it's relatively easy for me to meet people online, but there's only so much i can get out of virtual friendships anymore.
RL relationships have been commodified such that, for most people, if you're not getting something out of the interaction the cost benefit analysis isn't worth it. Internet relationships are easier to form because there's no immediacy of the face to face. If I suddenly disappear, no one here will mourn my loss. If I decide to stop responding to messages there's already etiquette in place that you're not supposed to really do anything in those situations. It's very low barrier-to-entry and low effort.
IRL you have to care about how you manage your attention, and for good relationships to form you should often be generous and unconcerned with transactions. But for most people that's too much work. In our society investments essentially necessitate returns, and returns in relationships are not guaranteed and never have been in human history.
As for how to meet people irl? I dunno. My go-to strategy has been to thirst trap people into being friends. :volcel-judge:
yeah, I'd notice if you were gone, cause I'd be like "that fucker with the same name as me is gone. I wonder where they went?" :cri:
Capitalism!
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Proletarianization means you spend most of your time away from home doing a job with little relation to anyone else.
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Capitalist "urban planning" frequently splits people up based on economic zoning rather than a more village-like approach where being outside and in community is even plausible let alone incentivized.
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"Third places", i.e. not work or home, tend to be service businesses like restaurants or coffee shops designed to sell you something and get you out of there - deliberately too small to have a meeting of 20 people. As land value has increased, community centers become very expensive to build and maintain and require huge parking lots due to the last point. That is, even if a community wanted a viable place to hang out and organize, they wouldn't be able to afford it.
Not to mention, so many things you might have gotten from your community in other societies - food, housing, childcare, etc. - you now obtain through cold, economic transactions.
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How hours a week would you say that you spend in spaces were there's opportunity to meet people?
My experience - I started meeting people when I spent 1-2 hours every week at org meetings and boardgame meetups.
people suck everything costs money and i'm unfriendly :shrug-outta-hecks:
actual strat: get one friend and parasite off their friends and parasite off the friends friends
In the rare times I meet a new friend I like, I try to fold them into my existing friend group as naturally as possible.
community didn't create enough money, so people feel unconnected to the people and place around them. These means it's harder to walk up to strangers and just start talking to them. Most hobby spaces have moved online(where they can put adds on them and micro-target every one of them). Plus the expense of literally any activity has skyrocketed. Unless the park is in walking distance you're going through gas getting there and back, and that can run into money for some people. Plus everyone is overworked and exhausted, so if you aren't already a guaranteed good time(by this I mean you are already known and liked by the other person) it is not worth the emotional energy to get to know you and see if you're friend material or not.
Yep ever since I moved for my job I have completly given up on IRL social contacts. Like I have none at all, but those few hours that I'm not exhausted on a weekend I'm not going to spend them in a bar hoping to strike a conversation. I'm in one of the most conservative regions in the country so organizing is almost impossible and I hate sports with a passion.
The same with dating. The social expectation around here is still that the first 20 steps must be initiated by the man. Running into a lot of rejection while putting all that effort in is at least for me much more unhealthy than just staying alone. Not that I would blame women like an incel, it just always puts me into a bad place. :what-the-hell:
it's actual effort to go out "cold calling" like that. People talk about it like it's supposed to be fun but it's worse than work sometimes. I really do feel much more comfortable just staying alone, it can actually feel peaceful occasionally which is rare these days I feel.
Dating is such a cringe annoying affair tbh. I really want more feminism so that dating isn't just the weird zone where patriarchal rules still apply. And dating apps are just so weird. I don't have time or money to go on a bunch of dates or try to screen out people who are just there for a hook-up.
Most fundamentally I think it's that there is a lack of non-transactional spaces for people to meet new people, particularly for people who are done with school / university.
This is what actions are good for. You meet leftists in a collaborative environment and know everyone (except the agent provocateurs) are on mostly the same page.
You really gotta find some group that meets in IRL and dedicate to going to it over a couple of months. It can really fucking suck, but it takes time to forge social bonds between people especially these days as everyone is so closed off and guarded. Honestly thats the only way I have had luck meeting people as an adult, and it is predicated on you having the luxury to dedicate a whole day to being social, which in and of itself can be super stressful. Personally I have found it worth it in the long run, but I am under no illusion that it is easy. So much of frendship isnt some magical bond or spiritual connection, but just regular boring old contact with similar interests over a long enough time.
it takes time to forge social bonds between people especially these days as everyone is so closed off and guarded.
This is probably a controversial take, and may only be a thing that is cared about by me; but I do honestly think that people over-valuing their individuality is a contributing factor to this. If you are an atomized autonomous subject, and you see that as a good thing, then ultimately anybody trying to engage with you without your prior permission (even if that engagement is fundamentally trivial) is to some degree or another, suspect. After all if you form social relationships with other people then they might come to expect things from you, which we understand to be an impingement on our freedom these days.
This may be true to some degree, but I think it's probably more that we have been trained by experience to not expect material reciprocation from others by society that we look at any offer of such as suspicious. I know that as I have slowly gained more deep adult friendships I find myself more willing to risk extending myself in a tangible way to other people. I personally try and avoid hypotheses that center cultural or ideological change, not that they cant be real thing, only that it is inherently centering a thing that cant really be quantified. Like how do you quantify "cultural individuality" you can quantify something like "number of reciprocal relationships" among a cohort of people, and for what I have seen for American society that number is quite low.
I will admit that I don't know as though I have the answers to all this, and a lot of my pontifications are probably built in large parts around motivated reasoning & :brainworms:.
Even so, I think that there's a potentiality that what you're saying about the simple fact of being more socially connected causing you to be more pro-social in how you engage with others, and what I'm saying about how the way we think about ourselves as persons could effect our willingness to even engage with others on a social basis; I think that in some ways there's a potentiality that these could be mutually reinforcing phenomena.
Admittedly I don't want to overcommit to anything though, unless it ends up being wrong.
Assuming you're in the US there aren't any recreational places to go to in most places. If there are, most people don't have the time nor the money since it'll probably cost money, be it a fee or a 20 minute car ride. I think that Bowling Alone book called them third spaces with the other two being work and home. Last month I actually met someone on one of my walks but it's not feasible to meet them again because everyone just goes straight to their car after leaving home to go to work for most of the day.
If you're in any western/capitalist country I'm guessing most of that still applies. When I read a lot during one my depressive phases one of the best ways to make friends is through repeated, spontaneous encounters which is just not possible to do in my experience.
Last month I actually met someone on one of my walks but it’s not feasible to meet them again because everyone just goes straight to their car after leaving home to go to work for most of the day.
This is why I'm so skeptic of that other guy's comments about putting yourself out there, there are limited contexts were spontaneous meetings are encouraged, outside of those, people think that you want something from them. I've actually talked to random people on the street a couple of times, even striked some conversations, but people aren't just going to open up to you just cause there was some interesting sight or sound and you briefly bonded over it. I also probably suck at it, I dunno. I just grew a bit sad just thinking about it, actually.
“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…”
It's a Timothy Leary quote, so the emotions are dialed up to 11, but the central idea is solid. If you're willing to say and do some of the 'weirder' things you think and feel, eventually you'll meet someone on the same wavelength. Some examples from my personal life:
- Shouted "Play Freebird!" at a bad musician during a street festival. A stranger approached me to ask what's the deal with people shouting "Play Freebird." Continued talking after that, found out we share common leftist ideas, and we've been friends for almost a decade.
- Started dropping little bits of leftist ideas while I was working the carnival and made friends with the only other leftist out on the road.
- Overheard a lady make a Donna Haraway joke when I was at a friend's art exhibition. I knew immediately that I had to talk to this person. 2 years later we got engaged. Sure, it didn't work out in the end, but it happened and I'm happy it did.
Basically: Be a lil bit :lt-dbyf-dubois: and a whole lot :yes-chad:
Yeah, a lot of Leary is pretty cringe in retrospect. Then again, so is a lot of counterculture.
Not in essence, no, but I know Leary was also not the most ethical person when it came to his LSD experiments at Harvard. I was kinda nervous about posting it in the first place.
See? A lil bit :lt-dbyf-dubois: and a whole lot :yes-chad:
I dig this totally. And abide by it intuitively.
Just put it out there while in public and watch the walls break down.
We’re all on this shit together. It works.
i'm glad it worked out for you but tbh even if the musician was bad i would have prayed for you to get hit by a wheelbarrow for that freebird thing
I mean yeah me too. I had yet to excise the boomer within in those days.
I haven't made an IRL friend in years, but I've also been in standby mode thanks to life stuff. Hoping that will change soon. Anyway yeah I also have no idea where I'd make a friend (my online friends help)
When you all are talking about meeting people online, are you guys able to form like, real friendships with them? By which I mean, you Zoom once a week or so, share your actual emotions and daily struggles, and do virtual activities together. I have only two relationships like that right now and I want more, but both of those people I met in-person pre-pandemic. Are you able to build friendships like this purely online? I unfortunately can't socialize IRL due to long covid.
i have online friends i've known for over 5 years and i love them as much as i love the few irl friends i have. and yeah, i do pretty much all of that with them, but lately the lack of physical contact has gotten to me a bit
It was easier in the old days, back when forums were niche communities rather than... Reddit. You got to know everyone you posted with because there were only so many of you and everyone had some sort of graphic signature at the ends of their posts so you'd quickly learn to tell people apart. You weren't so worried about opsec because you were mostly talking about anime buddy icons or something inane like that. Eventually the conversations would move to AIM and Skype, and there would always be weird interpersonal drama mixed into the forum posts as a result.
I just don't really know where you find that anymore. I miss the old internet, though.
It's much harder to make friends on Hexbear because most of us are just bots posting from the same basement server in the Lubyanka building.
Get a load of this guy not posting from Xinjiang :xinternet:
As a:
Socialist
Human
Interface
Linux
Lifeforms
I am run on distributed SHILL servers in Moscow, Urumuqi, Havana, and Ho Chi Min City.
yeah I've found it's just so incredibly hard to make any lasting friendships since graduating highschool (and by extension of that, since being a kid). it's difficult to make friends and meet people in person unless you're being made to meet with a group on a daily or at least semi regular basis. which really sucks since I don't really go anywhere anymore. I find that anytime I speak to an acquaintance/stranger its only a superficial or transactional exchange, a very lonely culture to exist in.
I do love the friends I made in online spaces though, I feel more genuine connection in my interactions with them with those superficial and transactional elements less present. but I just wish there weren't so many barriers to meeting people and developing friendships in person.
i can relate to everything you just said. after losing my connection with most of my friends from school, it's been near impossible to make any new friends irl (especially since i hate small talk and superficial conversations.) i love my online friends as well, but i keep wishing i could meet them irl just once.
I became, with practice and trial and error, somewhat extroverted before the pandemic. The pandemic really reversed a lot of that work.
I’m in south eastern VA if anybody wanna grab a beer or smoke one
