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.

  • micnd90 [he/him,any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    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.

    • aramettigo [none/use name]
      hexagon
      ·
      3 years ago

      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.