Finding Community in the Modern World, Part Two
How writing and hosting events have unlocked new levels of connection for me 🌐
I’ve previously written a piece about ways I’ve been able to find community in my own life. The five key pillars I mentioned were: coliving, living near friends, third spaces, attending good events, and community-based experiences.
Since writing that article, I’ve delved into two other newer ways of finding community that have unlocked deeper levels of fulfilling connection for me: writing and hosting events.
Writing
I started writing this Substack newsletter that you’re reading now in Fall 2023, and have found that sharing and discussing my writing with others has enabled me to feel a deeper sense of connection with others at scale. This has come in the form of both having deeper and more meaningful interactions with existing friends, as well as accelerating my connection with people I just met. With existing friends, my writing provides additional shared context that complements our interactions and enables deeper connection through greater understanding and more opportunities for resonance. For new people I meet, sharing a relevant article of mine allows us to build off of our initial conversation and have something deeper to follow up on that can lead to further dialogue. As a result of all of this, I have counterintuitively felt more connection to others by saying no to some social events to spend more time alone writing.
In my first substack piece, I wrote that my hope in starting this Substack was to capture elements of both the depths of in-person conversations and the reachability of social media. I would say both of these have definitely come true. What I didn’t realize would be possible at the time is that writing would also enable depths greater than that of an in-person conversation. This is because writing allows me to get more clarity on my thoughts than when speaking in an in-person conversation, and can serve as a vehicle to share my thoughts long into the future after I’m able to remember all of the details. For example, I still share the first public piece I wrote in 2019 about my 10-day silent meditation retreat experience and connect with people over it. I’m also grateful that writing has allowed me to connect with others at scale in a way that doesn’t include the downsides of social media. This is something I’ve been looking for ever since a friend told me two years ago that Instagram was his best way of keeping up with people at scale - I was intrigued by the connection aspect, yet felt cautiously skeptical because of the negative impacts my past use of Facebook had on me.
Hosting Events
Recently, I’ve been able to experience the magic of bringing people together through hosting events. The feeling of connection from this has felt totally different from that of meeting someone 1:1 or attending an event as a participant.
For example, I hosted a birthday picnic in Golden Gate Park for the second year in a row this year. There’s a certain level of fulfillment that’s hard to describe in seeing my best friends in SF from different communities connect with each other.
My Journey as a Host
For a while though, I never saw myself as a host and felt scared to do so. I thought that it was something I desired in the future, but something that I was so far off from - maybe after I had a big house myself as a venue and a bunch of other necessary ducks in a row. I also felt hesitation and nervousness because of the effort that hosting seemed to require, and worried that people might not have a good time.
Then, I realized that my thinking had a big all-or-nothing distortion to it. I had actually already been a host in the past as well. For example, in 2020 while living in coliving, I ran a weekly accountability group called ‘Beers and Ideas’ after the host moved out by utilizing the existing template and venue.
This reframe helped give me the confidence to co-host an event called Sabbatical Circle during a recent career break I took. I brought six people together who were facing similar experiences as me around being on sabbatical, the topic that I most wanted to talk about at the time. This event had been held at a community space called the Commons in the past, so I reached out to the previous host about it and was able to build off his template and tips. The event itself felt like the great 1:1 conversations I was having around that time about sabbaticals on steroids, with new dimensions of what was possible with everyone being able to build off of each other’s perspectives.
Overall, hosting changed from an idea I had for later in my life, to something I could do right now by putting together some existing puzzle pieces and being able to build off of what had been done in the past. My previous worries and overthinking about how to make the experience slightly better before and during events have decreased through actually hosting too, as I’ve gotten the opportunity to work on the muscle of letting go of control and trusting the participants to co-create the experience with me.
My journey into hosting events culminated in hosting a documentary screening on the decline of community in America called “Join or Die” at the Commons. This was the biggest community-building effort I had ever done personally. It started with gauging interest in the Commons Slack community months beforehand and getting in contact with the directors of the documentary about coordinating a screening. We ultimately had over 50 people come to this paid event. I facilitated a community discussion afterwards and felt very fulfilled in seeing people’s willingness to engage in and discuss topics around community-building. Seeing people stay afterward to mingle with each other and continue chatting felt really rewarding, and hearing people’s positive feedback felt special too. It felt pretty meta to build community by hosting a community documentary at a community space.
Recently, I met two people at another event and learned that they came to the documentary screening and were inspired by it to think more about how to build more in-person community in their own lives. They subsequently came up with an idea to host an offline dating event and recently ran one that was a success! I’ve been told in the past that you never know the impact you might make on others, so it was cool to be able to hear the role that the screening played in their journey of thinking about community in their life and getting into action by building community themselves!
Conclusion
Overall, writing and hosting events have allowed me to find community in the modern world in deep and meaningful ways. While these might feel like they take more effort than simply catching up with friends or attending events, hopefully my own journey of venturing into both helps demystify the process and illustrate the rewarding community and connection that they can enable.
