I've spent about $1000 on equipment and classes so far, and about a year of my time. My problem is that I still kind of suck, and I have no friends who also play pickleball. So at open play, people just beat me so they can finally get to play with their own friends. This is really demoralizing!
Haha. Most cities have rehearsal spaces for rent. The more expensive ones let you store your gear there indefinitely, like a storage unit, and cheaper ones let you rent the space hourly but you haul your gear in and out for the day.
Rehearsal spaces, small venues cheap enough to be booked by a group of 5-6 people for a day/evening (not necessarily bars or concert spaces), book a studio for a few hours and everyone pitch in.
Do folks have social nerd meetup suggestions in the Bay Area? I'm pulling my hair out here in Mountain View. Aside from trying to run my own, with limited success, it's veeery slim pickings.
The primary focus is on RE, of course, but the folks there are generally curious, and a large minority of the talks are about forward engineering.
I gave a talk on work I had done with the Signal Foundation on building a binary->binary rewriting tool to secure their Intel SGX1 enclaves against the various Spectre and LVI vulnerabilities.
My understanding is that they run quite a few meetups [1].
I am not sure what you mean by "apathetic about tech in general" but my experience has been that folks who go to makerspaces are excited about making things in the physical world. That tends to carry over to tech that empowers them to do so (e.g. 3d printers, CNC machines, laser cutters, ...).
I appreciate their range of crafting and manufacturing options, but my own interests are software and computing.
Re: "apathetic about tech in general" -- At the org where I'm a member, we hired a former Maker Nexus GM and had him on staff for about a year. His proposal for an income stream from kids' summer programs never quite landed. And apart from events organized by members, there was little initiative to bring in outside events, partnerships, hackathons, or new members through the door. Our slogan was some nonsense about being the heart of Silicon Valley, and the our space was basically 90% vacant most of the time.
You mean their Monday open mics, their monthly book club, and their... motorcycle enthusiasts meetup, if that's still going on? I've been at that open mic for years, most weeks. I've tried the book club, and I don't have enough interest in motorcycles.
That's advice to meet activity partners, not friends. Think of your closest friends. Did you set out to meet them by looking for people with their exact interests? Maybe you did and you and your friends are part of a scene, but I'd bet most people did not.
On advice like yours, I started a niche club and ran it for 3 years. When people join your club, they're not there to meet you! They're joining to participate in the club. Now you're in the awkward position of responsibility as the club's host/organizer, with the additional distance between you and the other participants.
My closest friends came to be because I spent significant time around them.
>The main catalyzer is something you do regularly with another person.
The easiest thing to do that in an intentional way is to find regular activities and do them with other people. The activity is the excuse to be together for x amount of time every week, be it whatever. If you choose something you genuinely like, not only will your intent be more sincere but even if you didn't meet anyone, at least you did something you enjoyed.
This is advice for people who have zero or one friends. If you already friends, then, by definition, you don't have this problem. Also, a bit controversial but useful, people who don't have this problem usually give very poor advice to people who have it. "Just make more friends, bro".
I'm curious to hear if you can think of a better way to make friends irl with a decent chance of success.
>I started a niche club and ran it for 3 years.
Did you not make one single lasting connection (friendship) from that?
> I'm curious to hear if you can think of a better way to make friends irl with a decent chance of success.
Any environment where you can meaningfully help each other: a group for new parents, a study group at school, joining a non-profit advisor board.
> Did you not make one single lasting connection (friendship) from that?
I made a lot of activity partners: people I could talk to about that topic, and maybe some adjacent topics, but who didn't have a lot of interest in making me a part of their life outside that general topic. They wouldn't join invitations for dinner, they wouldn't hang out outside the club's context, and they would eventually flake out.
A healthy social life consists of having people at various degrees of familiarity, who can move up and down closeness spectrum.
You start with setting specific relationships. Your gym buddies, your work buddies, that guy who's always at the bar you go to. For most people, their longest lived friendships started as school friends, or their parents' friends' kids. IMO, most people are able to figure this type of socializing out.
The next step up in familiarity involves building a relationship that is not fixed to a particular setting. You take a setting-specific friend, and invite them to something else. The easy way is the sort of thing where the place/timing is adjacent. You go, "Hey, gym-buddy, want to grab dinner after our workout? I've heard about this new Ethopian-Italian fusion place and I've been meaning to go". Once you reach that level of repoire, you start inviting them to things that are not immediately adjacent, like "yo, ACDC is going to be in town on the 20th, want to see 'em?". IMO, this is the step people fail at. They never make the step of inviting people to shit, and then end up with a bunch of work friends that they never see again after job hopping.
Then you make sure to see them in social settings at least every other month or so, and bam, friends. Then you start introducing your friends to each other, so that you end up nucleating a friend group. That makes it much easier to plan things, because you don't need to say "when is everyone free", you just make plans and some subset of people show up. Ideally you keep this up by establishing some sort of regular gathering, where inviting your other friends is encouraged. This lets you meet your friends' friends, which will expand your social life further. Sometimes multiple friend groups will merge, which again adds a bunch of people to your 1 degree and 2 degrees of removal set.
Beyond that basic process, the only key tips are 1) alcohol helps, there's a reason it's been the social lubricant of choice since the foundation of civilization. 2) It's okay that not everybody you ever interact with ends up a close friend. Knowing people helps you get to know more people. 3) Relationships are built on mutual utility. Most friendships exist because the people involved find spending time with the others more enjoyable than spending time alone. You can tip the scales in your favor on that by being enjoyable to spend time with. You tip the scales even further by being likely to say "yes" when invited to stuff. People don't like the feeling of being rejected, so someone who will routinely be down to hang when invited will get invited to hang a lot more than someone who is more picky. Don't agree to stuff where you'll be miserable, but if the options are a quiet night at home and a mediocre night of bowling with your friends, go with the bowling.
These tips are offered often and are presumably working for someone. As someone who has followed or tried to follow them for most of my life, there are lots of ways these tips might fail to serve:
- Places you visit often might be fundamentally antisocial: e.g., a gym where everyone wears headphones.
- Tickets to popular events (AC/DC) are astronomically expensive and sell out long in advance.
- Inviting people who you don't know well to smaller, local, less spectacular events tends to bore people.
- If someone is your first local prospective friend, inviting them and only them out constantly can stress an already tenuous relationship.
- Introducing people to each other may reveal that they don't enjoy each other's company, so now they're both less interested in hanging out with your group.
- Your prospective friends might have no local friends of their own, so they depend on you disproportionately for all of their socializing.
- Your prospective friends might not drink alcohol or enjoy hanging out in bars, so hanging out at a bar no longer feels very inclusive.
- Some people have a tight budget and don't deal well with the perceived obligation to spend money when out with friends.
To be honest, I've had a hard time managing these complications. It should be dead easy to apply advice, but it's not.
I admit I snorted when that was mentioned. It's frequently ranked as the most desirable place to live on earth.
Not to say the message of the article is completely without merit - there are things to see and do almost everywhere. But if I just get in the car and start driving I will 95% of the time find only strip malls and cornfields. Perhaps a suburban park with some trees.
Pick any mountainous, desert, or coastal part of the world and you are guaranteed scenery for ~95% of the drive.
Pick any historic part of the world and you are guaranteed nice-looking buildings anywhere you walk.
A sizeable fraction of the world fits into either of the above. Yeah, if you live in cornfields and strip malls, you aren't going to find much interesting. But in fact, most of the world isn't like that. Arguably the cornfields and strip malls are the minority.
Throw a dart anywhere on Kyrgyzstan, Japan, Indonesia, Norway, China, India, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Argentina, Namibia, the southwestern US, northwestern US, or Mexico. You'll find lots of interesting things wherever your dart landed. These aren't very cherry-picked countries, I just named a few off the top of my head that come to mind where the "dart anyhere is interesting" is true. My point is that the world is full of "Switzerlands".
This is so true, and also what I thought reading these comments. Love the "the world is full of "Switzerland". I added it to the note, thanks for the comment!
I was looking for this comment. I share a similar experience. Everywhere I lived (Croatia, Poland, Switzerland, ...) it felt like there was infinite magical locations within 1-2h drive with a lot of natural variety (ocean, lakes, ridges, forests, islands).
I'm not so confident that would be true all over the world. Some places I've spent 3-4 weeks in the nature I got bored from the lack of diversity. Can only stare into dirt and sand for so long.
This is ostensibly a think piece by the CEO of a software startup building a product for human-AI collaboration, ostensibly describing that same process. And it starts out pretty focused, but then it just goes on... and on... without really developing a point or making rhetorical progress. Fruit-by-the-foot writing. Is the future of writing full of essays so mind-numbing and interminable that humans will need computers to preprocess them?
This... doesn't explain anything about the song. Not its writing, not its production, not the music video. It's just a list of platitudes. Even the Atlas Obscura article has more content.
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