You should invite people over to your home regularly
Everyone—everyone!—is worried about the loss of interpersonal connections in society right now. Kids aren’t going out. Adults aren’t hanging out. The digital world is obviously at fault, even if the causal mechanism is not totally clear. But it’s definitely Bowling Alone on steroids.
The easy solution is to just, well, start hanging out with people! And don’t make plans to go somewhere. Just invite them over to your home. It’s way better. And people are more likely to accept. And so it’s more likely to happen. Here’s how I put it in my substack this week:
Whatever you make of that, my niche view is that people—all people, not just teenagers—don’t host enough, which I think of as fundamentally different from going somewhere with people. I know a lot of people who are uptight about having people over to their home, but I really can’t think of anything that is easier and makes people happier than being with people they know in a private setting.
Some of the problem is people make too much of it. You don’t have to clean your house, you don’t have to serve fancy food. You don’t have to plan it three weeks ahead of time. Just invite people over. Maybe for a card game. Maybe to watch a sports event. Maybe literally to just hang out. My guess is you’ll be shocked at how receptive people are.
Just do it. Stop making excuses. Get over yourself. Many people are literally desperate for these invitations. I’ve seen entirely social circles blossom because someone started inviting people over.
It won’t be awkward. It’s the opposite. Priya Parker is right. This is fundamentally what makes people happy.
It’s absurdly cheap. It takes almost no time to plan. The logistics are simple. Those three sentences negate every excuse you have for not doing it, and that your friends have for not going out somewhere. People will bring food—you’ll be drowning in it. You don’t need to clean, no one cares. It’s not an endless time commitment, you can bound it. Again, once you get in the habit of this, it’s so much easier than going anywhere.
People aren’t too busy. The trick is to be flexible. There’s no minimum guest size to make this work. Invite six couples. If all six show up, great. Play Spoons and hang out. If five are too busy, also great. Make cocktails and find out what is going on in one couples’ lives.
A card game or a board game night is an oasis from modernity. If you ever have any inkling that you’d like to get away from technology, a deck of cards and your kitchen table is the closet thing you have to a time machine. Half a dozen humans, present and talking to each other, around a table.
This isn’t some “a few times a year” thing. Once you have a home hang out circle, things will naturally rotate so there are different hosts. But you should really be thinking “weekly” in your head. Not only will that make you happier, but it will make hanging out routine, not exceptional.