Feel like I'm hitting a wall here. Trying to meet people just to have some local connections is hard, forget trying to organize.
Everybody knows each other forever and few are interested in knowing outsiders. The only people open to new connections are immigrants, naturally, who are worked hard and have few interests outside the grind and their families.
There is no social life, as we still envision it, still existing. No social spaces to congregate. There's a couple of bars that are only busy on Friday and Saturday nights. A couple of supermarkets, a walmart type store, and that's it.
The lawyers, doctors and accountants in the town seem to exercise together in groups and live outside the town, socializing in hotel restaurants & bars even further away from the town. I haven't seen any kind of other organized group activity.
Amber was right about rural towns.
Anyone got any interesting ideas on how to build some community IRL, without using online social networks?
e2a thanks for all the suggestions folks, appreciate it. Gonna start some kind of group outdoor activity maybe. We'll see.
edit - appreciate the effortposts folks. Just fyi I've moved to a foreign country several times, for multi year periods, and found work independently, so it's not like I'm unused to flying solo. Maybe I just had a vision of rural social structures and communities that doesn't exist anymore. Any manufacturing that existed here has been offshored. Agriculture is hyper mechanised now so no work there. Retail is dead.
The 24hr gas station that was an institution here apparently - a family owned diner, convenience store, carwash, that provided a lot of employment over decades - is now card operated gas pumps, no staff. All the money that the business used to circulate into the local community now goes offshore, where the family that still owns and operates the business operate it remotely. Capital no longer needs workers and is free to simply extract directly to offshore accounts.
That's exactly my situation and here's how i solved it:
1 - Go to school there for 12 years
2 - Get the hell out
Find the surviving book store or tabletop gaming store, if any still exist
That's a great call. There was a gamestop, I think, nothing now. Not a gamer, tbh, but would game now lol.
I was thinking more like the kind of store that sales board games, card games, d&d etc.
People who play those types of games typically prefer meeting irl and interact face to face. So whatever the faults of those games, it's less alienating than electronic gaming
And if there isn't a board game store, you could always bring some board games with you to a local coffee shop or diner at a regular time/day. Eventually folks will know you as the guy at the coffee shop on Friday nights with board games. Even for people with local social connections, they're still probably bored af.
But I generally agree with what others are saying here, unless you were born there small towns are really rough (rough for the natives too, just a little less so) and probably best to get out when you can.
if the place was truly rural, wouldn't a board game store essentially just be the closest walmart?
10k-30k isn't truly rural to me. I've seen towns like that still have small businesses for hobbies, especially if they're the principle town in a rural county
Yeah I was talking about IRL tabletop gaming too. It's the kind of town where the kind of people that play tabletop games would be bullied out of the bars if they pulled out a game tbh.
All good suggestions apart from church lol.
Gonna admit to mentioning that I'm single to a well connected neighbour while admiring her dog. Real slice of life stuff. Should at least find out in whose back yard people are hanging out in because they're not in bars.
I guess what’s your goal? If you’re just trying to make your life less shitty then anything works, if you’re genuinely working as a member of a vanguard party organizing people then you don’t really have a choice, you kinda gotta do everything like it or not.
Good post. My goal is the same as everybody here, as much as possible of both tbh. Just building the social connections that might lead to what we're calling organizing is tougher than expected tbh. When people talk about less developed countries as "places where people still talk to each other" I know what they mean now.
I was born in place like that, and I worked very, very hard to not ever have to go back. You're not gonna change the social dynamic, and you're gonna make yourself depressed and doomer-pilled if you lie to yourself that it's possible.
There's nothing wrong with online social networks. Don't reject your neighbors, but don't rely on them for community.
The best thing you can do is just to be helpful and friendly. Wave at people on the street. Chat with cashiers and shit at the store. Be a "regular" everywhere you go (i.e. you should know your barber, store workers, etc).
Honestly, if I were in that situation, I'd get 2-3 jobs, work 80 hours a week for a few months to a year, and use that money to move to a place with likeminded people. You're never gonna be happy living a community with starkly different values and worldviews than you. Putting your head down and just working so you can save and move is the path of least resistance here.
Is there any community kitchen, whether it is religious or not.
Not exactly rural town, but last year I moved to a new city under lockdown. Work from home, don't know anyone, no social life. My lifeline was a vegan community kitchen where I volunteer to chop vegetables and wash pots afterwards. We serve people every Tuesday. On Sunday we started dumpster diving and on Monday we chop vegetables. Thats like 3 out of 7 days at least working with your hands, doing honest work and talking to human. People who volunteer at community kitchen tend to be nice people at heart, even if it is a religious one because they tried to serve the community. On mine it happens that there is also a lot of activist lefty hipster types working at community kitchen.
Then when work from home is over, I manage to socialize with my co-workers, and on late shifts it is easy to talk "hey man what's for dinner" and if the answer is microwaved something or cup noodles then you can invite your IRL co-workers to the kitchen, hang out, and start organizing the workplace and whisper of a union.
Yeah, good post. There's nothing local though. I was a member of an organic-ish food co-op in the last city I was in, so I searched for anything remotely connected here. There isn't any food deprivation or homelessness in the area, I'm gonna say.
Of course, they're fine people, I take every opportunity to have a conversation or to borrow a tool or whatever. This housing area is about 70% immigrants. It seems like people who don't have the language skills to cut it in the cities can find work here, which complicates communication.
There a farmers market around? Being a regular there is one of the few ways I've met people.
Local bars tend to be good too. Go to a few to get an idea of the vibe in them then become a regular. Dive bars are good for meeting blue collar workers, they tend to be rather conservative but tend to be really pro union. Craft beer places have a ton libs but I've run into a few comrades there.
Yeah, thought the same thing. It was a couple of racks of vegetables and some clearly commercial organic honey, with a freezer van selling commercial organic chicken, in a car park. The staff were very unwilling to say where anything came from lol. lib voice They didn't even have artisanal coffee!
Been doing some solo drinking purely to see who is around. Pain in the ass tbh, a few beers kinda writes off a day. The answer is no one is around. People come out in tight groups at the weekend, zero during the week. Dunno how these places are staying open. The signs advertising police camera surveillance and actual police cameras outside the town bars, with a view of all coming and going, are a nice touch.
That really sucks. I guess being in a tiny town (less then 3k) makes a difference. Any where you become even a semi regular at people start to know you. Although I've been here for almost seven years and still don't have anyone I would call a friend, but that's probably more because I'm an extreme introvert than anything else
Hey sounds like my hometown. The lack of public areas where the community can congregate is soul-sucking, isn't it?! :amerikkka:
Unfortunately, when it comes to the 'general' community at-large, you're going to be hardpressed (basing this entire comment off my own hometown, fyi so ymmv) to find anywhere beyond the grocery store/gym where more than 15-20 people congregate at the same time.
However, rural communities tend to really go all out on local events/festival. My hometown specifically does a festival every summer that - while attracting a surprising number of out-of-towners and visitors from the surrounding area - is mostly trafficked by the entire damn community. Then there's the county fair every October -- same thing where 95% of the people there live in the surrounding 10 miles. These were the best opportunities I ever had doing things like getting people to sign petitions, network, etc. A local organization (or individual if you're still on your own!) can easily get a table as a vendor/local organization and regardless of how trafficked your local fair/festival/etc is, you're bound to at least have a few people walk up and ask you what you're about.
In my experience, getting a vendor/organization table at a local fair is more of a 'figuring out who the hell to talk to' thing rather than an insurmountable task due to paperwork, fees, etc. I spent a literal week asking every person I knew who typically participated in the county fair, "hey who do I talk to if I want a table at the entrance where the Police department and the Rotarian club have their tables & flyers?" and getting in contact with that person since of course it was some retired white dude who doesn't use SMS or email and can only be found at the deli downtown from 8am - 11am on Mondays.
Do you have a local chamber of commerce? They are often the most unbearable local government organizations in existence but I guarantee you your local one probably is connected to or hosts some 'young professional' group. Those tend to be a bit more fluid when it comes to ideology and what you can get out of the group itself, opposed to like the CoC's Small Business meetings or whatever. I would definitely consider attending if you're just trying to meet like-minded people who will likely have an hour or two available during the week to meet with a different group.
If anything - you surely have a library nearby and I guarantee you the librarian there will be perfectly fine with it if you ask to leave some flyers on the walls/by the entrance/etc.
I get where you're coming from with the festival idea, but I honestly think people's current understanding of outdoor events is off. It's like how a protest now has to be registered, negotiated and controlled. Any and all outdoor events are the same. There's a country "festival" held here, before the pandemic and again recently. It's a fenced (kettled) area, no alcohol allowed inside, where approved music watching activities may occur for just a couple of hours, finishing by 9pm.
Watched a movie recently with some kind of archetypal 18thC mormon summer fair and actually thought it seemed more fun and free than what exists here ffs.
Thanks for the library suggestion - forgot about it because it's so underfunded and out of the way. Bought some printer paper for flyers just now too.
Find the chatty friendly people and get in with them - don't be afraid to get to know boomer church ladies at least at first, some of them have all of the social connects in a place like that and the nice ones will introduce you to everyone.
See if there are any orgs in your area, even ones that aren't specifically revolutionary like Food Not Bombs, Black and Pink, DSA, or similar and meet some comrades there. Even look for like a community garden or something and see if there are people you can get involved with there.
Keep an eye out for event fliers posted around, especially in like restaurant windows, even not-so-hip towns around that size can have some surprising music scenes (one near me just had a local EDM festival?) and stuff like that too.
See if you can get to know your neighbors too — say hey if they're out and about, otherwise stop by with food and introduce yourself (ymmv pandemic wise)
The old folks around here have been radicalised by media fear programming, actively hate younger generations, and many are radically and religiously anti abortion. They have been co-opted by the local police department and report the slightest thing that irritates them as part of some kind of community anti crime thing. There is no crime apart from the older generation refusing to give the younger the same opportunities the older had when they were young. I hate the thought of intergenerational warfare but there it is.
They will call the cops on a group of kids having a smoke in the sun. They will call the cops when kids burn rubber for an hour at the weekend at a supervised, negotiated, car event. These are people who were wild and lived an active youth, that they don't seem want to allow to today's youth.
Appreciate your other suggestions, but they just don't exist here. I live in an immigrant area, hard working family focused people that socialize very little. All they're interested in is why wouldn't someone be doing that, lol.
I live in a smaller rural town than that and there's definitely still some older folks that are pretty chill. If there's 10k to 30k people where you're at I'd bet there are some chill ones there too, but fair enough for avoiding them.
It's really easy to start your own chapter of food not bombs, you could also try some other orgs too, and that might be an easier way to find a social network that doesn't suck. You could also try forming a tenants union or something, or working on organizing a community garden as a starting point or something
I feel like I've done all the obvious things, so yeah starting a org is probably the next step. Anything to get people interacting in a group setting tbh.
It's among the most conservative town in the country tho, according to voting records on social issues.
There ought to be around 500-3000 people in the town who are your age plus minus five years. Of them there are at least a couple dozen who would align well with you if circumstances were right. So it is about either finding people or creating things in which people participate so you find each other and build stuff.
Focus on regularly meeting (the same) people again and again, might take a couple of years but this is kinda tried and tested. Still hard to do and the other suggestions in this thread are more helpful, just don't give up.
Whats your job in town? It matters a lot. In places like that though you get a lot of churches, which might not be so bad of youre religiously inclined
Actually decent suggestions. Been exercising outdoors for years before the pandemic, but now might be the time to join a gym.
I'm not gonna lie, I did describe my type to a guy I was regularly buying from, and asked him to set me up with another customer. He didn't lol.
That's what I thought. Maybe he doesn't want customers talking to each other or something.
probably he thought it was 50% chance of stealing customers, 50% chance of cop/fed BS.
Buy a truck, join a truck group, start workin on trucks with some guys, start talking about how its bullshit the boss does nothing but makes all the money.
slow agitprop, lie about how your grandpa was an original redneck union coal miner and the cops threw bombs on him from planes. Its stealing valor for a good cause, okay.
just ask them questions about their views but reframe the same views into commie agitprop.
then idk, repeat and enjoy the company of some guys working on trucks and drinking beer. Have one teach you to weld, do static metal art from old truck parts. gift your art to folks.
