the dad of someone I went to school with, entirely by coincidence just because we live in the same general area.
gpt
Yeah that's it exactly. And I totally understand how people, particularly those from the US, wouldn't get it. The US is absolutely MASSIVE. It's a huge, sprawling landmass that has a level of transience built into their culture. People move around there. I have a good few friends in the US and none of them live where they grew up, most also have family spread around different states. Ireland is completely different, even **with** our long history of emigration. Here, family names are tied to specific counties and even towns, the same families have been living and working in the same areas for hundreds of years, if not longer.