Puzzle nights are up 151% and my team works alone — Chovy's Blog
Puzzle nights are up 151% and my team works alone
2026-08-18, by Anthony “chovy” Ettinger.
How this was written: drafted with an AI assistant from my own notes,<br>then edited by me.
Axios ran a piece on Monday called<br>America's meetup<br>explosion. The short version: people raised on swiping, DMs and streaming are leaving<br>the house, and the events they are turning up for are ones nobody would have called cool<br>five years ago. Birding. Silent book clubs. Mahjong.
The numbers are from Eventbrite and Evite. Puzzle competitions were up 151% in the<br>twelve months to July 2025 over the year before. Mahjong events are up 94% this year.<br>Eventbrite calls the category "soft socializing", meaning you are in a room with other<br>people and networking is not the point.
The best line in it comes from Cole Robinson, a 20 year old who runs the Audubon chapter<br>at Trinity University: "It's very easy to sit inside and rot just by yourself." He is<br>talking about birdwatching. He could be describing my industry.
Sitting inside by yourself is our default setting
Profullstack is fully remote and has been the whole time. The team is spread across<br>several countries and most of a clock. That is a real advantage and I am not giving it up.<br>But an office was quietly doing a job that nobody put on the org chart. It made you leave<br>your house, put on shoes and be near people who were not in a thread.
Take that away and nothing replaces it on its own. Slack is not a hallway. A standup is<br>not lunch. You can go a full week shipping good work and speak out loud to nobody. That is<br>not a productivity problem, it shows up later as everything being slightly harder than it<br>should be.
What we are actually asking
Nothing complicated, and no HR program:
One thing a week with other humans in it and no screen. Not a tech meetup. Chess<br>night, a run club, a bad pottery class, the library. It does not have to be about<br>software and it is better if it isn't.
If there is a ticket price, expense it. A 15 dollar puzzle competition is cheaper<br>than replacing someone who burned out in a spare bedroom.
Working from a cafe or a library counts for the day, not for the week. Being near<br>strangers is not the same as talking to one.
Nobody has to report back. If it comes up in standup, fine, but this is not a<br>metric and I am not tracking it.
The clients get the same advice
Founders have it worse than developers do. A lot of the people we build for are one or<br>two people who moved their entire social life into a laptop, then wondered why every<br>decision started feeling heavy. When one of them tells me they are stuck, the honest answer<br>is usually not architectural.
So we say it out loud in calls now: go to the thing. Talk to people who cannot help your<br>company. Some of the best product feedback I have ever gotten came from explaining what we<br>do to somebody at a bar who had no reason to be polite about it.
The honest part
I am bad at this. I work late, I stream late, and the easiest thing in the world is to<br>tell your team to go outside from a chair you have not left since morning. Writing it down<br>is partly me committing to it.
Stuart Schuffman put it to Axios better than I can: "Everybody's been stuck behind their<br>phones for the past two decades, and it's not good for humanity." He is not wrong, and the<br>fix is not a better app.