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Yeah, but you've already got your friend circle, right? With the socioeconomic-geographic mobility situation - people moving to get good jobs, better lifestyle

Yeah, but you've already got your friend circle, right? With the socioeconomic-geographic mobility situation - people moving to get good jobs, better lifestyles, and increased quality of life may not. And there are of course regressive movers too, and probably people pursuing greener grass. They aren't going to have friends locally, workplace socializing is... Suboptimal. But in a society that increasingly verbalizes distaste for cold approach, and lacks — as you said a quiet socializing atmosphere (or even competition in such a sphere) there's little left. At least that's my experience.

bunderbunder 2y ago
As someone who moved a lot when they were younger, I'm not convinced that the problem there is access to spaces. It's that the Internet killed it. It reduced the quality of options through over-centralization. And even for the things the Internet didn't destroy, people no longer know how to find things without the help of Google, which then became useless for finding anything that isn't SEO-optimized content farm dreck. A couple concrete examples: In 2005-ish, it was relatively easy to find monthly vegan potlucks in decently-sized towns. Larger ones might have many of them, with sort of a neighborhood focus. But after Meetup came out you saw a lot of consolidation where everyone would just sort of gravitate toward one of them, and the rest would die off. Chicago consolidated on one group that was organized by some friends of mine, and eventually got so big that it sort of collapsed under its own weight. Chicago also used to have a bunch of smaller social groups for people learning various languages. That whole space eventually got absorbed by the Chicago Language Cafe, which then became so big that the venue needed to change from a reasonably-sized neighborhood pub to a large taproom in a converted industrial space. It was big, noisy, kind of inaccessible, and generally just a terrible place to get to know people - again due to Internet-fueled centralization. By contrast, the knitting community tends to have groups organized by local yarn stores instead of through a massive centralized site like Facebook or Meetup. There are two within walking distance of my house. One of them played an essential role in rebuilding my social life when I moved to this neighborhood a few years back. The other I haven't really been to, per se, but they meet outside when the weather's nice and I'll stop and say hi if I happen to be passing by. There are also numerous book clubs that meet at local book stores and libraries. There are probably at least ten within walking distance of my house, meeting at 3 or 4 different venues. (edit: Unstated major premise here is that the diners and bars I was talking about in the previous post aren't actually good places to meet people in the first place, anyway. I view them more as places to spend time with friends you already have.)

bunderbunder 2y ago

As someone who moved a lot when they were younger, I'm not convinced that the problem there is access to spaces. It's that the Internet killed it. It reduced the quality of options through over-centralization. And even for the things the Internet didn't destroy, people no longer know how to find things without the help of Google, which then became useless for finding anything that isn't SEO-optimized content farm dreck. A couple concrete examples: In 2005-ish, it was relatively easy to find monthly vegan potlucks in decently-sized towns. Larger ones might have many of them, with sort of a neighborhood focus. But after Meetup came out you saw a lot of consolidation where everyone would just sort of gravitate toward one of them, and the rest would die off. Chicago consolidated on one group that was organized by some friends of mine, and eventually got so big that it sort of collapsed under its own weight. Chicago also used to have a bunch of smaller social groups for people learning various languages. That whole space eventually got absorbed by the Chicago Language Cafe, which then became so big that the venue needed to change from a reasonably-sized neighborhood pub to a large taproom in a converted industrial space. It was big, noisy, kind of inaccessible, and generally just a terrible place to get to know people - again due to Internet-fueled centralization. By contrast, the knitting community tends to have groups organized by local yarn stores instead of through a massive centralized site like Facebook or Meetup. There are two within walking distance of my house. One of them played an essential role in rebuilding my social life when I moved to this neighborhood a few years back. The other I haven't really been to, per se, but they meet outside when the weather's nice and I'll stop and say hi if I happen to be passing by. There are also numerous book clubs that meet at local book stores and libraries. There are probably at least ten within walking distance of my house, meeting at 3 or 4 different venues. (edit: Unstated major premise here is that the diners and bars I was talking about in the previous post aren't actually good places to meet people in the first place, anyway. I view them more as places to spend time with friends you already have.)