401–410 of 433 posts
This suggestion is common to the point of banality, but it really does benefit hugely from having "a mailing list of several dozen friends and acquaintances" to bootstrap it. I've been trying something very similar to the author's approach for three years now: a casual tech meetup. My results are way worse despite putting hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into the endeavor. The people you attract might thems…
As someone who used to have a highly active social life and now finds IRL socializing to be mostly a dull chore, I always find it confusing to see so many people commenting to the contrary. My partner is slightly more social than me and gets out slightly more than I do, but generally we are homebodies and we like it that way. Other people (at least in this country) are generally emotionally messy, unwilling to tolera…
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I have to mention the 300 club at Amundsen-Scott station. When the temp outside hits -100 (F) they crank up their sauna to 200, then run from the sauna to outside in their underwear.
As part of the 300 club, I have to say that there was no underwear involved in my cohort, just shoes (a requirement).
As someone who used to have a highly active social life and now finds IRL socializing to be mostly a dull chore, I always find it confusing to see so many people commenting to the contrary. My partner is slightly more social than me and gets out slightly more than I do, but generally we are homebodies and we like it that way. Other people (at least in this country) are generally emotionally messy, unwilling to tolera…
I think I went through a phase of feeling like you do, but eventually I realized it was a pretentious, excessively online, insufficiently adventurous, disconnected way to engage in life, that was lacking in humility and vulnerability, relying too much on control. I realized all of this while not having gone to the apparent extreme you have, and never stopped building new friendships, but my level of engagement in tho…
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I'll answer your question with a question. In the past, I would have recommended finding a Meetup on some activity you enjoy. Meetup isn't as popular anymore (another victim of COVID and WFH culture), but the spirit of the idea is sound. Are there apps or services that fill that void these days?
Meetup isn't a victim of Covid and WFH, it's a victim of being sold to WeWork years before Covid.
WeWork bought Meetup because tons of tech Meetups used WeWork spaces to host events.
This acquisition made a lot of sense, IMO. Many companies at the time were much more employee-friendly than now and liked having their employees (who mostly worked in the office) host cool events with free food. Nearly everyone was already downtown, free pizza is free pizza, and talking about Ruby or DevOps or whatever sure as shit beat traffic. This was especially true for startups, which were in WeWork offices.
COVID lockdowns were a huge collective wet blanket atop all of that for obvious reasons.
Moreover, everyone working from home added huge inertia to what was previously a very natural chain of events. Driving downtown for events (and dealing with traffic) was/is a huge commitment, free pizza or not (which isn't really free anymore after you account for gas). Those events being in worse spaces (since event space got harder to find) didn't help.
All of this affected social Meetups too, albeit less so. You used to be able to build a calendar of the Meetups you wanted to hit in a day. If you were already at NY Tech Meetup for something, hitting up a social meetup afterwards was easy.
(WeWork sold Meetup some time back IIRC.)
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It definitely can be a chore. I organized a large (600+-person at its peak) Meetup in Park Slope, Brooklyn, NY during Meetup's hayday (2010-ish). Meeting heaps of different people from all walks of life was interesting at first. But like a previous poster stated, connections like these are fleeting and take a lot of work to maintain (especially if you're a man, which I am; see the end of this post for more on that).…
Oh man, I relate so hard on the sports conversations.
This suggestion is common to the point of banality, but it really does benefit hugely from having "a mailing list of several dozen friends and acquaintances" to bootstrap it. I've been trying something very similar to the author's approach for three years now: a casual tech meetup. My results are way worse despite putting hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into the endeavor. The people you attract might thems…
Advice may not be what you are seeking, but a few things jumped out to me: Pouring thousands of dollars into a casual meetup, even over the years, tells me of it being less casual than what is described in the OP. I have never had more success trying to cater to different diets, budgets, asking for opinions on restaurants. Organizing a club needs, at least at first, a near totalitarian approach. _You_ pick a nice pla…
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Meetup isn't a victim of Covid and WFH, it's a victim of being sold to WeWork years before Covid.
Respectfully disagree. COVID and WFH really was a brick wall to Meetup's momentum. WeWork bought Meetup because tons of tech Meetups used WeWork spaces to host events. This acquisition made a lot of sense, IMO. Many companies at the time were much more employee-friendly than now and liked having their employees (who mostly worked in the office) host cool events with free food. Nearly everyone was already downtown, fr…
I've never been to a meetup hosted at a WeWork office in the bay area, and I used to go to quite a few. Most were at company offices.