How to transform your social life - by Kasra
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How to transform your social life<br>plus the pros/cons of having a lot of friends<br>Kasra<br>Sep 28, 2023
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I’ve experienced two versions of social life in New York:<br>You know a handful of people in the city but you don’t ask them to hang out because it makes you anxious, no one invites you to things, and you spend most weekends entirely alone. On Friday nights you feel depressed that the workweek is ending and you have no plans, so you send an office-wide Slack message asking if anyone wants to get dinner, which of course no one responds to because they all have lives.
You are invited to multiple parties every weekend (housewarmings, housecoolings, birthdays, salons, picnics, launch parties), you frequently ask people to hang out without a second thought, you host things every month, you meet several new people each week, and you make connections with random people on the internet who are interested in getting to know you.
It would have surprised me a few years ago to discover that it’s possible to go from (1) to (2), but indeed it happened for me, in the span of about a year. Here are the things that helped me make the transition.
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Make it a game to initiate as much as possible, even when it makes you anxious.
I can’t stress how surprisingly effective this technique was. For the first year or so that I was in New York, I was in this weird place where I knew a few other people in the city, but I didn’t really feel close to them, so I was hesitant to ask them to hang out. And then I got sick of my hesitation and wrote this:
link<br>And I kept this literal log of every single time I messaged someone and felt uncomfortable about it:
With enough practice and loving awareness at each instance of discomfort, this eventually became easy, and I stopped having to make a note of the discomfort at all. (Concretely, between November and December 2021, I wrote down approximately 50 such moments. After two months I no longer felt the need to do this.)<br>The same practice can be helpful for any uncomfortable activity that you repeatedly have to do. I think making the written note is crucial because it helps to create a vivid juxtaposition in your mind between (1) how uncomfortable you felt at the moment you did the activity, and (2) how totally unimportant it feels when you’re looking back at the note a week later. This juxtaposition helps train your brain to be less afraid of the activity, perhaps.<br>I’ve used this same approach for various other things that I wanted to conquer my fears on, e.g. “going to parties where I don’t know anyone and I feel nervous” (currently at 13), and “feeling cringe when posting on social media” (currently at about 50), among others.<br>Start a blog and/or twitter and/or other social media thing.
There are a lot of things that suck about social media, but one of the best things is that you get to connect with people who have the same interests as you.<br>“But what do I say/post?” Whatever you’re already saying/doing in your life, but you just put an artifact of it online. If you like making art you can post art. If you like reading science textbooks you can talk about your learnings from science textbooks. Twitter is a fairly easy to get rolling with because you can just post whatever random thoughts pop into your head, and unless you’re enlightened I’m sure you have plenty of those.<br>You don’t need a big following to make friends off the internet. On twitter I started connecting with people when I had less than a hundred followers. Anytime you see someone whose stuff you like, you can DM them and say “hey I really like your stuff!” And maybe follow up with “would you be open to a social call sometime?” (More opportunities to expose yourself to rejection!)<br>One caveat here is that social media is easy to get sucked into. You can use various tools like blockers to make sure you’re not overdoing it on the consumption side.<br>Host things.
What kinds of spaces, events, gatherings do you wish existed more? Hosting is a great opportunity to craft your social life into exactly what you want it to be, because you can set the intention and the tone and the participants of the gathering. Maybe you wish there was a knitting club. Why not start one? It can just be you and two of your friends.<br>If you do this consistently, very interesting things can happen. You’ll get introduced to people who want to host your gatherings in their spaces. You’ll meet other people who are into hosting and discover the enormous breadth of social spaces that exist in your city. You’ll also just make a lot of new friends by virtue of your friends inviting their friends.<br>When you host something, be sure to talk about it (on social media), so that people are aware you’re doing it. Even if they don’t join the first time, they will be more interested in joining later. This will also make it more likely that, for example, someone...