Back in 2019, got to go to Hong Kong for a couple months for work and got to bring my family.

I was about to turn 40 and realized that the place we were staying had a rock wall. In a somewhat "mid life crisis" spur of the moment decision, I decided to go buy shoes, a belt and a chalk bag (I did a lot of indoor rock climbing in college).

We get there and the rock wall is a. closed and b. only for kids.

Get back to the US and COVID lockdown starts. As things open up, I go on the town dad's Facebook group and ask if anyone wants to go rock climbing with me. Multiple dads say "hell, yes!" so I start a rock climbing club.

One of the dads that joins the climbing club loves board games, is inspired by my starting the rock climbing club so he starts the town board game club.

I tell people this story to illustrate that:

- if you don't have a club or org for something that you're into, go start one

- you doing the above can trigger other people to start clubs too

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 tolerate people with radically different views/values, and either intellectually lacking or overly predictable in their interests. The few times I find a candidate who isn’t like this, they usually have some kind of personality disorder that makes them too unstable for long-term friendship. When I was younger I often looked past this, but there’s only so many times you are willing to let a human wrecking ball into your life.

A good book is almost always better. The life of a deep reader and casual hobbyist is rich and fulfilling if your romantic needs are satisfied at home. I do not miss my former social life at all.

Just leaving this out there for any other wayward souls who may be annoyed by the conversation.

>I sent the details to friends and acquaintances who appeared in my notifications, or to mutuals who appeared on my timeline. But anyway, to my relief, on the night itself, a whole bunch of people actually turned up.

If the author was able to pull 'a bunch of people' to birthday drinks with nothing but an invitation, this story is more about underestimating his social capital rather than creating new capital.

Working remotely taught me a similar lesson as the author. The most important part that I think people get wrong in general is that online friends, or your good friends from uni or your childhood youth that you only see in person once or twice a year, can't replace an active local friends group - or community as he calls it. Cutting the daily interactions with other humans by no longer going to an office every day made me realize that - because you very quickly feel that something is missing.

I can really relate to this post, celebrating my birthday with a party for the first time in 10+ years in 2025, it truly had a massive impact on my mental health and it made me realize I should throw little gatherings much more often.

Great write-up and encouragement on the author's part.

Lovely read. Social health is my number one 2026 priority. I moved into a new city in 2025 and this hits home. I'm lucky to have a great and active group of online friends but it's no replacement for something local.

Some things that I've picked up last year that are a good starting point:

- timeleft dinners. I get dinner with 5 strangers every few weeks. Tons of fun and you meet a lot of interesting people.

- swing dancing: I went on a date to a social dance and immediately became addicted. It has taken a while to learn the basics, and some of the unwritten rules of the dance floor, but now this is an activity I can take with me to many of my city's social dances and meet all sorts of people. It has greatly improved my social skills and confidence.

I think the biggest different this year will be the amount of effort I put into organizing social events: I've found that everyone seems to be waiting for an invite, but no one wants to do the inviting! OP hinted at this in his article.

I came to the same conclusions as the author. Then I tried something like this and failed to get people interested.

It’s draining for me to reach out to try and convince people, not sure if the social anxiety or the lack of executive functioning.

Any tips for someone that understands and wants community but struggles with the building process?

I had a similar problem this year after having moved to a new country, working a remote job and separated from my partner. Having had a terrible social life since I was a kid, I knew it in my bones that I'd have to find myself new friends or else. So I did - I renewed my relationship with old friends, joined a book club (was a big reader as a kid), and my dog helped me make friends at the dog park.

I find it interesting that I've thought about the exact social mechanics of making friends before as well - low stakes in person common context where you meet on a regular basis is key.

My partner and I were discussing our need for “third spaces” this week. We’re homebodies, and enjoy being home. However mundanity of wake, work, hobbies, sleep in the same place every day is getting to us.

It’ll be a slightly different approach to the other though. For me, I want to start playing some tabletop games (war games and/or RPGs) at my Friendly Local Game Shop. I think these types of interactions are important for community.

Joining a hackspace/makerspace suddenly introduced me to a high quality real-life social network. It's an excuse to engage with your hobbies but also hangout with like minds and pick up new skills.

This won't be an option for everyone. I have to travel for an hour each way to get to mine, but it's worth it. If I had more energy I would start one in the city where I live.

This reminded me of E.M. Forster’s line from Howards End: “Only connect.” Not in the grand, ideological sense, but in the mundane, logistical one. It's funny how life optimizes for comfort and autonomy, but those optimizations quietly remove the scaffolding that friendships used to grow on.

I’m that guy who gets all the introverts together.

Over the past decade I’ve built two different communities like this, both of which meet weekly. They’ve become pretty important social outlets for all the regulars.

Unfortunately, they are both at my workplace. Which means I am tied to my employer not just professionally, but socially. This makes the prospect of changing jobs much more painful and disruptive.

I’ve been helping build https://fractal.boston/ for about a year now and it’s been a massively rewarding experience

Like the author, I highly recommend _building_ rather than simply joining a community. If you’re joining an already established scene, get involved! Host events, and bring in new members, establish new norms

I also work from home, together with my wife. So even though we have kids, there is no necessity of leaving the house, save for 15 minutes a day on weekdays to drop off and pick up.

The main thing people have to get over is passivity. You want to see your friends? Invite a bunch of people to come out. Nowadays it takes very little time to book a restaurant.

I do this every few months. I just think of three or four other people I want to have dinner with, arrange a time, and then invite everyone else I come across. Dinner ends up being anywhere from 4 to 12 people, out of maybe 20 invites. As for who to invite, just invite your friends, and your "friend seeds".

Everyone has a few peripheral people they know, whose bio seems to fit the template of your actual friends: live near you, studied with you, worked with you. People who in all likelihood have the same values as you, except you haven't hung out together due to lack of opportunity. We all know that guy: you know his name, you know he does what you do, you don't know anything else. So you bring that seed along and you and your existing friends water the relationship.

A more modern way to not be lonely is to play an MMO. This isn't quite like real friends, but it also isn't quite the same as being lonely. The big benefit of course is that you can do this at home.

These games are all about cooperating, sharing knowledge and experience. It's not really all that different from cooking a meal together, you're just in your PJs as you're slaying a dragon. You can also end up learning a fair bit about your online friends from just hanging around. Life stories, that kind of thing, they are a basic part of friendship.

Most of the comments here are about joining groups, and rightfully so, as most people are really in the basement when it comes to having friends, especially after your 20s.

But what the author did (organizing drinks) reminds me a lot of a great podcast I heard about putting together cocktail parties, and the social benefits: https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/social-skills/2-hour-c...

It's probably not for everyone, as it seems like a lot of work, and it might be too regimented for many, but I've wanted to do it for a while. Maybe this is the year.

In 2023 I built a similar community around parties in my (small) apartment. With a group of around 80 people in the end, usually about 30 shown up. It was great fun, but ultimately it did not build a community. It was great, but vast majority of the connections were fleeting.

Turns out partying is not something that really builds bonds.

I keep expecting fraternal orders to make a comeback. It seems like they were a solution to this problem, but have been deemed old fashioned.

I knew someone with the last name ‘Mason’, who would often get asked if he was a Freemason or a decent of one. Eventually he got asked so many times that he decided to join. After that it seemed like he went from not having much of a social life to going out all the time with his Freemason buddies.

Two places I’ve lived have been a short walk to an Elk lodge. If I was a member, I’d imagine that would be a good 3rd place with community. I think VFW would be another one, for veterans, which has also dropped in popularity, but was where my grandfather found his community.

Most of society has relegated fraternal orders participation to their college days. But even in college, most people I knew looked down on fraternities.

I wonder if some of the issue is that most of them require members be religious. With church attendance declining, joining a group that seems to require it is a harder sell. Church itself is also a place where community is built that a lot of people have left behind. I know several people whose entire social network seems to revolve around the church, for better or worse.

Bringing back these groups could really help a lot of people, so everyone isn’t expected do it all on their own or be lucky enough to have a friend who does it for them.

My dad has been very good about keeping up connections throughout his life which looks to be paying off now that he’s retired. But it seems like a significant amount of work that most people aren’t willing to do.

I have an old college roommate who lives less than a mile from me who I have only seen once in the last two years. I think most guys aren’t willing to pick up the phone to set something up, so simply having a place to go, where people are, tends to work out better. My friend who lives nearby is a member at the local country club, which also falls into that bucket of fraternal orders in a way. If I joined that I’d probably see him more, because we’d both have a place to regularly go. I feel weird inviting people over my house to do nothing and just hang out.

The unstated implicit difference between online and real world interactions is that you talk to people in real time, can't scroll by, block a person, or be rude to them. Well, you can, but, good old fashioned discourse, and friends telling you to stop being a weird idiot was/is human societal interactions for all of history until the creation of the internet. Facial and physical cues are also part of the lost tapestry that social media cannot replace.

I feel sorry for the young 'uns that have grown up with the internet, that have been able to isolate themselves and their opinions from the real world simply by choosing to not interact physically, and block those whose opinions differ.

I've thought about starting my own community group, but I am pretty skeptical that I could find many folks interested in what I'm interested in. I think this is a real barrier to many. Any advice?

To elaborate, in the US, existing groups tend to be narrow and uninteresting to me. In most places I've lived, it's basically a mix of sports/fitness groups, art groups, "tech" (i.e., programmer; traditional engineers like myself won't feel entirely welcome), social dancing, popular fiction reading group, activism, etc. I can't say that any of these genuinely interest me and/or would be a good place to meet people. At a fitness class, for example, many people aren't interested in casual conversation as far as I'm aware. And without genuine interest in the subject, it's hard to engage.

Posts like these make me question whether I even exist, or at the very least, doubt my humanity.

I couldn't end reading it. He was saying all the time that the read might have some envy and this was too good to complain, but what I most felt is pity. Being all day at home feels miserable to me.

The author casually mentions this but basically the main reason through history to build communities is the existence of kids, which he literally decided not to have.

I'm the opposite, I don't like or want a social life, I live comfortably, but by having kids I have no other choice than to participate in a bunch of communities just as a byproduct of trying to be a good dad.

Even the communities anyone participates today were likely built around kids in a past time.

The rest of the article is just trying to overcompensate for the decision of not having children.

Yep, build community - by organizing get-togethers for the most interesting people you know, not just yourself.

It’s work, it doesn’t come naturally - but you get the privilege of curating who’s there.

My father passed away on Saturday. The aftermath drove home the importance of community.

Hundreds of people came to the funeral, even though it was short notice (24 hours) and in the middle of holiday season. They all dropped whatever they were doing, hopped in their cars or on a plane and came. Friends from his childhood. Friends from his middle/high school years. Friends from his university years, and med school years. People he had worked with and done community service with over the decades. His former students from the decades he taught at the local university. Employees at the hospital he worked at. Family friends. Friends of family. People who knew him by only name and yet still wanted to pay their respects.

I'm Turkish, and community has always played a big role in our culture. But the past few days made me realize that, ever since immigrating to the USA 20+ years ago, community had been supplanted by individualism. Like the author, I work from home. I do have a bit of a social life, and there's a couple of meetups I organize, but the size of my community is nothing compared to my parents. It makes me sad.

Reading this article gave me some hope. It reminded me that ultimately it's a matter of putting in the work, which I am determined to do. Not because I want to maximize the number of people who come to my eventual funeral or anything like that, but because I do want to live a richer life and the best way to do that is to share it with others.

Sorry if the above was all over the place. Things are still raw.

It's scary that community is a goal to attain here, it seems. Having everything optimized, what kind of life is that? Surely not one that's worth living. What would you say in 20 years about a life without connection, spontaneity, beauty, experience and all? Or where all of those points are checkboxes to be checked? I actually see a bunch of reasons for avoiding community like "they are all leftist and I can't say this and that". I can only recommend going outside more and mingle. Life is beautiful, people are cool and the more you isolate, the more you stray from that.

Wonders if author has studied low vs high context societies

You wouldn't need the long blog post or any other efforts if you didn't work remotely (remote work is poison). Having kids is a personal choice, but so many of you are failing to understand why family is so important that maybe you should revisit that choice, too. What are so afraid of? Was your home life as a kid that painful and awful? Even so, you can do a better job of it!

I can relate exactly to what he's described. This decade (the 2020's) has definitely thrown a lot of curveballs.

> I’ve got no idea, I’m too busy gaming on my Playstation 5 and living a life of selfish consumption.

This is in another article of his about not having kids. But I think just focusing on enjoyment in life is a poor human experience. Life has much more to offer that is equally interesting. Enjoyment isn't the only game in town. And the other things that life has to offer, can be fucking painful. But I'd still say it's worth it to experience.

I appreciate it that life is bitter sweet. I wouldn't exactly say that I like it, but I appreciate it (and it goes up to a point, when we're talking about really rough tragedies, yea none of that please).

Many good observations here. I had time to read 50% through.

>> I think I’m particularly suspicious of community, because as a writer and pedantic arsehole on the internet, I value truth-seeking behaviour. I want people to think and say things that are true, not just things that they have to believe for the sake of keeping their community happy.

Unfortunately, this is what happens with every group of people.

Our individual realities are highly subjective. A group of people who are part of a community construct a shared reality that they can all accept. If you don’t contribute to the shared reality, you are treated as someone who is problematic.

As humans we are social creatures. In our evolution, we develop cognitive systems that help us thrive in social structures. One system is called the social protection system. This system gets activated when we sense tension in relationships and sends a signal of fear to the subject that they risk being separated from a social group. This fear motivates people to maintain connection. So some people are intrinsically motivated by fear to maintain their status, sometimes unconsciously.

Our self esteem comes from two things, relationships and mastery. Healthy self esteem comes from connection to people who accept you for who you are, where you feel visible and accepted with your good and bad traits.

If you have a few people in your life with this type of connection, you will have a healthy social foundation and rely less on belonging to a group.

Groups are valuable in that the human experience is complicated. The best source of information comes directly from other humans and their experiences overcoming complexity.

However, I do agree with the author where certain groups can be problematic, particularly engaging in things like tribalism.

Establishing good self esteem by keeping a few people close to you who see you and accept you as a flawed human is key. The other part is to immerse yourself in activities where you develop mastery and maintain a connection to the activities that are intrinsically motivating and satisfying without distraction from external signals.

I learned this by studying the science of self actualization, from the research done by Scott Barry Kaufman and his book Transcend. He’s a humanistic psychologist who was inspired by Abraham Maslow, one of the founders of humanistic psychology.

> If you want to organise something today, where the hell do you start? Email???

WhatsApp groups.

I did almost the identical project the OP did, for the same reasons, in the same style. Reading that article could have been (with 10% of details tweaked) about my experience.

The biggest difference in how the author approached and how I did: he did it monthly; I did it weekly. I found that made a HUGE difference in building community. If it's once a month, and people come on average 50% of the time, then you'll see these people 6 times a year. That's nice, but one of my goals was to build real, deep relationships with more people, and having a party where I speak a few minutes to each person (if you're the host, it's hard to get more than 30 minutes with one person) 6 times a year - you can't really build a real relationship. Also, once a month puts pressure on people psychologically to attend, but I wanted it low-key, "Come if you want, if not next week, or the week after - or never! It's all cool and you go live your life and you be you!" was part of the vibe I was going for, and it's easier to get that vibe when it's all the time, but the less frequent it is, the more subconscious pressure there is, and I wanted a low-key event (for example, imagine a wedding - that's very irregular, hopefully once in your life - so there's massive pressure to attend, and I wanted the precise inverse).

But my doing it weekly, made it a bit more like church/synagogue, in the best communal sense of the word: a place to go at the same time, same place every week, time to build real relationships, you always knew you'd have a place to go, etc. And because many of the people were the same week on week, it naturally led to longer, deeper conversations, both individual and group conversations.

I was also strict on a few rules. There were a few topics that were banned from being discussed ("politics, business, and sports" basically - and everyone knew going in those were banned) so that forced people to avoid those generic and tiresome topics that (politics in particular) just make unhappy. Also, I had a very strict "no cell phone" rule and I enforced putting cell phones into a box near the entrance.

It also became a HUGE success in my city. Mentioned in the media and featured in videos. Because it became known as the nexus of interesting conversations in a spot with cool energy. Many dotcom/tech superstars as well as ambassadors and other interesting and curious figures, when they were in my city for a few days for business, they'd hear that my apt was the place to be that night and they'd contact me to invite themselves.

It revolutionized my life and my social network. I'd strongly recommend everyone who is suffering from these same sorts of social challenges create their own sort of variation of this concept.

This lasted almost a decade, almost every Wednesday night from 2007 to 2016. Then... adult life happened: family, moving internationally, and... alas. I have a personal challenge these days that I should invest energy in figuring out: the best way to reboot this for me, but in the world I life in now, not only post-covid, but with kids and family life. Sometimes I think about rebooting it but in a public venue on my "date night", sometimes I think about doing a "Zoom" version of this where it's beers on Zoom, etc etc there are many possible ways to approach this challenge - but I haven't yet been inspired with the right formula for me.

There's a time and place for everything under the sun and this was a beautiful and life-changing era of my life.

If anyone is interested in creating their own version of this (particularly the OP), just drop me a line and I'm more than happy to Zoom any time with you and give you some tips. My email is morgan@westegg.com (I still love meeting people even if through email and Zoom!), and my personal website is westegg.com and I have an ancient and embarrassingly bad web page 2008 tumblr-style page about these events at: wnip.org - If the above sounded interesting, I'm always up for a brainstorm so ping me!

What is your body count now?

What if you have a community but it's boring and uninspiring? It's always the same shit, STEM nerds, who can only talk shop, tech, video games, sports and bitcoin/crypto/libertarianism/ancap stuff. I mean, I've moved like 3 times in the span of 7 years and every time I end up in the same kind of community. Also, no women. :(

Congrats OP, sounds super excited for his new social life.

I live overseas and I’m very lonely. I’ve been told to join a group or club related to my interests so I can meet new people and make friends, but I can’t. It doesn’t feel natural to me to go for friend-hunting. And I’m very tired of meaningless, superficial connections and conversations I’ve had with most of the people from my surroundings. I feel my only friends are the ones I did at school. After that period of my life, people -or even me- start to disappear.

But with my friends from school, we can be without seeing each other for years and it’s always so easy and rewarding to catch up. I wish I’ve spent more time with them before moving :,(

TLDR; Man emails friends.

ugh i hate gen ai images. please dont start ur article with one

> Hanging out with other humans is good – and if you can’t find a community… you can always build your own.

I did just that, and built https://wonderful.dev

It's based around jobs for devs, but right now it's just a place to chat about tech.