Five weeks of social interactions

Recently I started tracking all "hanging out" I get — walking with couchsurfers, taking Tinder dates to museums, going to board game meetups, etc. I just do the tracking in a separate calendar in my calendar app:

Over the last five weeks it averages to "every second day". I did a poll and it turns out some of you are doing much much less:

So I am going to do a breakdown of all the hanging out from the screenshot above and maybe there will be some stealable ideas there.

Meta: why track all this?

Putting stuff into a calendar makes me more aware of "I am doing badly and should boost up the whatever [channels] I have available". For instance — "Oh, this past week has been quiet. I can start accepting requests on Couchsurfing again now."

Also, without tracking things, it's easy to feel like "oh, I have zero social life and have always had zero social life and it's so bad". Nope, it's not zero — it's just "not that much" and also "not particularly fulfilling". If your background evaluation is also "complete shit", switching it to "not that much and not particularly fulfilling" is going to help you long-term.

Meta: background knowledge

I live in a foreign country
not knowing the local language
working remotely
without roommates
and without a partner.

Okay, now let's go.

Hanging out with hostel people

I was in Stockholm for four days (Jul 19–22). I didn't know anybody there, and stayed in a hostel.

They had a QR code for a hostel-wide Whatsapp group, and every once in a while somebody would announce "we're going to bar XYZ, who's with us?", but somehow I missed all of those.

However, I still got to hang out on two occasions:

I had a board game (The Resistance) with me and I asked a girl in my room if she wanted to play it. I also told her "we need at least five people, though". A few hours later she asked some other guy, and the guy went around and asked a few more people, and we went to the shared kitchen and played.
One day they just had a flyer saying "BBQ at 3pm" in the reception, so I bought a bottle of wine and went to the BBQ. There wasn't a raging party or anything — just a bunch of people sorta standing around and talking a bit. I made myself a burger, talked to a few people and swam in the lake.

Lessons:

If you have a board game in your backpack, you'll probably eventually get to use it. Reaction-based games with simple rules are more fun; anything that takes a while to explain can be boring. Just buy UNO or something and carry it with you as often as possible. You'll get to use it like five times in a year, sure, but that's alright. You need the 1% wins.
Even boring social events are still good because later you can recall them and feel like "aha, that thing happened". You'll get to recall any particular event like only once or twice, sure, but that's—alright—because—you—need—the—1%—wins.

Hanging out at Couchsurfing meetups

I found out, completely by accident, that Krakow has a tradition of doing Couchsurfing meetups. Well, I say "Couchsurfing" but in reality it's "absolutely anybody can come and we don't care".

They have a FB group with things like "we're going to watch a movie today" or "we're going to play board games today" or "we're going to do a language exchange meeting". (Board games usually end in a bar crawl. Language exchange is a lie and it's just a bunch of people chatting about whatever in English.)

I went to four meetups so far — one was absolutely great and super fun, two were alright, one was meh (I had a drink, played chess with a few people and left).

Lessons:

Regular free-for-all social events are a thing that exists. I'm not saying they are easy to find. I'm just saying they exist. Rationality meetups, movies, board games, whatever. You can probably find them in your city if you make "hey, do you know [anything like that]" one of your default things to ask. (Like, if you already ask people "hey, can you recommend any good coffee shops around here", you can also ask about this other thing.)
Regular free-for-all social events are a safety net. I'm not saying they are particularly fun or fulfilling. I'm saying that they are useful to avoid disasters like "I haven't talked to another human being in a month".

Hosting couchsurfers

(This one might not be applicable if you have roommates or scared of Covid or whatever.)

I have the Couchsurfing app. It costs like $2 / month.

I live in a city with 780k people and in the summer I get approximately 1–2 hosting requests per week. If I wanted, I could have people staying at my apartment nearly every day.

Couchsurfing is another safety net. It is not always fun, not always fulfilling, I almost never keep in touch with the people I host, but I still learn new things from them and it's still a safeguard from "haven't talked to anybody for a week".

In the past weeks I hosted people four times:

Two volunteer girls from Ukraine. We went to meet their other friends, then to a bar, and then to a club. In addition to being pretty fun, it was also a) the first ever time I went to a club, and b) the first ever time I smoked properly and felt good about it.
A couple of guys from Warsaw. I went out with one of them later, we had steak, I found out I can actually enjoy red wine, and I got invited to stay with him if I'm ever visiting Greece.
A Polish girl stayed for a night. I don't think I'll ever see her again, but I gave her a bunch of different teas, so maybe a few different people around the country will get to enjoy good teas as the result of it.
Two more Polish girls. Once again, I don't think I'll ever see them, but I gave them a bunch of books from my "finished books" pile. Something good might come out of this — either from the books themselves, or at least from them learning that "hey, you're allowed to offer books from the finished-pile to strangers".

Lessons:

Trying to have a moderately good time with random people is useful even if you're never going to see them again, because later you can apply what you've learned to have a better time with people you do want to be friends with. Thanks to hosting couchsurfers, I know three good bars in Krakow now. Going to a bar with a date from Tinder is much easier if you can go "hey I know this really cool bar" instead of "okay let me pull up Google Maps and try to figure it out from the reviews".

Hanging out in a coffee shop

Eight months ago, I arrive in Krakow, I don't know anybody. Cold, bad, lockdown.

I start going to coffee shops, and whenever I detect even a hint of Russian accent, I ask baristas "hey, just curious — where are you from?". About half the time it turns out they are from Ukraine, we switch to Russian and chat for a while.

One of the baristas turns out to be the actual owner of the coffee shop, and she's super friendly, so I start coming more often. It's lockdown and indoor dining isn't allowed, but since she's the owner, she doesn't care that much. Russian+friendliness = I can sit inside.

One day her husband was also in the coffee shop. He owns a construction business and does a small book circle for business owners. For the next few months, we are doing book circle meetings every Thursday and I enjoy them a ton. I also go mountain hiking with him (never did that before) and it turns out to be super easy to arrange, so for the next few months I start inviting people to mountain hike. Because HEY, I CAN ARRANGE THAT. I AM A KNOWLEDGEABLE MAN.

Anyway, regarding the past five weeks:

There are other frequent guests in the coffee shop, so I get to chat with them. Nowadays (eight months later) it means that I can go to the coffee shop and say "what's up?" to a few people I already know, pretty much any day.
Today the coffee shop had its anniversary. I got invited, we ate cake, I brought cheeses, and I shopped for presents with another guy from the coffee shop.

Lessons:

If you just keep talking to somebody every day, you might get to piggyback on their own social life later. Possibly months later, but still.

Hanging out in Wroclaw

A while ago an acquaintance told me "hey, my friend from Belarus moved to Krakow recently, he's looking for a flat, can you give him advice re/ neighborhoods and stuff?". I said "sure". Later I went on a walk with that person from Belarus. Later we went to a botanical garden. Later he mentioned he had a pasta-making device and "can make pasta at some point" and I said "sure" and we spent like five hours making and eating pasta. Etc.

In the last five weeks, we went on a weekend in Wroclaw together. This was like the second time in eight months I visited another Polish city. We walked a ton and went to a contemporary art museum. I also went to a tiny piano concert (church, ten people, girl in sneakers playing Chopin) and even though I didn't like it much, now I know that piano concerts are actually a very easy thing.

Lessons:

Dunno.

Hanging out with the girl from the bus

About three months ago I was on a bus (from the mountain hiking!) and met a girl:

I got her Instagram and then went off to Sweden or wherever. Fast-forward a month later, I get back and remember about her and text "hey, do you want to grab a coffee". We grab a coffee and she's interesting & easy to talk to.

Fast-forward another month, I get back from wherever else I was and text "hey, do you want to have dinner this evening?". We have dinner in a great former-synagogue place and I learn about her snake-killing grandma.
I also tell her about the contemporary art museum, and she goes "by the way, there's a Hokusai exhibition in the national museum". So, a week later we go to the Hokusai exhibition together.

Just in case, Hokusai is the guy who did the Apple waves emoji:

He also did tentacle porn, a 180m long portrait of a monk, chased a chicken to win an art competition, and a bunch of other stuff.

Lessons:

You can tell people "hey, do you want to have dinner?" even if you haven't talked to them for a month. I guess that's it.

Calls with family

I had a call with my family like once in those five weeks (we were trying to help my sister figure out what university course she wants to do).

Lessons:

If you, like me, hate giving your family "updates" on your life (see this tweet for an example of what I'm talking about), you can switch to "hey let me help you with X". After a while your family will stop being annoying and start being "we help each other every once in a while and it fills a few holes in the social calendar". 1% wins again. In my case, I just literally started saying "nah that's boring let's talk about [how's your hobby going] instead" every time my mom tried to ask me about how my life was going.

Chess

Once you start playing chess, you discover that a lot of other people also play chess. It's like the default board game that everybody learned in the childhood and then forgot.

It turns out I have two friends who play chess. One guy at the coffee shop knows how to play chess. A few people from Couchsurfing know how to play chess. Somebody at the board games meetup was ignoring everyone except for people who could play chess with him. Somebody from Tinder brought a chess board on a date once. Etc.

So, approximately once a week I get to play somebody. Can be in a coffee shop, can be a call with a friend. Usually it's not "chess instead of whatever else we wanted to do", but "chess or else I would be completely on my own".

Lessons:

If you know the rules of chess, at least once in a while you'll get to play chess with somebody. 1% wins, I told you.

(Btw: if you know the rules but nothing else, and want to be a bit better than "I know the rules but nothing else", the Building Habits series is entertaining & very very good for learning.)

Conclusion

track

things

calendar

dammit