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 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.
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.
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