How I rebooted my social life

Some self-help for the New Year

A few years ago, I was going a little mad.

Materially, my life was comfortable. My partner and I had just bought a house. I was doing okay in a freelance writing career. And we were living the sort of middle class-ish lifestyle where we could afford multiple foreign holidays a year.

But there was something I found disturbing. I didn’t have any reason to ever leave the house.

That’s not much of an exaggeration. Through a combination of luck and circumstance, I’d landed in a work-from-home career where almost everything happened over email or Zoom. Amazon could drop anything I wanted at my door within 24 hours. Deliveroo and Ocado took care of food. And because my partner and I don’t have—nor want—kids, we didn’t have that automatic tether to our local area either.

So far, this may not sound so difficult. Lucky me, right? But what made living like this difficult was that my social life had also ground to a halt.

Sure, I had friends and perhaps even hundreds of looser connections, by virtue of being a middle-ranking character on British Politics Twitter, but I only rarely saw people in person. Our closest friends did not live locally, nor was there any mechanism that would regularly bring us together.

How did this happen? I think the cause of this social collapse was down to a few different factors. The first was obviously the pandemic, which made us all too comfortable with staying indoors. The second is a function of getting older – a significant proportion of the people you used to hang out with have kids and disappear off the face of the Earth for two decades. And the third was, frankly, my comfortable circumstances.¹

Simply put, I really like being in my house. It’s extremely pleasant to live in. The person who I like spending time with more than anyone else lives here with me, and our cats are here too. I have a massive TV, a Playstation 5 and a gigabit internet connection.

But clearly you can have too much of a good thing, as it has the effect of making staying in more desirable, and makes the prospect of heading outside seem less appealing.

Perhaps, though, you can’t really see the problem? You might even be reading what I’ve written so far with envy. After all, I’ve lucked my way into an extremely pleasant life of no dependents and few commitments,² so what could possibly be wrong? Objectively, this was an incredibly unsympathetic situation to complain about.

However, the problem is that I had basically managed to over-optimise my life, and as a result it was actually quite a mentally tough way to live. It turns out that when you don’t have them, you start to miss connections with other humans.

And this was when I finally realised something that should have been obvious. I had a small group of close friends who were spread across the country. I had a wider group of friends and acquaintances who I’d talk to online.

But what I lacked was a community.

The cage of norms

Ironically, I’d always been pretty dismissive of the importance of community.

On a zoomed-out level, this was because I saw myself on the cosmopolitan side of the great cosmopolitan/communitarian divide. In principle, I’ve always liked the idea of a big, anonymous, atomised city where individuals are free to determine their own destiny.

Ideologically, I think strong, individual rights are important tools of liberation, and I’m suspicious of how strong communities shackle people within what the authors of The Narrow Corridor refer to as a ‘cage of norms’.

For example, the reason small towns can feel so oppressive is because they are surveillance panopticons. Everyone knows each other, so the range of acceptable behaviour is inevitably mediated by social pressure. If you break the invisible rules of the group, you risk losing status, being shunned by everyone in your life – or potentially even worse.

Historically, that’s why small communities are more conservative, and why people move to the city to free themselves from the expectations they were born into.³

But this is not just a geography thing. These same dynamics also apply to other types of communities too. Strong communities, whether geographic, religious, professional or simply driven by shared interests warp our incentives, and create norms and taboos about what can and cannot be said or done, if you want to maintain standing with the in-group.

I think I’m particularly suspicious of community, because as a writer and pedantic arsehole on the internet, I value truth-seeking behaviour. I want people to think and say things that are true, not just things that they have to believe for the sake of keeping their community happy.

And to be fair to me, there are plenty of examples of communities where this happens – many of which I have written about before.

For example, back in 2020 if your in-group were all lefties, it would have required an act of tremendous bravery to question the norms that arose around ‘wokeness’.⁴ And more recently, in ‘neurodivergent’ communities, it can be difficult to raise legitimate questions about over-diagnosis, without risking the wrath of friends and peers.⁵

And I personally have experienced these same community dynamics myself, albeit on a much less severe scale.

I won’t bore on as I’ve talked about this before, but I spent my early-mid 20s as an enthusiastic member of the ‘skeptics’ community which, ironically, was premised on the rejection of dogma and the celebration of changing your mind. Yet, inevitably, over time even this community developed its own norms about what ideas and questions were and were not acceptable to remain in good standing, and it has fallen apart as a cohesive community because of disagreements over those norms in the intervening years.⁶

So this is all to say that my default setting here was deep suspicion of community dynamics, and a strong desire to be an independent thinker. I wanted to believe that I was deriving my opinions and outlook on the world through the exercise of pure reason and careful thought. I didn’t want to pollute my analysis with concerns about what other people would think.

But when I reached the point of total social collapse, it turns out that, actually, I did.

The value of community

This is all an extremely pretentious way to say that, despite my carping above, what this whole thing made clear to me was that there is clearly social and psychological value in community.⁷ Even if it does make truth-seeking more complicated.

So what good is there in being a part of a community? It seems almost too obvious to say. I could talk about how there are practical advantages in terms of mutual support. I could point to how communities are engines of trust, which we need for society to function. Or I could recognise how community bestows a sense of belonging or identity as we float through an empty, meaningless, godless, universe.

But this would hardly be revelatory.

So what I will say is that personally, something I miss the most about being a part of a community is how it creates a ready-made group of friends, even in a city as large as London.

Back in those ‘skeptic’ years, I could go to certain ‘skeptic’-branded events – pub meet-ups, public lectures⁸ and so on – and without detailed planning or coordination, I’d inevitably bump into familiar faces. And crucially, they all knew each other too – it was a shortcut to like-minded people to hang out with.⁹¹⁰

So when the community fell apart, and I fell out of it, it was like losing access to an entire constellation of friends.

Building community

This brings me back to my dilemma. I had identified that the problem was that I wasn’t part of any community. So how could I find a new one?

It was 2023, a few months before my 36th birthday, and I had an idea. I should organise some birthday drinks for myself – something I hadn’t done for years.

Now, obviously, this doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I was genuinely nervous. My mental health wasn’t in a spectacular place, so when I did this I wasn’t sure if anyone would actually turn up.

So I psyched myself up, and started sending out invitations to both friends I hadn’t seen in a while and looser connections. I didn’t have a well-defined strategy for who to invite – I sent the details to friends and acquaintances who appeared in my notifications, or to mutuals who appeared on my timeline. But anyway, to my relief, on the night itself, a whole bunch of people actually turned up.

There were friends who I’d known for years, and others I was meeting in person for the first time. And as far as I could tell, everyone had a pretty great time.

Psychologically, this was obviously an enormous boost. It turned out making the effort to invite people to stuff pays off. And this is when the answer to my larger problem hit me. If I wanted a community, then I could build it myself.

I mean, in principle, it shouldn’t be too hard to do. Community has been the foundation of all of human society since the dawn of our species, so the playbook for how to build one had already been figured out.

I think it boils down to a few key ingredients: a community needs a common connection or interest. It needs a place for people to interact informally. And it needs a mechanism for new people to join, to prevent it from decaying over time.¹¹

So the first thing I did was not wait until my next birthday to organise some more drinks. In fact, soon after that first event, I began planning not just my next event, but my next events, plural.

My premise was simple. I was going to attempt to fill a room with what I described as “the most interesting people I know”. And I was going to do it every month.

I’d pick a date and announce some drinks. I’d then send out an invite to a mailing list I’d curate of several dozen friends and acquaintances. And I’d follow the same scattershot strategy of inviting people to join both the next event and the mailing list. Then when the day arrived each month, I’d hang out with whoever turns up.

My thinking was that this solves two of the core challenges when forming a community. It solved the coordination problem – instead of ad-hoc hangouts that would need to be specifically arranged and have a nominal purpose – like a work meeting – I was saying “I will be here, come and hang out if you’re free”.

And it also solved the decay problem. To put this in the most mercenary and bloodless terms possible, by continuing to expand the mailing list, I have created what digital marketing bores would call an engagement funnel. Now when I make a new friend, I have something recurring I can invite them to so that we can see each other regularly. And if they turn up, it’s an effective and fun way to maintain our connection, rather than have us drift apart.

A successful reboot

It’s now over two years on from… whatever this moment was. And it has worked out even better than I could have hoped. Almost every month now, I have an excuse to see my friends, and renew the connections I have with a much wider network of people. Some months are bigger than others in terms of attendance, but every single time I’ve headed home feeling like I am connected to my fellow humans, and psychologically renewed.

It has had spillover benefits too – my social calendar is now much busier, as staying connected with people, in person, has enriched my social connections more broadly.¹²

I no longer feel like I am going mad, even if there is a risk that my description of how to maintain friendships above might read as psychopathic. I once again have a community of people around me.

And I don’t think I’m the only person who appreciates this. Other regulars at my drinks events seem to enjoy the excuse to get together, maintain existing connections and make new friends too.

Which I guess brings me to, basically, why I decided to write about this, beyond the fact that I thought you might like something a bit more reflective in the awkward Christmas-New Year gap.¹³

I wrote about this because I suspect I’m not the only person who has experienced a collapse in social connections. The structural problems I identify above – the pandemic, working from home and comfortable circumstances – aren’t exactly unique to me. I bet that lots of people feel like they are going mad for similar reasons too.

So at risk of sounding like a grifting internet ‘guru’ type, if you’re where I was a few years ago, my life advice to you is this: Just invite people to stuff! It works!

If you’re looking for an excuse to organise that event, start that thing or create that WhatsApp group, this is the sign you have been waiting for to do it!

Hanging out with other humans is good – and if you can’t find a community… you can always build your own.

Talking of joining communities, if you enjoyed reading this you should subscribe to my newsletter (for free!) to get more of my writing direct to your inbox. I even organise real-life public events for subscribers occasionally!¹⁴

1. There are other causes I could speculate about. I suspect the Cost Of Living Crisis™️ also made people less likely go out, for reasons explained in this comic.

2. Even my work doesn’t have much of a rhythm to it. Because I’m my own boss, my week is not structured around regular meetings with colleagues – it’s more like having a list of homework assignments to complete on my own schedule.

3. Narratively this point would be stronger if I was gay or had dissident political or religious views. But I’m an incredibly boring heterosexual man in a monogamous relationship, with completely mainstream centre-left views. But you can see what I’m saying.

4. When I originally published that linked piece, I was absolutely terrified. Since then though, there has been a vibe shift and my claims in the piece would hardly raise an eyebrow.

5. Another really striking example is the experience of former Extinction Rebellion campaigner Zion Lights. When she, er, saw the light about the importance of nuclear energy it was not easy for her. Backing nuclear nuclear is considered basically heretical in the environmental movement, and in her new book Energy is Life she writes movingly about the toll changing her mind took on her when the facts said one thing – but everyone in her community believed another.

6. The fact it happened to a community of people who aspired to be rationalists shows just how powerful and intrinsic to the human experience group dynamics are.

7. Don’t worry, I promise that I’m not going to go all Blue Labour about it.

8. I am an extremely cool dude.

9. This even worked internationally. A few times when my partner and I would go on holiday, we’d look up the local skeptics group – and we’d set up a very enjoyable evening with likeminded people.

10. This might turn into something I write about at greater length, but I do sort of mourn the loss of both Facebook and more recently Twitter as centralising spines for our social connections. It used to be – certainly for my generation – that you could create a Facebook event and click “invite all”, and hey presto, you’d have a party and a guest-list. But now so many people have given up on both platforms, we’re once again scattered as a species. If you want to organise something today, where the hell do you start? Email???

11. This latter characteristic is I think best witnessed on internet forums of old. You’d join because of a common interest, like video-games or Star Trek or whatever. But over time, it would become more of a social hang-out with the “off topic” board hosting most discussions. And unless there’s a steady stream of new people, the core would rot as people move on in their lives, or rage-quit, and so on.

12. It even has professional benefits. It turns out that bringing together interesting people I know from different parts of my life is fantastic for generating the germs of the takes and stories I write on here.

13. I sure hope expressing mild vulnerability on the internet won’t backfire!

14. I really should do another one soon.