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

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.

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.

In a way it nice to see this is not just me. I work remote, very thankful for it, but my social life has collapsed and taking my self esteem with it.

My obligations at home keep me from trying out new things more often. But I'm trying to be more active online. And using a co working space once a week.

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.

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'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.

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. :(

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.

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

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?

Here are my reactions to this in order, as I read it:

- This is super relatable (isolation of modern life in a capitalist system, especially as we age)

- I like this reflection on how norms/values can be at odds with modern hyperindividualism

- Woah why are we talking about "woke" all the sudden, red flags. I thought in this year 2026, we all acknowledged that all that "anti-woke"/"free-speech" stuff was a complete smokescreen (at least here in America) now that the same people who fought so hard for it are doing everything they can do undermine it in ways that are orders of magnitude more extreme (e.g. get your visa revoked for supporting Palestine as a student).

- Mild disgust at everything regarding skeptics and the ton of naval-gazing around it. IMO is obvious to everybody in the world (other than "skeptics"/"rationalists") that self-lablebed rational community is not even faintly rational (probably more obviously emotional than a random person on the street) and incredibly pretentious to label themselves so.

- A few paragraphs about inviting friends to bars. Okay right, that's why I clicked on this. WTF did I just read?

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.