This should belong to the stupid questions thread but anyway… why don’t bars, inns, taverns, pubs, whatevers work in reality the same way they do in fiction, or, better question, under what conditions, when and where do or would they work like that?
You travel to another city on a business trip, say, to visit a trade show the next day. Same country or different doesn’t matter but let’s assume you speak the language. You check in your hotel. You have a free evening and go exploring. You go to the hotels bar or another bars, inns, taverns, pubs. What will happen? Exactly nothing. You will probably a have a drink or three alone, or if you don’t drink alcohol it will be even more boring, have some dinner, perhaps sight-see as long as it is not dark then retire to your room early because you are bored. The point is, nobody will socialize with you, nor give you the signs that you are welcome to socialize with them. You will get to know exactly zero locals. You will not participate in their lives. You will be an outsider, it will feel like staring at an aquarium. You sit in a bar in a corner, nursing a beer, while you watch the locals come and go, greet each other, chat with each other, while they ignore your existence. A pretty sad thing actually. They seem to have zero interest in getting to know a non-local. You may even get suspicious glances, as they are used to knowing all the faces in their bar, or because simply you radiate those I-don’t-belong-here signals. A pretty sad thing overall.
In fiction this is so different… not only the lively taverns in Tolkienesque fiction where travellers immediate come together and entertain each other with stories, but even in modern, James Bondesque fiction there are things happening in hotel bars after the elegant secret agent checks in, friends and enemies made, pick-ups attempted and so on. There is a social life going on.
Why is it so, or what conditions would make it different? I have exactly one experience when it was not so. We were in a classic outback, behind the beyond farmer town, and we were 10 people canooing down the river. Apparently people in more boring, small-town places are more interested about outsiders, and larger groups mix easier than one lone traveller with a whole bar. If I remember right, we were largely discussing amongst each other and basically the locals overheard us and pitched in. Perhaps such conversation-starter signals are necessary.
As of now it feels like the precondition for getting to know people is to be with people I already know. This also means sticking to cities where acquaintances live in. This sounds too limiting.
Less serious answer: If you walk into a bar wearing ringmail under a travel-stained cloak and loudly ask the bartender, “What news from the North?” you may actually entice people to approach you. Likewise if you’re wearing a tuxedo for no apparent reason. But nobody cares about some tired-looking guy in wrinkled khakis.
More serious answer: I’ve known two or three individuals in my life who were so shameless in engaging with strangers that they could legitimately go into any random bar and in short order they were the life of the party. This requires a rare type of extreme extroversion that I’ve often envied.
Addressing the actual question: Currently most bars are implicitly meant to be either gathering places for small groups of friends or places for opposite-sex courtship stuff. Structural changes that would motivate a more fictionesque milieu would be providing long trestle tables and a corresponding lack of private booths, more open-form, quick games to play (less billiards, more darts), “group rate” alcohol (pitchers of beer rather than individual mugs always promote sharing), and I daresay marketing the tavern as a place specifically for open socialization could help.
I can confirm this. I stayed in a hostel in London for a week last month, and got way more social interaction than I was expecting and about as much as my introverted self could stand. Including one invitation to dinner that may or may not have been a date.
tl;dr: go to places with conversation potential and show that you have value and interest.
Business travel + city destination is a significant obstacle already. Locals may well be highly jaded with “interchangeable” business travellers who are fatigued on the road and may not be at their best socially.
And usually business travellers stay in places that are convenient for their work destinations, be it office, site or conference centre … nearby establishments are far more likely to attract after-work crowds (catching up socially with friends, or continuing workplace conversations), not very good opportunity for an outsider to get involved.
So it’s no surprise that this happens:
You sit in a bar in a corner, nursing a beer, while you watch the locals come and go.
I see loads of people like this in the nearest pubs and hotel bars to my workplace: dozens of solo travelers who are not engaged/engaging with the locals in the slightest. There are various ways to improve on this but it requires social effort. First, choice of destination is key. I travel a lot for work, and always try to find a pub or bar away from the main business areas, ideally with a good reputation for its drinks (I am partial to local beers in such circumstances). Often they look like “old man pubs” but as I advance into old-man-ness myself, I find these more and more welcoming.
Then don’t go hide in a corner but instead, hang out at the bar and get into a drinks-related conversation. Can be as simple as asking for a drink recommendation from the server, or once you’ve sunk one or two, other recommendations for drinking around town. You may find yourself stuck in a “beer bore” conversation but more often in my experience this is just the starting point. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but retreating to a corner table, reading a book or resorting to a smartphone are all signs of giving up, and most places I’ve travelled these are clear signals that a person doesn’t want to be disturbed.
More generally, it’s all about revealing some kind of common ground—and showing other people that you have potential conversation value (some kind of conversation-starter signals), AND are interested in talking to them. Not all one-off visitors want a chat—and going back to the original point, this is very often the case with business travellers who might just be counting the days until they return home, or focussed so much on work they don’t care about their surroundings.
Finally, there are of course vastly different social practices across different countries, regions, neighbourhoods. My comments above are mainly related to my experiences in England and northern Europe. My experience in Scotland, and Ireland (and even more so, midwestern USA, where I grew up) is that one must work hard if one wishes to avoid conversation with locals.
Perhaps an open place—square, street, park—is better than a bar, since the bystander effect isn’t so strong and people feel reasonably sure they can run away from you.
Freedom of expression comes with a cost. I can’t remember a single sober or just less weird person who has tried to start a conversation when I was abroad being weird. I don’t like it—think Sam meeting Strider.
Of course other pieces of clothing can also encourage people to approach but Vibriams offer the other person a conversation starter in way that most other pieces of clothing don’t.
Or at least I don’t know of another piece of clothing that has a similar effect.
For me, the most responses came from a cheap khaki blazer of all things. The highest responses I’ve ever seen among my friends were from a backpack with juggling clubs sticking out the back.
They wouldn’t directly comment on it unless they knew me, but just a general impression my friends and I got. One friend jokingly tried to take it off of me so he could wear it himself after he saw two hot girls strike up a conversation with me just by me ordering a drink while standing next to them. It was a few years before guys overdressing became the “in” thing at night clubs, so it was probably because I was trendsetting.
I think there are two different things: 1) Wearing an item to signal that you are a person worth talking to. 2) Wearing an item that makes it easy for someone to talk to you because it gives them a conversation starter.
At a night club I can see how a trendy khaki blazer encourages people to talk to you. I however don’t see how it will encourage a person to talk to you while you ride the tram or are otherwise in a situation where talking to strangers isn’t standard behavior.
The past was a more small-town place. If you were travelling and went to an inn, the exoticism of being from out-of-town would have been greater. People would have been more willing to socialise with you for the novelty, and also to try and take advantage of you.
Basically, if you have high value in some sense, people will want to come chat to you. This could be because they want to sleep with you (as in the “attractive female” example above) but could be because they want to sell things to you, rob you, divert you from this bar to the one they own down the street, get your advice, get you to write a letter for them, get you to marry their sister, and so on.
This stuff doesn’t work so well in Western countries these days because the law is stronger, bars are better at excluding miscreants, and our society is more atomised. But go to a third-world country, look like a rich Westerner—or, even better, a rich Westerner with ties to their culture—and you’ll see it constantly.
I think there is a growing trend toward social atomization/social withdrawal that makes these kinds of interactions less likely than they were in the past.
As a kid, I remember biking around with friends to different neighborhoods, meeting different groups of kids of varying ages, playing elaborate, adventurous games we had invented, going to their houses, going to different shops and arcades, deciding on fun activities to do together, etc. Visiting the old neighborhoods near where I grew up, I almost never see kids. It’s not that there are zero kids in the neighborhood anymore(though there are fewer, certainly), but they’re either cooped up at home or being chauffeured to their scheduled playdates by “helicopter parents.”
I wonder how parents have time for that. Since I rarely get home from work before 18:30, we ended up finding a kindergarten near where my wife works and we are very lucky that we live in Austria and there is a law that mothers can choose their own hours of working freely until their children are 6. She will choose 5 hours a day and that will be compatible with a kindergarten schedule. But if different legislation or financial needs required us to work 8 hours both, I have no idea how would be manage. I know in the US a lot of women simply stay at home but I guess you need to be significantly rich for that like making 3 or 4 times the minimum wage and it is pretty rare here, even in engineering etc. jobs. The pay difference between a burger flipper and accountant here is about 2x. Besides, our experience is that it made my mother hugely depressed to have nobody to talk to half day and then the child only the other half, and the first year of staying at home before kindergarten is making my wife similarly depressed, the utter lack of communication and socialization and basically feeling like locked into an apartment like locked into a monastery is taking a huge psychological toll. It can be incredibly lonely. For this reason I think helicopter parenting will not be an issue for us because we will be at work, even if we could financially afford not to, the simple truth is you can talk to people at work and talking people at home in the neighborhood is almost impossible.
Any friends in different time zones? Oops, USA probably wouldn’t work because 12:00 in Vienna = 3 AM in San Francisco. You would probably need someone in India or China. Okay, this is probably not a good idea. On the other hand, maybe you could pay someone in India to talk with you.
Other friends who are also moms at home? Former classmates?
This happens? I guess then we must not be very social people. Friend is a matter of definition, there is one non-relative who relatively frequently calls her the phone, for me that is zero but OK as never pick up the phone anyway, and she has about two, I have about three non-relatives who reply to emails or facebook messages although rarely initiate the exchange themselves. I guess these people can be considered friends, but the definition may vary. In my experience, socializing with people at work does not carry over into socializing after work, I think people guard their privacy rather jealously and we too, I remember two occasions in five years non-relatives entering our apartment and it felt awkward for both. For this reason, as socializing with coworkers does not carry over into evenings, and not really having hobbies or meeting people after work, the people mentioned above who can be defined as friends are former classmates, and as we approach 40 that kind of number naturally reduces.
This is why it is very important to not stay home from work. BTW my mothers case was exactly the same in the 1980′s, staying at home and occasionally talking on the phone with 1-2 ex-classmates, so she welcomed when she was offered to open a fast food stand and talk to customers. Socializing at work and being home with the family in the evening and weekends can be a tolerable combination. No idea what would be more than tolerable, I always figured it is more natural to hang with relatives, perhaps kinship based tribes should be reinvented. (Not necessarily about “blood”, but more about having shared role models and so on.)
What? Having friends, or having friends in different time zones?
a) Yes, it does.
b) In general population, I would guess it doesn’t; unless there are specific circumstances, e.g. your relatives moved to a different part of the planet. But here on LessWrong we have an international community, and some people visit meetups in different countries. There are probably only a few who have travelled to a sufficiently distant time zone. But you don’t have to be one of those; only to be a friend with one of those.
Friend is a matter of definition
Sure; if we taboo “friends” it means something like “people whom you trust enough to do together X”. For different values of X you get different sets of people. (X = “have fun together” or X = “start a conspiracy to overthrow the government”)
In my experience, socializing with people at work does not carry over into socializing after work
Similar for me, 2 exceptions in 20 years.
I usually socialize with my neighbors, with people I have or had some hobby in common (such as LessWrong), and sometimes I meet friends of my friends and they become my friends.
Of course with my neighbors the expectations are low: generally just being nice to each other in case someone will need a little help from the other, and to keep communication lines ready in case there will be a shared problem to solve. Saying hello to each other, bringing cookies, sharing a glass of wine once in a few months. With people I found through my hobby I expect to talk about the hobby, and later about other topics; and if the relations are good, maybe even spend some vacation together.
I always figured it is more natural to hang with relatives, perhaps kinship based tribes should be reinvented
I was thinking along similar lines once, but almost everyone from my family lives in a different city than me, so it’s not an option. But generally, “relatives” and “friends” are two different categories; I cannot realistically expect my relatives to have similar hobies as I do. With them, it is a different way of spending time; just being together, being a tribe. With friends, it is talking about hobbies, making hobby-related plans, and later also being a kind of a tribe—though this part is more difficult because “clicking together as friends” is less transitive relation than “being related by blood”. There are many situations where I am friends with X and Y, but X and Y do not like each other. (So I cannot convert “having 2 friends” into “having a tribe with 3 members”.)
I think the business-travel milieu is the main obstacle here, though I can’t rule out quirks of your psychology.
When I go to another city for pleasure rather than business, I find myself far more willing to approach people and the people I approach far more receptive. I don’t know exactly why, and I don’t know how well it generalizes, but I suspect it has something to do with mostly-subconscious differences in attitude driven by contextual explore/exploit wiring in my head. Big city vs. small town doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, although some towns are friendlier than others. (For context, I’m neither particularly extroverted nor particularly introverted.)
Business travel is another story. Hotel bars for business travelers aren’t geared toward random socialization in the first place, but more importantly I don’t think they set off the same unfamiliarity signals, likely because cube farms and airports and midrange contemporary hotel bars look the same from Manila to Milan; it’s less like conventional travel and more like a trip into the Business Class Dimension.
My advice: get out of the hotel, get out of the hotel district, and go looking on Yelp or the local equivalent for a popular night spot that suits your goals and personality. (I’ve had good luck near local universities; YMMV.) You won’t be as hammered with unfamiliarity as you would be if you were traveling on your own time, but the locals won’t be expecting interchangeable business travelers and you’ll probably get a little further out of that headspace yourself.
I don’t know anything about bars, but I have pretty bad social anxiety and that describes my situation everywhere. On the other hand my dad will often start conversations with random strangers wherever he goes. Not at bars, just random people going about their day. He has zero fear of rejection and I never understood how.
There are efforts to make it easier for interested locals to socialize with tourists and foreigners. I joined the Couchsurfing group in our city and they host weekly drinks at local pubs/bars to get exactly this type of socializing to happen, and it seems to be very successful. When you explicitly set the mood to ‘meet new people from around the world’, you get a lot of interaction, as opposed to the usual mood in pubs, which is ‘getting drinks with friends after work.’
Interesting, it sounds like Couchsurfing became sort of a big thing? In my mind it was always fringe, because I assumed not so many people would be willing to endure the awkwardness of accepting a favor from complete strangers when a hostel bed is not expensive at all, for people who can afford plane tickets, I mean. I mean accepting a favor of getting a bed for free instead of renting one in a hostel sounded to me always very much like panhandling, beggaring, and thus shameful and awkward, but maybe I am seeing it differently, at 37 it is getting harder to understand the mentality of people much younger. I think 15 years ago my generation would have seen this as beggaring...
There are various reasons people do it, not all of them have to do with cost. However, many of the participants in the ‘socializing’ sessions don’t actually participate in the actual couchsurfing bit, and that’s fine.
I think even this is only true in specific pick-up bars, with music and suchlike, disco balls and colored lights and DJs, during the night. Pretty sure nobody tries to hit on an attractive woman in a hotel bar at 16:00 at least I never tried to, as it would be a breach of social etiquette, since these are not hunting grounds and these are not hunting times, if she wants to pair off she will got to a music bar at 22:00 and everybody respects that. Or at the very least, it can happen in fashionable bars in gentrified areas, but the average common (European) bar with retired working class types nursing their alcoholism, attractive women won’t even go there, usually. Disclaimer: my experience is limited to Europe, and I think the whole phenomenon that median ages go well into the forties and not to put a too fine point on it but for white non-immigrant folks easily into the fifties colors the picture a lot. It seems almost like people young enough to be attractive basically make their own special subcultures and average typical places are old people places.
I spent about two weeks sight seeing with such a woman and she was being approached constantly. On the other hand she is significantly more attractive than average.
I don’t think Europe is a uniform place in that regard. Different European countries have quite different norms.
In my experience the amount of conversations I have with strangers in daily life depends almost entirely on how open I am to be approached be other people.
It seems to be hard to fake signal I give out via body language. Unfortunately it comes and goes for periods of a time and it’s not easily changeable.
It seems almost like people young enough to be attractive basically make their own special subcultures and average typical places are old people places.
That’s probably says more about what you consider a typical place then about how young people want to spend their time.
That said in the age of meetup.com you can simply pick a relevant meetup where people with whom you share an interest congregate.
My experience ranges from Scotland to Ukraine, Denmark to Italy and frankly haven’t seen a huge difference. You see, modern culture became incredibly uniform. Global trends from TV made sure pretty much everywhere people are drinking the same drinks, listening to the same music, wearing the same clothes. I actually find it boring and no longer travel to cities when I am travelling for pleasure, not business, because today the only real difference between say Amsterdam and Rome is pretty old buildings. But otherwise people became “global people” everywhere.
The most interesting part is that I think we (EU) have evolved our own dialect of English, a non-native yet distinct dialect, which has its own words/terms like “wellness hotel” which don’t exist in the native dialects (or were borrowed back recently). It differs even in pronounciation, “th” in words like think or three tends so sound like “s” in the EUnglish dialect, while in most native ones it is actually closer to “t”.
I don’t think Europe is a uniform place in that regard. Different European countries have quite different norms.
In my experience the amount of conversations I have with strangers in daily life depends almost entirely on how open I am to be approached be other people.
It seems to be hard to fake signal I give out via body language. Unfortunately it comes and goes for periods of a time and it’s not easily changeable.
It seems almost like people young enough to be attractive basically make their own special subcultures and average typical places are old people places.
That’s probably says more about what you consider a typical place then about how young people want to spend their time.
That said in the age of meetup.com you can simply pick a relevant meetup where people with whom you share an interest congregate.
This should belong to the stupid questions thread but anyway… why don’t bars, inns, taverns, pubs, whatevers work in reality the same way they do in fiction, or, better question, under what conditions, when and where do or would they work like that?
You travel to another city on a business trip, say, to visit a trade show the next day. Same country or different doesn’t matter but let’s assume you speak the language. You check in your hotel. You have a free evening and go exploring. You go to the hotels bar or another bars, inns, taverns, pubs. What will happen? Exactly nothing. You will probably a have a drink or three alone, or if you don’t drink alcohol it will be even more boring, have some dinner, perhaps sight-see as long as it is not dark then retire to your room early because you are bored. The point is, nobody will socialize with you, nor give you the signs that you are welcome to socialize with them. You will get to know exactly zero locals. You will not participate in their lives. You will be an outsider, it will feel like staring at an aquarium. You sit in a bar in a corner, nursing a beer, while you watch the locals come and go, greet each other, chat with each other, while they ignore your existence. A pretty sad thing actually. They seem to have zero interest in getting to know a non-local. You may even get suspicious glances, as they are used to knowing all the faces in their bar, or because simply you radiate those I-don’t-belong-here signals. A pretty sad thing overall.
In fiction this is so different… not only the lively taverns in Tolkienesque fiction where travellers immediate come together and entertain each other with stories, but even in modern, James Bondesque fiction there are things happening in hotel bars after the elegant secret agent checks in, friends and enemies made, pick-ups attempted and so on. There is a social life going on.
Why is it so, or what conditions would make it different? I have exactly one experience when it was not so. We were in a classic outback, behind the beyond farmer town, and we were 10 people canooing down the river. Apparently people in more boring, small-town places are more interested about outsiders, and larger groups mix easier than one lone traveller with a whole bar. If I remember right, we were largely discussing amongst each other and basically the locals overheard us and pitched in. Perhaps such conversation-starter signals are necessary.
As of now it feels like the precondition for getting to know people is to be with people I already know. This also means sticking to cities where acquaintances live in. This sounds too limiting.
Less serious answer: If you walk into a bar wearing ringmail under a travel-stained cloak and loudly ask the bartender, “What news from the North?” you may actually entice people to approach you. Likewise if you’re wearing a tuxedo for no apparent reason. But nobody cares about some tired-looking guy in wrinkled khakis.
More serious answer: I’ve known two or three individuals in my life who were so shameless in engaging with strangers that they could legitimately go into any random bar and in short order they were the life of the party. This requires a rare type of extreme extroversion that I’ve often envied.
Addressing the actual question: Currently most bars are implicitly meant to be either gathering places for small groups of friends or places for opposite-sex courtship stuff. Structural changes that would motivate a more fictionesque milieu would be providing long trestle tables and a corresponding lack of private booths, more open-form, quick games to play (less billiards, more darts), “group rate” alcohol (pitchers of beer rather than individual mugs always promote sharing), and I daresay marketing the tavern as a place specifically for open socialization could help.
In my experience hostels are a lot more like the fictional bars you describe.
I can confirm this. I stayed in a hostel in London for a week last month, and got way more social interaction than I was expecting and about as much as my introverted self could stand. Including one invitation to dinner that may or may not have been a date.
At science fiction conventions.
At Esperanto meetings.
tl;dr: go to places with conversation potential and show that you have value and interest.
Business travel + city destination is a significant obstacle already. Locals may well be highly jaded with “interchangeable” business travellers who are fatigued on the road and may not be at their best socially.
And usually business travellers stay in places that are convenient for their work destinations, be it office, site or conference centre … nearby establishments are far more likely to attract after-work crowds (catching up socially with friends, or continuing workplace conversations), not very good opportunity for an outsider to get involved.
So it’s no surprise that this happens:
I see loads of people like this in the nearest pubs and hotel bars to my workplace: dozens of solo travelers who are not engaged/engaging with the locals in the slightest. There are various ways to improve on this but it requires social effort. First, choice of destination is key. I travel a lot for work, and always try to find a pub or bar away from the main business areas, ideally with a good reputation for its drinks (I am partial to local beers in such circumstances). Often they look like “old man pubs” but as I advance into old-man-ness myself, I find these more and more welcoming.
Then don’t go hide in a corner but instead, hang out at the bar and get into a drinks-related conversation. Can be as simple as asking for a drink recommendation from the server, or once you’ve sunk one or two, other recommendations for drinking around town. You may find yourself stuck in a “beer bore” conversation but more often in my experience this is just the starting point. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but retreating to a corner table, reading a book or resorting to a smartphone are all signs of giving up, and most places I’ve travelled these are clear signals that a person doesn’t want to be disturbed.
More generally, it’s all about revealing some kind of common ground—and showing other people that you have potential conversation value (some kind of conversation-starter signals), AND are interested in talking to them. Not all one-off visitors want a chat—and going back to the original point, this is very often the case with business travellers who might just be counting the days until they return home, or focussed so much on work they don’t care about their surroundings.
Finally, there are of course vastly different social practices across different countries, regions, neighbourhoods. My comments above are mainly related to my experiences in England and northern Europe. My experience in Scotland, and Ireland (and even more so, midwestern USA, where I grew up) is that one must work hard if one wishes to avoid conversation with locals.
Perhaps an open place—square, street, park—is better than a bar, since the bystander effect isn’t so strong and people feel reasonably sure they can run away from you.
How weird are you ready to look?
This is a fantastic and important point.
Freedom of expression comes with a cost. I can’t remember a single sober or just less weird person who has tried to start a conversation when I was abroad being weird. I don’t like it—think Sam meeting Strider.
Wearing Vibriams is a good way to encourage strangers to start talking to you.
Or any interesting piece of clothing; people are often choosing who they approach based on their look
Of course other pieces of clothing can also encourage people to approach but Vibriams offer the other person a conversation starter in way that most other pieces of clothing don’t.
Or at least I don’t know of another piece of clothing that has a similar effect.
For me, the most responses came from a cheap khaki blazer of all things. The highest responses I’ve ever seen among my friends were from a backpack with juggling clubs sticking out the back.
I do understand how juggling clubs can lead to a conversation. What kind of responses does a khaki blazer produce?
They wouldn’t directly comment on it unless they knew me, but just a general impression my friends and I got. One friend jokingly tried to take it off of me so he could wear it himself after he saw two hot girls strike up a conversation with me just by me ordering a drink while standing next to them. It was a few years before guys overdressing became the “in” thing at night clubs, so it was probably because I was trendsetting.
I think there are two different things:
1) Wearing an item to signal that you are a person worth talking to.
2) Wearing an item that makes it easy for someone to talk to you because it gives them a conversation starter.
At a night club I can see how a trendy khaki blazer encourages people to talk to you. I however don’t see how it will encourage a person to talk to you while you ride the tram or are otherwise in a situation where talking to strangers isn’t standard behavior.
The past was a more small-town place. If you were travelling and went to an inn, the exoticism of being from out-of-town would have been greater. People would have been more willing to socialise with you for the novelty, and also to try and take advantage of you.
Basically, if you have high value in some sense, people will want to come chat to you. This could be because they want to sleep with you (as in the “attractive female” example above) but could be because they want to sell things to you, rob you, divert you from this bar to the one they own down the street, get your advice, get you to write a letter for them, get you to marry their sister, and so on.
This stuff doesn’t work so well in Western countries these days because the law is stronger, bars are better at excluding miscreants, and our society is more atomised. But go to a third-world country, look like a rich Westerner—or, even better, a rich Westerner with ties to their culture—and you’ll see it constantly.
I think there is a growing trend toward social atomization/social withdrawal that makes these kinds of interactions less likely than they were in the past.
As a kid, I remember biking around with friends to different neighborhoods, meeting different groups of kids of varying ages, playing elaborate, adventurous games we had invented, going to their houses, going to different shops and arcades, deciding on fun activities to do together, etc. Visiting the old neighborhoods near where I grew up, I almost never see kids. It’s not that there are zero kids in the neighborhood anymore(though there are fewer, certainly), but they’re either cooped up at home or being chauffeured to their scheduled playdates by “helicopter parents.”
I wonder how parents have time for that. Since I rarely get home from work before 18:30, we ended up finding a kindergarten near where my wife works and we are very lucky that we live in Austria and there is a law that mothers can choose their own hours of working freely until their children are 6. She will choose 5 hours a day and that will be compatible with a kindergarten schedule. But if different legislation or financial needs required us to work 8 hours both, I have no idea how would be manage. I know in the US a lot of women simply stay at home but I guess you need to be significantly rich for that like making 3 or 4 times the minimum wage and it is pretty rare here, even in engineering etc. jobs. The pay difference between a burger flipper and accountant here is about 2x. Besides, our experience is that it made my mother hugely depressed to have nobody to talk to half day and then the child only the other half, and the first year of staying at home before kindergarten is making my wife similarly depressed, the utter lack of communication and socialization and basically feeling like locked into an apartment like locked into a monastery is taking a huge psychological toll. It can be incredibly lonely. For this reason I think helicopter parenting will not be an issue for us because we will be at work, even if we could financially afford not to, the simple truth is you can talk to people at work and talking people at home in the neighborhood is almost impossible.
Random ideas:
have friends visit you at home
have a Skype talk with friends
No, the problem of moms staying at home is the same as the problem of unemployed people: their friends or relatives are all at work.
Any friends in different time zones? Oops, USA probably wouldn’t work because 12:00 in Vienna = 3 AM in San Francisco. You would probably need someone in India or China. Okay, this is probably not a good idea. On the other hand, maybe you could pay someone in India to talk with you.
Other friends who are also moms at home? Former classmates?
This happens? I guess then we must not be very social people. Friend is a matter of definition, there is one non-relative who relatively frequently calls her the phone, for me that is zero but OK as never pick up the phone anyway, and she has about two, I have about three non-relatives who reply to emails or facebook messages although rarely initiate the exchange themselves. I guess these people can be considered friends, but the definition may vary. In my experience, socializing with people at work does not carry over into socializing after work, I think people guard their privacy rather jealously and we too, I remember two occasions in five years non-relatives entering our apartment and it felt awkward for both. For this reason, as socializing with coworkers does not carry over into evenings, and not really having hobbies or meeting people after work, the people mentioned above who can be defined as friends are former classmates, and as we approach 40 that kind of number naturally reduces.
This is why it is very important to not stay home from work. BTW my mothers case was exactly the same in the 1980′s, staying at home and occasionally talking on the phone with 1-2 ex-classmates, so she welcomed when she was offered to open a fast food stand and talk to customers. Socializing at work and being home with the family in the evening and weekends can be a tolerable combination. No idea what would be more than tolerable, I always figured it is more natural to hang with relatives, perhaps kinship based tribes should be reinvented. (Not necessarily about “blood”, but more about having shared role models and so on.)
What? Having friends, or having friends in different time zones?
a) Yes, it does.
b) In general population, I would guess it doesn’t; unless there are specific circumstances, e.g. your relatives moved to a different part of the planet. But here on LessWrong we have an international community, and some people visit meetups in different countries. There are probably only a few who have travelled to a sufficiently distant time zone. But you don’t have to be one of those; only to be a friend with one of those.
Sure; if we taboo “friends” it means something like “people whom you trust enough to do together X”. For different values of X you get different sets of people. (X = “have fun together” or X = “start a conspiracy to overthrow the government”)
Similar for me, 2 exceptions in 20 years.
I usually socialize with my neighbors, with people I have or had some hobby in common (such as LessWrong), and sometimes I meet friends of my friends and they become my friends.
Of course with my neighbors the expectations are low: generally just being nice to each other in case someone will need a little help from the other, and to keep communication lines ready in case there will be a shared problem to solve. Saying hello to each other, bringing cookies, sharing a glass of wine once in a few months. With people I found through my hobby I expect to talk about the hobby, and later about other topics; and if the relations are good, maybe even spend some vacation together.
I was thinking along similar lines once, but almost everyone from my family lives in a different city than me, so it’s not an option. But generally, “relatives” and “friends” are two different categories; I cannot realistically expect my relatives to have similar hobies as I do. With them, it is a different way of spending time; just being together, being a tribe. With friends, it is talking about hobbies, making hobby-related plans, and later also being a kind of a tribe—though this part is more difficult because “clicking together as friends” is less transitive relation than “being related by blood”. There are many situations where I am friends with X and Y, but X and Y do not like each other. (So I cannot convert “having 2 friends” into “having a tribe with 3 members”.)
I’ve seen occasional suggestions that extended families are having a renaissance in the UK & US, if that counts.
I think the business-travel milieu is the main obstacle here, though I can’t rule out quirks of your psychology.
When I go to another city for pleasure rather than business, I find myself far more willing to approach people and the people I approach far more receptive. I don’t know exactly why, and I don’t know how well it generalizes, but I suspect it has something to do with mostly-subconscious differences in attitude driven by contextual explore/exploit wiring in my head. Big city vs. small town doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, although some towns are friendlier than others. (For context, I’m neither particularly extroverted nor particularly introverted.)
Business travel is another story. Hotel bars for business travelers aren’t geared toward random socialization in the first place, but more importantly I don’t think they set off the same unfamiliarity signals, likely because cube farms and airports and midrange contemporary hotel bars look the same from Manila to Milan; it’s less like conventional travel and more like a trip into the Business Class Dimension.
My advice: get out of the hotel, get out of the hotel district, and go looking on Yelp or the local equivalent for a popular night spot that suits your goals and personality. (I’ve had good luck near local universities; YMMV.) You won’t be as hammered with unfamiliarity as you would be if you were traveling on your own time, but the locals won’t be expecting interchangeable business travelers and you’ll probably get a little further out of that headspace yourself.
I don’t know anything about bars, but I have pretty bad social anxiety and that describes my situation everywhere. On the other hand my dad will often start conversations with random strangers wherever he goes. Not at bars, just random people going about their day. He has zero fear of rejection and I never understood how.
There are efforts to make it easier for interested locals to socialize with tourists and foreigners. I joined the Couchsurfing group in our city and they host weekly drinks at local pubs/bars to get exactly this type of socializing to happen, and it seems to be very successful. When you explicitly set the mood to ‘meet new people from around the world’, you get a lot of interaction, as opposed to the usual mood in pubs, which is ‘getting drinks with friends after work.’
Interesting, it sounds like Couchsurfing became sort of a big thing? In my mind it was always fringe, because I assumed not so many people would be willing to endure the awkwardness of accepting a favor from complete strangers when a hostel bed is not expensive at all, for people who can afford plane tickets, I mean. I mean accepting a favor of getting a bed for free instead of renting one in a hostel sounded to me always very much like panhandling, beggaring, and thus shameful and awkward, but maybe I am seeing it differently, at 37 it is getting harder to understand the mentality of people much younger. I think 15 years ago my generation would have seen this as beggaring...
There are various reasons people do it, not all of them have to do with cost. However, many of the participants in the ‘socializing’ sessions don’t actually participate in the actual couchsurfing bit, and that’s fine.
If you are an attractive female and go into the bar, the men there will indeed try to socialize with you if you let them.
I think even this is only true in specific pick-up bars, with music and suchlike, disco balls and colored lights and DJs, during the night. Pretty sure nobody tries to hit on an attractive woman in a hotel bar at 16:00 at least I never tried to, as it would be a breach of social etiquette, since these are not hunting grounds and these are not hunting times, if she wants to pair off she will got to a music bar at 22:00 and everybody respects that. Or at the very least, it can happen in fashionable bars in gentrified areas, but the average common (European) bar with retired working class types nursing their alcoholism, attractive women won’t even go there, usually. Disclaimer: my experience is limited to Europe, and I think the whole phenomenon that median ages go well into the forties and not to put a too fine point on it but for white non-immigrant folks easily into the fifties colors the picture a lot. It seems almost like people young enough to be attractive basically make their own special subcultures and average typical places are old people places.
I spent about two weeks sight seeing with such a woman and she was being approached constantly. On the other hand she is significantly more attractive than average.
I don’t think Europe is a uniform place in that regard. Different European countries have quite different norms.
In my experience the amount of conversations I have with strangers in daily life depends almost entirely on how open I am to be approached be other people. It seems to be hard to fake signal I give out via body language. Unfortunately it comes and goes for periods of a time and it’s not easily changeable.
That’s probably says more about what you consider a typical place then about how young people want to spend their time.
That said in the age of meetup.com you can simply pick a relevant meetup where people with whom you share an interest congregate.
My experience ranges from Scotland to Ukraine, Denmark to Italy and frankly haven’t seen a huge difference. You see, modern culture became incredibly uniform. Global trends from TV made sure pretty much everywhere people are drinking the same drinks, listening to the same music, wearing the same clothes. I actually find it boring and no longer travel to cities when I am travelling for pleasure, not business, because today the only real difference between say Amsterdam and Rome is pretty old buildings. But otherwise people became “global people” everywhere.
The most interesting part is that I think we (EU) have evolved our own dialect of English, a non-native yet distinct dialect, which has its own words/terms like “wellness hotel” which don’t exist in the native dialects (or were borrowed back recently). It differs even in pronounciation, “th” in words like think or three tends so sound like “s” in the EUnglish dialect, while in most native ones it is actually closer to “t”.
I don’t think Europe is a uniform place in that regard. Different European countries have quite different norms.
In my experience the amount of conversations I have with strangers in daily life depends almost entirely on how open I am to be approached be other people. It seems to be hard to fake signal I give out via body language. Unfortunately it comes and goes for periods of a time and it’s not easily changeable.
That’s probably says more about what you consider a typical place then about how young people want to spend their time.
That said in the age of meetup.com you can simply pick a relevant meetup where people with whom you share an interest congregate.