San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Making friends is hard — Bay Area ‘cult’ offers help
On a recent Wednesday evening, I dropped in on a cult.
Before I showed up, its leaders asked me to provide them with the phone numbers of two people who knew me well — to create an intimate bio of me. I demurred. Maybe a little too culty.
As I walked into the cult’s space in Oakland’s Jack London Square, I was entreated by a staff member to swap my boots for a pair of white slippers hanging on a nearby wooden rack. Writing my name on the slippers with a marker was encouraged, though not mandatory. I passed on the name, but I did wear the slippers.
I then sat at a long table alongside 17 slipper-clad Millennials, where, for the next four hours, between bites of vegan quinoa-andvegetable casserole, we had a freewheeling conversation about ghosts, knitting, the San Francisco startup scene and the problem of loneliness.
This group, started in August, is called “Friend Cult” — and rather than obsessing over heavenly beings, they worship something more worldly: the fragile, soul-nourishing magic of the casual hangout. The tenor of their gatherings is calmer than most dinner parties, thanks to the fact that they will certainly happen again at the same time, same place.
Friend Cult’s founders, Courtney Owyang and Matt Goss, started this project to meet not just their own needs, but what they saw as a critical need among the people around them. While the cult motif is just a put-on, the ritualistic aspect of the get-togethers, which happen every Wednesday night, rain or shine, is essential to the operation.
“There was a time in our lives when we saw our friends a lot,” Goss said, when hanging out was just a constant, low-pressure thing; you used to always run into people you knew, and you didn’t need so much structure or planning to get a dose of face-to-face interaction.
The convenience of knowing, for a membership price of $100 to $185 a month, you have a guaranteed hang-out session every week is what the pair hope will make socializing as intuitive as it used to be.
There’s little denying that our society is at an especially brittle
moment in human relationshipbuilding. People don’t seem to be hanging out anymore, as one Atlantic story put it. Its analysis found that the hours we’ve spent socializing in real life have palpably declined since 2015 across all demographics. It’s not just the pandemic; though lockdowns likely helped this trend along.
Since moving to the Bay Area, I’ve encountered more than a few groups that have similarly tried to get people talking in real life. There’s Groundfloor, a club hoping to fill the social void left by the erosion of traditional social infrastructure like churches and sports teams. The Commons is a selfdescribed “fourth place” that hosts civics discussions and poker nights at its space in Hayes Valley. Then there’s City Campus, a group of tech workers planning to build a utopian co-living “campus” in the middle of San Francisco, with visions of recreating the pop-in, pop-out feeling of a “Friends” episode.
It’s worth noting that for Goss, Owyang and likely most of the people involved in these projects, their golden age of hangouts was college or grad school, a time when young people who are generally of the same level of intellect, socioeconomic status and life stages are geographically jumbled together in a social pressure cooker. Of course, socializing would have been easier back then, especially when everyone wanted to kvetch about final
exams.
But it does make sense that there are so many people hyper-focused on this issue in the Bay Area. Since the Gold Rush, transplants have swarmed here seeking fortune and a new start. Now, it’s a leader in remote work, which has kept many white-collar workers sequestered at home during weekdays.
“Lack of social life is killing me … I work in a boring East Bay suburb and WFH,” wrote one user on Blind, a forum geared toward tech workers.
“Making friends as an adult in San Francisco is so hard,” wrote someone else on Reddit.
Some of the friend cultists echoed these frustrations when I spoke to them over dinner. One woman confessed to having struggled to make friends via the Bumble app. A startup founder named Tobi said that many of the meetups he’d gone to had quickly devolved into networking events, where conversations felt weirdly braggy, like verbal LinkedIn posts. The Commons did interest him, but he was put off when it declined to answer questions about the diversity of its membership.
Guess we have to figure out the basics of making friends before we can move on to the problem of making friends who are noticeably different from us.