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.
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.