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To maintain relationships as an adult you need regularly scheduled recurring events. Whether its a cookout every other Sunday, a Friday happy hour, Thursday nig

To maintain relationships as an adult you need regularly scheduled recurring events. Whether its a cookout every other Sunday, a Friday happy hour, Thursday night online gaming, or anything really. But it must be a recurring event that does not need to be planned each time, but not going is still considered something you are cancelling. This was common knowledge until we had a generation will cell phones which greatly reduced the amount of informal regularly scheduled events. In large part because coordination is not nearly as difficult so there is less push to just set something up that occurs once every two weeks as opposed to jus doing it last minute via group chat.

neilv 7y ago
Or weekly/frequent religious community gatherings. People who aren't familiar with that might not appreciate the community aspect. For example, for some flavor of American Catholics, much of a normal Sunday can be blown (as far as the kids are concerned) by dressing up in Sunday best clothes, attending the big folk music mass, the chatter as people spill out of the church and maybe also talk with the priest out back after the procession out, followed by hours of "coffee and donuts" socializing in the parish's school cafeteria or meeting hall. I'm not that kind of religious, but that's one way to find and maintain friendships, as well as sense of community and mutual support.
- throwaway50003 7y ago
  It seems that every time a social topic comes up on HN someone will extol the virtues of church attendance and their sense of community. Like, seriously, if some HNers are that nostalgic towards churches why don't you guys join one of the many congregations out there?
  - bartwe 7y ago
    Would be weird if you dont believe their variant/flavour
    - throwaway50003 7y ago
      Then gather a group of like-minded people and just hang out! It worked for rationalists, surely it can work for other adjacent communities. HN meetups are a thing, right?
- neilv 7y ago
  A comment that sounded sincere was deleted while I responded to it. Quick answer: I mentioned a religious congregation because I thought it wasn't well-known in HN circles. My intent was actually to use this as an opportunity to try to explain something I know about some complicated group. All of us fellow humans have so much misunderstanding between so many groups, contributing to conflict and disrespect, often for no good reason. (For example, religious/cultural congregations aren't just about doctrine and dogma passed down from parents -- or often aren't even about that at all, for many people -- but are often things that people are in for reasons we can maybe appreciate and understand. Then we can address actual problems better, together.)
  - pessimizer 7y ago
    I'm the opposite of religious, and there's no doubt that the political strength (and happiness, and comfort) of religious groups lies almost completely in the fact that they meet regularly at a dedicated meeting facility, and this while this meeting can be gotten out of, it requires some sort of excuse, and an individual's consistent absence is considered a mild crisis for the group. The group is also expected to favor its members, and to provide mutual aid, and as the group increases in size, that mutual aid is often delivered in a form mutually beneficial to the helper and the helped e.g. one member needs work, another member needs a worker they can trust. Many/most religious people have a very loose idea of the orthodoxies of their own religions, but they know everything about what's going on at their church, and in the lives of other people who attend it. Secular traditions can't really survive over the long term without designing similar structures. I doubt that individualist ideologies can do this at all, because they tend to feel that obligation without contract is not a thing, and even that the strength of obligation with contract is directly related to the ability to enforce that contract.
    - brighter2morrow 7y ago
      I think it's hard for no religious institutions to form cohesive groups because they don't have a commonly-held value structure. Indeed once you start to impose values on group members then for all intents and purposes you become quasi-religious because there's no materially bound "value-driven particles" or similar physical structure to values.
- mises 7y ago
  Can second. I grew up in a Protestant Church like this, and it's a great community. Nice and welcoming people are sometimes rare these days. I can't help but think that it's just not "cool" to be religious. It's seen as things our parents did, and every one wants to be an edgy atheist. For better or for worse, humans drew community from their churches (or other religious institutions) for a very long time. Churches were uniquely well-suited to "scale" with modern life and urbanization, especially compared to other traditional communities. I'm not saying you have to be any specific religion; I'm guessing many other religions are welcoming as well. But pick something where you can find a community of friendly people who share your values (this is possibly most important). Edit: I see that the parent comment has now felt compelled to apologize for suggesting that religion could be a good thing. That's pretty sad. Just because you don't believe in God doesn't mean it can't be a helpful thing for others. Quite frankly, I also believe it's helpful for mental health. Believing that when you die you will just disappear is a rather depressing worldview, and I know people with serious health issues who are atheists and are struggling with that. Same with many aging people. On the other hand, being able to "offer something up to God" can be quite cathartic and an excellent way to relive stress. Priests were the therapists of olden days. Edit 2: For further clarification, here's my response to those who say "just gather like-minded people". It's much harder to do that without religion. The best definition of religion I ever heard was "an ideology that provides a comprehensive worldview". In other words, something that shapes your perspective on and understanding of every thing else. It is not easy to find such a group of people who share such basic understandings and values without the use of religion.
  - cheerlessbog 7y ago
    Religion combines two things and some people only want one: opportunity to socialize and build friendships with people who share values; and a belief in supernatural actors.
    - pessimizer 7y ago
      I think the problem with this is that one of those values has to be to consistently attend the meeting. Supernaturalism offers this. Video games rely on consistently being entertained by video games; once it's not fun, you can just leave.
- cwp 7y ago
  Yup, that's a regularly scheduled recurring event, alright.
- impostir 7y ago
  Disclaimer: I grew up in that environment, community Catholic, and am now an atheist. I never enjoyed the Sunday gatherings, I was an angry child, but leaving it does give me perspective on why people stay. It gives you a real sense of community that most people I know don't have. It connects you with people, hell my family wouldn't have any friends without their parish. Religion, specifically Catholicism, has a lot of problems, but their are legitimate reasons why the vast majority of people hold onto them.
e40 7y ago
To maintain relationships as an adult you need regularly scheduled recurring events. Whether its a cookout every other Sunday, a Friday happy hour, Thursday night online gaming, or anything really. That is obviously true, but I had never thought of it that way. This is one of the most insightful HN comments I've read in a long, long time. Thank you.
- Justsignedup 7y ago
  This also highlights why church or other community events are so hard to leave. All religious nonsense aside, this creates a space for people to just hang out and get some socializing in, create lasting relationships. Also explains why it is so hard to leave a game. You're not leaving a game, you're leaving the community you've been playing with. This is why org nights are so important, its how you get together on a schedule. This is also why it is better to be in an event that everyone in the family can participate in, since it is so important for you not to miss.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
As a rule of thumb, multiple the RGB value of the average congregation member's skin tone, the number of grand children the average woman in the church has and the age of the church (so, like 1000-something years for catholic). The lower the number the more of a "social event" church is. Edit: You people have no sense of humor.
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  Agreed. Lighten up, HN. He didn’t even make any jokes about the Sixth Greater Abyssinian Baptist Church or something.
nlawalker 7y ago
> But it must be a recurring event that does not need to be planned each time, but not going is still considered something you are cancelling. The tough part about recurring events is that they're always lower priority than anything emergent, because they're going to happen again. A mildly uncooperative two year old or middling-priority work task likely won't prevent you from attending a one-time event, but an every-other-week happy hour? Yeah, sorry, can't make it this time... The trick is finding a large enough interval such that missing an instance feels like a real loss.
Tade0 7y ago
To maintain relationships as an adult you need regularly scheduled recurring events. Or somebody willing to go the extra mile and gather everyone regularly. I have such a person in my circle of friends from college - he organizes get-togethers which include me even though I've been out of town since 2015. Given the distance I usually vodkonference.
scandinavegan 7y ago
I run a face-to-face pen-and-paper RPG one night every other week for a group of friends. Some of them I've actually met through this campaign. We've been going for many years and when people ask how me make it work, my number one suggestion is the same as yours: pick a day of the week and stick to it. Pick a cadence that is fast enough so that you don't forget what you did last time, but is also slow enough so that you have time for other things in your life and have time to look forward to it. It can be every week if that works for everyone, or every other week, or once a month. For us it's every other week. One feature of having a fixed day is that it's possible for everyone to schedule other stuff around the activity. But the best part is that you don't have to spend a week coordinating peoples' schedules, having to decide if the player that "prefers" Monday gets to decide over the player who "prefers" Tuesday, and so on. At the start of every other week, it's already there in the calendar. Also, since everyone in the group has jobs and kids now, people will miss sessions now and then. I've decided to play anyway, as long as we're at least two players plus the game master. If we were to wait for everyone to be available, we would always cancel, because someone is almost always away. We just pretend their characters are busy and decide at the start of next session what they did, or they float along as spectres with the group without interacting. If they hold quest items, we just give them to another character for a session, and so on. We make it easy to drop in and out. I'm a player in another group that insists that everyone is present, and we have six-month gaps between sessions that are supposedly bi-weekly because there are always sick kids or deadlines at work for someone.
hnick 7y ago
This seemed very artificial to me, until I realised we had this recurring event to an extreme degree earlier in life - it was just called school.

neilv 7y ago

Or weekly/frequent religious community gatherings. People who aren't familiar with that might not appreciate the community aspect. For example, for some flavor of American Catholics, much of a normal Sunday can be blown (as far as the kids are concerned) by dressing up in Sunday best clothes, attending the big folk music mass, the chatter as people spill out of the church and maybe also talk with the priest out back after the procession out, followed by hours of "coffee and donuts" socializing in the parish's school cafeteria or meeting hall. I'm not that kind of religious, but that's one way to find and maintain friendships, as well as sense of community and mutual support.

throwaway50003 7y ago
It seems that every time a social topic comes up on HN someone will extol the virtues of church attendance and their sense of community. Like, seriously, if some HNers are that nostalgic towards churches why don't you guys join one of the many congregations out there?
- bartwe 7y ago
  Would be weird if you dont believe their variant/flavour
  - throwaway50003 7y ago
    Then gather a group of like-minded people and just hang out! It worked for rationalists, surely it can work for other adjacent communities. HN meetups are a thing, right?
neilv 7y ago
A comment that sounded sincere was deleted while I responded to it. Quick answer: I mentioned a religious congregation because I thought it wasn't well-known in HN circles. My intent was actually to use this as an opportunity to try to explain something I know about some complicated group. All of us fellow humans have so much misunderstanding between so many groups, contributing to conflict and disrespect, often for no good reason. (For example, religious/cultural congregations aren't just about doctrine and dogma passed down from parents -- or often aren't even about that at all, for many people -- but are often things that people are in for reasons we can maybe appreciate and understand. Then we can address actual problems better, together.)
- pessimizer 7y ago
  I'm the opposite of religious, and there's no doubt that the political strength (and happiness, and comfort) of religious groups lies almost completely in the fact that they meet regularly at a dedicated meeting facility, and this while this meeting can be gotten out of, it requires some sort of excuse, and an individual's consistent absence is considered a mild crisis for the group. The group is also expected to favor its members, and to provide mutual aid, and as the group increases in size, that mutual aid is often delivered in a form mutually beneficial to the helper and the helped e.g. one member needs work, another member needs a worker they can trust. Many/most religious people have a very loose idea of the orthodoxies of their own religions, but they know everything about what's going on at their church, and in the lives of other people who attend it. Secular traditions can't really survive over the long term without designing similar structures. I doubt that individualist ideologies can do this at all, because they tend to feel that obligation without contract is not a thing, and even that the strength of obligation with contract is directly related to the ability to enforce that contract.
  - brighter2morrow 7y ago
    I think it's hard for no religious institutions to form cohesive groups because they don't have a commonly-held value structure. Indeed once you start to impose values on group members then for all intents and purposes you become quasi-religious because there's no materially bound "value-driven particles" or similar physical structure to values.
mises 7y ago
Can second. I grew up in a Protestant Church like this, and it's a great community. Nice and welcoming people are sometimes rare these days. I can't help but think that it's just not "cool" to be religious. It's seen as things our parents did, and every one wants to be an edgy atheist. For better or for worse, humans drew community from their churches (or other religious institutions) for a very long time. Churches were uniquely well-suited to "scale" with modern life and urbanization, especially compared to other traditional communities. I'm not saying you have to be any specific religion; I'm guessing many other religions are welcoming as well. But pick something where you can find a community of friendly people who share your values (this is possibly most important). Edit: I see that the parent comment has now felt compelled to apologize for suggesting that religion could be a good thing. That's pretty sad. Just because you don't believe in God doesn't mean it can't be a helpful thing for others. Quite frankly, I also believe it's helpful for mental health. Believing that when you die you will just disappear is a rather depressing worldview, and I know people with serious health issues who are atheists and are struggling with that. Same with many aging people. On the other hand, being able to "offer something up to God" can be quite cathartic and an excellent way to relive stress. Priests were the therapists of olden days. Edit 2: For further clarification, here's my response to those who say "just gather like-minded people". It's much harder to do that without religion. The best definition of religion I ever heard was "an ideology that provides a comprehensive worldview". In other words, something that shapes your perspective on and understanding of every thing else. It is not easy to find such a group of people who share such basic understandings and values without the use of religion.
- cheerlessbog 7y ago
  Religion combines two things and some people only want one: opportunity to socialize and build friendships with people who share values; and a belief in supernatural actors.
  - pessimizer 7y ago
    I think the problem with this is that one of those values has to be to consistently attend the meeting. Supernaturalism offers this. Video games rely on consistently being entertained by video games; once it's not fun, you can just leave.
cwp 7y ago
Yup, that's a regularly scheduled recurring event, alright.
impostir 7y ago
Disclaimer: I grew up in that environment, community Catholic, and am now an atheist. I never enjoyed the Sunday gatherings, I was an angry child, but leaving it does give me perspective on why people stay. It gives you a real sense of community that most people I know don't have. It connects you with people, hell my family wouldn't have any friends without their parish. Religion, specifically Catholicism, has a lot of problems, but their are legitimate reasons why the vast majority of people hold onto them.

e40 7y ago

To maintain relationships as an adult you need regularly scheduled recurring events. Whether its a cookout every other Sunday, a Friday happy hour, Thursday night online gaming, or anything really. That is obviously true, but I had never thought of it that way. This is one of the most insightful HN comments I've read in a long, long time. Thank you.

Justsignedup 7y ago
This also highlights why church or other community events are so hard to leave. All religious nonsense aside, this creates a space for people to just hang out and get some socializing in, create lasting relationships. Also explains why it is so hard to leave a game. You're not leaving a game, you're leaving the community you've been playing with. This is why org nights are so important, its how you get together on a schedule. This is also why it is better to be in an event that everyone in the family can participate in, since it is so important for you not to miss.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

As a rule of thumb, multiple the RGB value of the average congregation member's skin tone, the number of grand children the average woman in the church has and the age of the church (so, like 1000-something years for catholic). The lower the number the more of a "social event" church is. Edit: You people have no sense of humor.

selimthegrim 7y ago
Agreed. Lighten up, HN. He didn’t even make any jokes about the Sixth Greater Abyssinian Baptist Church or something.

nlawalker 7y ago

> But it must be a recurring event that does not need to be planned each time, but not going is still considered something you are cancelling. The tough part about recurring events is that they're always lower priority than anything emergent, because they're going to happen again. A mildly uncooperative two year old or middling-priority work task likely won't prevent you from attending a one-time event, but an every-other-week happy hour? Yeah, sorry, can't make it this time... The trick is finding a large enough interval such that missing an instance feels like a real loss.

Tade0 7y ago

To maintain relationships as an adult you need regularly scheduled recurring events. Or somebody willing to go the extra mile and gather everyone regularly. I have such a person in my circle of friends from college - he organizes get-togethers which include me even though I've been out of town since 2015. Given the distance I usually vodkonference.

scandinavegan 7y ago

I run a face-to-face pen-and-paper RPG one night every other week for a group of friends. Some of them I've actually met through this campaign. We've been going for many years and when people ask how me make it work, my number one suggestion is the same as yours: pick a day of the week and stick to it. Pick a cadence that is fast enough so that you don't forget what you did last time, but is also slow enough so that you have time for other things in your life and have time to look forward to it. It can be every week if that works for everyone, or every other week, or once a month. For us it's every other week. One feature of having a fixed day is that it's possible for everyone to schedule other stuff around the activity. But the best part is that you don't have to spend a week coordinating peoples' schedules, having to decide if the player that "prefers" Monday gets to decide over the player who "prefers" Tuesday, and so on. At the start of every other week, it's already there in the calendar. Also, since everyone in the group has jobs and kids now, people will miss sessions now and then. I've decided to play anyway, as long as we're at least two players plus the game master. If we were to wait for everyone to be available, we would always cancel, because someone is almost always away. We just pretend their characters are busy and decide at the start of next session what they did, or they float along as spectres with the group without interacting. If they hold quest items, we just give them to another character for a session, and so on. We make it easy to drop in and out. I'm a player in another group that insists that everyone is present, and we have six-month gaps between sessions that are supposedly bi-weekly because there are always sick kids or deadlines at work for someone.

hnick 7y ago

This seemed very artificial to me, until I realised we had this recurring event to an extreme degree earlier in life - it was just called school.