Create the social spaces you want to see in the world

the world needs it

A tide is shifting; dare I say the vibe is shifting. People are waking up to the possibility that you can do things in big cities that are not just drinking, that you can have more interesting and fulfilling conversations, that you can share the parts of yourself you’ve hidden away. People are discovering that there’s so much room to experiment within the space of “ways to share company with friends and strangers.”

On June 3, 2021 I posted this on my instagram story:

It seems, in retrospect, like a reasonable request, and yet it felt like it was outside the norm of the social spaces that were available to me at the time. Only three friends responded to the story. But fast forward a few years, my friends and I have hosted dozens of such intentional gatherings, like demo nights, rabbithole sessions, group meditations, public speaking games, and saturday night “introvert parties.”

And it’s not just me. In the time since the pandemic, I’ve noticed an explosion of intentional gatherings. I’ve met people who are hosting storytelling nights and reading parties, chai and vibes and cocreation sessions, weekly writing clubs and walk and talks. People are building physical spaces for these things too: you have The Commons in SF, you have Verci in NYC, you have people building neighborhoods and campuses of their own. The term “third space” has quadrupled in usage in the past decade¹, and even the New York Times has picked up on the trend.

Behold the magic of cascading effects. Many of us want to have more interesting, inspiring, and nourishing social experiences, and it only takes seeing one other person doing it to give us the permission to do it ourselves. As I’ve shared about my own gatherings over the years, I’ve seen dozens of people inspired to do their own, in places as far as Bangalore and Sydney. And in turn, everything I host is downstream of spaces I’ve seen others create.

Events in Bangalore inspired by something I hosted in NYC

Events in Sydney inspired by something I hosted in NYC

Anson is someone whose hosting work is a big source of inspiration for me

Okay, so fun hangout ideas are nice; but what if this is actually bigger than that? What if this is about solving a nationwide epidemic of loneliness, and potentially even chipping away at the root cause of America’s crisis of democracy? Bear with me: I recently watched the documentary Join or Die (2023), which argues that the cause of America’s civic decline is the erosion of something called “social capital.” Just like how a region can have financial wealth, technical knowledge, or natural resources, it can have a different kind of wealth in “the networks of relationships among people who live and work in a particular society, enabling that society to function effectively.”² There’s ample empirical evidence that declines in social capital—as measured by decreasing participation in social clubs, religious groups, unions, and other organizations—is directly linked to declines in voter turnout, social trust, educational outcomes, and even the ability of local governments to function effectively.³ The thesis of Join or Die is that joining clubs is necessary not just for your individual wellbeing, but for the wellbeing of your country. All the more reason to participate in the creation of clubs and communities.

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People are yearning for better ways to connect, and our civilization depends on it, but we don’t have enough hosts and spaces to accommodate them. The few cafes I know in New York that are open past 8pm, like Book Club, tend to be completely packed at night. Whenever I meet someone new and tell them about Midnight Cafe events, they are eager to join, and hundreds of strangers have signed up for our mailing list. Another friend recently started Open Book Club, and had 150+ people on the waitlist for their second meeting. And nothing else has popped off quite like Reading Rhythms, which sells out hundreds of tickets each week for quiet reading parties—if you want to join, you’ll have to wait a month and a half before you can read with strangers in a vibey space. 

There is, admittedly, a degree of absurdity to all of this. Go to tiktok and you’ll see comments like “Hipsters recreated the library and think it’s profound 😂”. They are right, to a degree: there is nothing new about book clubs, storytelling nights, or salons. We can agree that the instagrammification of connection is annoying, that the word “community” is slapped too often onto personal projects for social media clout⁴, and that all this event marketing—curating a chic aesthetic and selling the illusion of intimacy—is not doing a whole lot in the service of connection. And yet, the fact that so many people are signing up for these events (in New York, at least) demonstrates that they are serving a need that is otherwise not being met. I will take all the overwrought branding and fancy instagram pages if it means more people can connect, if it means we can make baby steps towards weaving the social fabric of big cities into tighter-knit enclaves.

I think as hosts we have a responsibility not just to talk the talk but to walk the walk, both in our hosting work and in our personal lives. To put as much attention into the actual experience of our events as we put into marketing them; to put as much effort into our friendships as we put into our gatherings. I quipped the other day on twitter: “oh, you want to solve the loneliness epidemic? have you considered checking in on your friends more often?” I think there is something fundamentally off about being someone who takes on this grand mission of bringing people together and consequently barely maintains their own friendships.⁵ It’s the same way I feel about people who espouse the virtues of activism and donating to charity, and then are cruel and inconsiderate to the actual humans around them.

I do think, at the end of the day, most hosts are in this for the right reasons, and are trying their best. Hosting is too hard to do if you don’t actually find meaning and joy in bringing people together. The list of duties is endless: you feel the weight of responsibility for everyone’s experience, your attention is scattered in a million directions in the hours leading up to and during your event, you put untold hours into sending invites and confirming venues and setting up decor, and you also have to deal with people flaking last minute. So anyone who hosts things ultimately earns my respect, even if their events are accompanied by pretentious instagram branding.

There’s a quote about how every great institution is the extended shadow of a single person. I would say that every great gathering is the extended shadow of its hosts. Of course, the host can’t control everything, and in the end everyone is co-creating the experience in tandem, regardless of your label as “gatherer” or “gatheree”. But each time I attend someone else’s event I’m struck by the way that little details in the event—the decorations, the layout of the space, the ordering of activities, the opening spiel they give—are reflective of that person’s values, interests, and inclinations in that moment. Events are a fingerprint of the people who make them. Which begs the question: what are the social spaces you want to create? What does a “you”-shaped party look like?

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Thanks to Suzanne for feedback on earlier drafts.

1. See Google trends:

2. From wikipedia.

3. From Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone.

4. I like to talk about what I do with Midnight Cafe more as “hosting events” and “curating interesting experiences” rather than “building community.” As much as my events have fostered connection and new (and often deep) friendships, I don’t think it has the kind of consistency to be reasonably called a community, and many other groups I encounter fall into the same bucket. Fractal, from the outside, seems a shining example of genuine community: it’s self-organizing, it has been around for several years, and it’s centered on a cluster of people who physically live in the same space. (I should also mention that it’s fine to just host cool events and not build a community; I just think people should be honest about what they’re doing.)

5. I’ve written before that this is no easy task; my point is that we should make a concerted effort at it regardless.