i'm sure you can just say hi and move on.

Then just wave and move on, GP and his wife will not be sequestrating you to make you mingle.

You would love my next door neighbors. They moved in the same week we did 2 years ago. We saw them when they first drove up and enters their garage (middle age couple). Since then, nobody has ever seen them. They never have lights on in their house at night. They never answer their door. They never open their garage and drive away. They never have packages or anything else delivered. They only way we know they are still alive is their trash bins go out and are taken back in every week (though nobody has ever seen them do it) and in the winter you can see the white smoke/condensation from their utility vents.

Where does the trash come from?

Brought in through underground tunnels .

We assume they are leaving in the dead of night and grocery shopping at one of the 24 hour grocery stores. Maybe they have packages delivered somewhere they can pick them up in the dead of night. There is always someone around during the day, so for sure somebody would have seen them come or go if they were doing so during the day in the past 2 years. Our conjecture is either they are vampires (which is unlikely since it was daytime when they first arrived) or they are in the witness protection program.

I just remembered another detail. They have grass in their front yard. It is cut, but a service has never come by and cut it and, of course, we’ve never seen them cut it. But we don’t hear any sounds in the dead of night of it being cut and it doesn’t look like it was cut with a scythe. Frankly, it’s a mystery.

They are one of the Matrix communication ports...

It sounds like you're in the cohort of "some just waved and moved on."

it's a little dramatic to say it's an unpopular opinion for you to not want to exchange deep hour-long life stories with your neighbor every interaction. of course!

i'm replying because the fact you mention "i know my neighbors well enough" is already the ideal that OP is speaking on. in todays world you can literally not acknowledge your neighbor's existence in all directions and get along 100% just fine. i mean, "borrowing sugar" is why instacart exists!

no no no, you're already doing lovely and agreeing with OP that neighbors, as real human people to honor as existing, is a good thing.

Yeah there’s a Seinfeld for that

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kiss_Hello