Re:Is Loneliness a Health Epidemic?
by taoistextremist on Monday March 05, 2018 @04:50PM
(#16524788)
I guess it depends on your interests, but I'd suggest going to meetups centered around activities that necessitate or strongly encourage socializing. I go to meetups to speak a different language, and I tend to make pretty good friends at those since the meetups typically revolve around just getting a meal and talking with everybody about life.
Aside from that, maybe you could try taking up a hobby you didn't think you'd be interested in? Pretty much any reasonably sized city seems to have meetups for learning how to salsa dance, for example, which is inherently a very social scene where people all get to know each other.
I've had alot of luck with boardgame meetups. Atleast in my city there is no pressure to buy anything. They're typically weekly with more events interspersed throughout the month
Re:Is Loneliness a Health Epidemic?
by mortenjorck on Monday March 05, 2018 @05:21PM
(#16525082)
This has unfortunately been my experience with not just meetups, but other things where common wisdom says you can make friends, like volunteering. I volunteer every few weeks at a soup kitchen, but despite having done it for a couple of years, none of my fellow volunteers have become more than casual acquaintances.
Re:Is Loneliness a Health Epidemic?
by CogitoCogito on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @02:12AM
(#16527388)
In my experience, making friends at these sorts of things requires active work. It might be active work by someone else, but usually you're not that lucky. You usually need to really ask others if they'd like to meetup yourself. Also you need to be very prepared for them not being interested (like say dating) and be ready to hop to other groups/circles if necessary. (Or even better, just fan out and meet many groups simultaneously and only start going regularly if you meet people you like.)
I'm not saying that you're _not_ doing it or that this is easy (socially, financially, temporally, etc.), but I do think it _is_ easy to just pass through life as a bit of an outside observer, be it at work, volunteering, or basically any other social engagement. (I guess this is what the main article is all about...)
1 - I'm just not in the least bit interested in the overwhelming majority of meetups out there. So there really aren't a lot of interesting meetups for me to choose from.
2 - Way too many of the meetups are actually businesses in disguise. They're looking to sell you a class or get you to pay admission for an event. This might not be a big deal for someone with more disposable income, but it is often a deal breaker for me.
3 - Most meetups meet for just the event itself, and everyone leaves right afterwards, leaving no opportunity to interact with the people there.
4 - For the handful of a handful of meetups which are interesting, not businesses in disguise, and actually leave some time for interaction before/after the meetup: apart from the single shared interest that we all presumably have in the subject of the meetup itself, the people you meet are going to be pretty random and so the odds of making a genuine connection are still going to be pretty low, in my experience, especially if you're shy.
5 - Usually you don't see these people again until the next meetup, which is usually a month later. So you talk to these people maybe for an hour a month. Not much of a chance to make a connection.
Overall, I just really haven't had much luck with meetups, in terms of making friends. I've done better with dating sites, honestly. At least with those, I can be pretty sure before I even go to meet someone that we have a whole bunch of things in common, and can pretty quickly sense if there's some chemistry between us, and if not just move on to the next person. It's harder to do that with random people at meetups. Just my 2 cents.