2 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Weekly Free Talk Friday Thread!
Fair warning. I wrote a lot. I tried to include as much detail as I could because I want to be as helpful to you as I can.
So the common theme here is that most of these hobbies are kinda like solo hobbies. That's not bad. I think it's really healthy to have solo hobbies. But if your work environment isn't able to help put you in social situation to build friendships, then we need our hobbies to. right? Or set aside time in our weekly life to build new hobbies/interests around the concept of friendship making. This is the investment part.
These hobbies aren't serving as the catalyst to make new friends as they are currently enjoyed. So either we got to make these hobbies group-ish or weave in hobbies that are centered around grouping to force interactions where we can build social connections.
As for hobbies I like art
So just throwing out some ideas here. But what about organizing a low key paint swap? I imagine space is limited in an apartment but if it's possible, what do you think about painting a landscape with 3 other randos from the books club or people from work? If space is an issue, maybe we can try doing this at a park?
I did a thing where we each painted 1/4 section of a landscape for 1 hour. The goal being that combined it is one whole landscape and we each only did one section of it. (Person 1 paints section A, person 2 paints section b, person 3 paints section c, etc)
You need a real wide shot of a landscape, something like this[1] And maybe a way to display the artwork so that people can see it easily. Small prints attached to the easel? (I might try etsy for digital prints of wide lanscapes)
Then all the painters slide right to paint on someone else's canvas for 15 minutes. Then again we slide to the right to paint on someone else's canvas for 15 minutes. And again until we've all had a chance to paint on each other's canvas.
I was a bit nervous letting someone else paint on my canvas but i let it be a fun thing. Just by the virtue of someone else painting on your canvas creates some connection or point to talk around. Add some soft upbeat music and I think it creates a space that allows you to engage in a hobby with potential friends. And everyone got to take something home, that's always a good feeling.
Depending on a lot of factors, this may or may not be doable. But it's an example of trying to group-ish some of our solo hobbies into a space that we can use to make connections to folks.
And again, this is the investment part. If you like to paint acrylic, you might already have some supplies. Use cheap brushes and paints from Temu so you don't incur a huge cost. Or ask participants to bring snacks/wine/beer/cash to help with costs. Or openly acknowledge that we're using cheap easels, paint and paintbrushes so it's easier to do this more often.
Don't overcommit to paying for something that will give you bad feels. I don't want to set the impression that you should buy friendship but at the same time, taking the time to create a space for friendships to happen is a huge part of this. I'm usually kinda broke, so a lot of my investment was setting up the space or running the event.
Other activities off the top of my head, invite randos from work to bike to a brewery in the warmer weather.
I actually want to hit on a point, I think a large part of my success has been the ability to invite people to hang out, *before they pass the certifed vibe check*. I've hung out with a lot of people that I don't count as friends because we don't really get along. But I didn't know that until after we hung out. My brother-in-law does this and it's been so successful that I tried to incorporate it into my life. I used to be *very* nervous cold approaching people for hangouts. But this is the Bluey method. Treat them as if they are already friends. I think most people are also in the same boat in that they need more social interaction than they have, so sometimes it's easy to make that connection once I get past my own anxiety around it. At first, this was me asking every rando at my friends birthday party if they want to play DnD. This is the emotional investment and it may be the largest part of friend-making.
I hope this helps
Comment by Effective_Fox at 28/01/2025 at 23:58 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Thank you I’ve saved your comment. I’m not super optimistic but I’ll keep your suggestions in mind and keep trying different things
