If You Build It, They Will Come

If You Build It, They Will Come

Several times in my life I’ve tried to break in with a new social group. I ran into a cool community I wanted to join, or I moved to a new city and wanted to make friends there, or I just wanted to broaden my horizons.

Pretty quickly I learned that the best and fastest way to join a group is to organize events where we do the group’s core activity. In every group I’ve ever encountered, there is far more demand for social events and things to do than there is supply. Getting people to come is like giving away ice cream at the beach. You can make friends by showing up from the outside and consistently attending other people’s events, but it’s a lot easier and faster to make friends if you’re also organizing your own stuff and inviting the people you’re hoping to get closer to, or helping with someone else’s events. I’ve found this true everywhere from niche online fanfiction discussion groups to vanguard intellectual movements directing hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Lots of people have a sort of consumer attitude towards their communities, where they take everything for granted. I saw things this way when I was young. A social scene is an automatic feature of the world that appears on its own, like a wild blueberry bush. It starts sprouting parties and dinners and conferences and reading groups as naturally as the bush sprouts berries.

Surprisingly, it turns out things don’t actually work that way. In fact, events happen when someone puts in the legwork to organize them. And one of the most reliable laws of the universe is that, if something takes a little bit of legwork, then most people just won’t do it. A scene’s leaders are mostly the people who actually bother to put in the work.

The work of organizing is underappreciated by many people. But the other organizers are very attuned to this, and absolutely will notice who else is picking up the burdens.

I’ve come to believe that part of today’s problem of social alienation is a problem of too many free riders. Lots of people want to consume social fabric, but our social scripts telling people to produce social fabric have largely fallen by the wayside. I don’t know how to solve this undersupply at the scale of society. But you can solve it at the scale of your own community by just supplying it.