Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

There are multiple people here recommending clubs and interest groups, but I think this is missing the point of the article. "Hanging out" as defined in the article is explicitly about not having anything specific to do or to talk about. It's unstructured socialization, being together with no particular goal in mind.

What struck me reading this is that our cultural obsession with productivity has bled over into our private lives—socializing has to be a calendar item in order for it to fit in, and if it's going to be a calendar item it should have a specific purpose. This is sad. We've lost something important: spontaneous, purposeless social interaction.

View on HN

That is one thing I noticed about North American social culture, the relative lack of [semi-]public spaces to just exist.

In the UK there are countless nooks, crannies, parks etc to just kill time with people.

Even the pub is an institution expressly for this purpose. You go in, buy a pint when you want and are left alone to your friends/business. None of this “What can I get you? How is everything tasting? Anything else?” hyper-commodification of simply being somewhere just for the sake of it.

This makes me think that non pushy spaces like UK pubs should be given advantageous tax treatment.

Are there any “coffee pubs”? I personally enjoy an occasional beer but I don’t know if I’d want to repeatedly invite folks to hang out for hours in a place that largely serves alcohol drinks in mixed male/female company. Seems like it could become a headache in the US.

One other issue in the US is that any third space becomes a long term hangout of all the local homeless, which causes people not to want to go there. Several local Starbucks have this problem and I stopped going there. It pushed me to drive 15 minutes to find one I can hang out without being distracted by people with obvious mental illness who need treatment.

> One other issue in the US is that any third space becomes a long term hangout of all the local homeless, which causes people not to want to go there. Several local Starbucks have this problem and I stopped going there.

Yes. Our local Starbucks, at the Redwood City CA train station, removed all their furniture and closed their bathrooms. Now it's a big empty room with a bleak counter, where people sometimes come in and buy something.

Almost all Starbuckses are bad, but you have several other options with plenty of seating near the Redwood City Caltrain.

Try La Tartine just around the corner, which has plentiful seating, decent prices, and closes pretty late.

Also, the Philz down the street and Coffeebar further down the street (although both have higher prices and worse hours than La Tartine).

Terrible. It's almost like if Starbucks could invest in the police, the benefits would be win-win.

> Are there any “coffee pubs”?

Agora in Houston is a Greek-owned coffee shop that operates as a coffee shop day and night but also offers alcohol at night, and sometimes has belly dancers and such. It's pretty unique - I don't think I've ever found anywhere else like it (in the US anyway).

That's just a cultural difference on the expectation of service. Europe is more towards the "I'll summon you when needed". The US it's expected they'll check in on you and to some extent that you'll wait until they check in to ask for something.

The US has bars and parks and coffee shops too. Plenty of places to just go and be

And Japan has both. Either you don't have time to look at the menu before they show up taking your order or people shout "SUMIMASEN!" over the whole restaurant.

Eh, so far in my experience nobody's been shouting across the restaurant or hole-in-the-wall place; normally it's a hand wave or signal, or often a button or bell.

Maybe I haven't been going to exciting places...

And as for taking my order before reading the menu, depends how fast you can decypher the translation of whatever app you use :) (assuming a non-Japanese speaker)

A huge part of that is IMO the absurd lack of free time. 40 hours plus commute, overtime and on-call (=total 60-80h) is bad enough in a single-earner household where a spouse keeps up with chores, but two full-time employees or singles not living with parents? They're all but drained in the evening, and when you only have time on Saturday between dealing with leftover chores (=laundry, actual cleaning beyond letting the Roomba roam around) or catching up on sleep, the rare four spots for social life in a month have to be carefully planned. And no surprise either that people don't have children as a result - hard to have them when you're working all the time.

The 40 hour work week needs to go. Now.

ETA and don't forget so many restaurants and pubs either closed down completely, cut opening times or hiked prices thanks to inflation and exploding rents over the last years. It's not just the pandemic that fucked things up.

Just bringing back an actual "9-5" would help. None of this "8-5" (because breaks don't count) shit.

This is true :) However...I'd argue that in tech, you needn't put up with this. There's plenty of demand for tech workers who aren't expected to work insane hours, and can have time for kids and hobbies. Not being expected to work insane hours often correlates with not being paid as much. But a poor tech salary is the same as a good salary in many other jobs. You can have a good lifestyle without the big bucks. Doesn't involve living in a big house somewhere posh or having new/large cars etc. Does involve having a meaningful life. :)

> There's plenty of demand for tech workers who aren't expected to work insane hours, and can have time for kids and hobbies.

Even without insane hours and ordinary 40 hours, the problem is: out of 24 hours, you lose 9 hours to sleep (8 hours + 0.5/0.5 to fall asleep and wake up), 3 hours for eating (including making the food and cleaning up), 8 hours to work, 1 hour to commute... that leaves you with just three hours a day of theoretically "free" time, of which you'll set aside at least an hour to decompress from work, one hour to interacting with your spouse - and now you're left with one hour a day of actually "free" time.

No way to fit hobbies or even any meaningful social activity in there and any unplanned events (e.g. a traffic jam, something comes up at work so you need to stay a bit late) completely throw everything off.

I think your job doesn't sound very nice - needing at least 1 hr to decompress, having to stay late because something "came up". Dunno if cycling to/from work would help with de-stressing quicker? (of course, cycling may or may not be feasible where you live). Certainly being stuck in a traffic jam after a hard day at work is no fun either. I'd rather spend longer on public transport if that means read a book, message some friends, even chat to a friend in person that does the same run. WFH even if only 2 days a week, is a game-changer, if you could achieve that. Working 4-days weeks is another big game-changer. I do that and its totally worth the salary hit. Seems a great shame if people feel unable to have kids and/or a social life just due to the demands of work. People also aren't going to be productive employees either if they're unhappy because of that. I think people need to push back against their employers, and the irony is, by doing so they're actually helping their employer because burnt-out people are not useful. But to have the nerve to push back, or switch jobs, one may need some money saved up. Which is very do-able for reasonably frugal people on tech salaries. I hope you manage to get to a better situation somehow :)

I'm not always basing my comments out of my own life - I don't have kids and work mostly from home, but I have a lot of friends not as lucky as I am.

As one of the club-recommenders, this is specifically because socializing for the sake of socializing is boring. One phone call every few months or a few hours in person a year are enough to be completely up to speed with someone. Any more than that and it gets awkward unless you have very good chemistry.

I don’t want to give the wrong vibe: I love said phone call or in-person hours.

The activity, even if it’s a meal or a walk, make it infinitely better and something that can happen on a more regular basis with less-close friends. Golf gets a lot of flak for being a game that men play because they’re too toxically masculine to ask their friends to just hang out. My perspective: there’s something to be said for people being too boring to just hang out with as often as you would be willing to play golf with them.

This might be an extrovert/introvert divide. Extroverts being driven to have more casual friends where you need an activity to avoid awkwardness while introverts limit their friends to those with whom just existing is entertaining enough. The club attendance would be for extroverts here.

I would tend instead to think that it’s a transition in civilization where we just have more fun things to do and don’t need to sit around “talking shit” as the article mentions. Roman gladiator events were a big deal and everyone attended, now you pick what sporting events you want to watch from home. Why would I sit around doing nothing when I can find people and make relationships while simultaneously having fun doing something I enjoy? Your comment portrays them as mutually exclusive and they aren’t.

This sounds so alien to me.

Even as an adult I still hang out with my college buddies at least once a week, to do absolutely nothing, sometimes we'd go to bars, often just chat. My parents also do it with their limited circle of friends. Same with my sister and her group of friends, sometimes they include me too.

I don't know where I stand on the extrovert/introvert continuum but boring clubs are definitely 10x more boring than just hanging out for me. And interesting ones aren't exactly for "just hanging out".

I have a small network (I think science says it averages 6 people for most) with whom I’m comfortable killing time doing nothing. Unfortunately there aren’t really any mutual ties among them.

It’s about the next tier of friends/acquaintances. Just hanging out with the next tier, for me, sucks. I have SO many things I would rather be doing than hashing out surface level conversations with anyone outside the network of 6 friends (who include my parents in my case). At the same time, social interaction of any kind is nice. If I can combine the things I like with “people” I will.

Your comment strikes me as you being fortunate to have a group of close college friends around, and your parents/sister similarly being fortunate to have groups of people who mutually like each other enough to have fun hanging out.

It’s also very relative. Before I developed the hobbies and interest that took me away from kicking it with roommates etc., kicking it was better than nothing. I say “sucks” in this relative sense. I just have stuff I really like doing now.

Well, I'm fortunate, yes, but to be fair I'm up for hanging out with pretty much everyone. I hang out at work, at the co-working space we have with people I never talked before, with my neighbors, with my sister's acquaintances, with my dad's people. And all those people also seem to love "just hanging out", because they do.

I also have plenty of hobbies, I have a band, soccer weekly with some folks, I also have a garden, I play video games with another buddy...

My point I guess is that some people have a higher tolerance for hanging out with others, even unknown folks. I find that almost everyone has interesting stories to tell if you let them, and I enjoy hearing. I have my share of funny anecdotes too. I thought that's down to the introvert/extrovert spectrum but from your post it seems to be something else.

Ah, I have identified our disconnect.

Our definition of hanging out is different. I’m going with “killing time” in a sense of hours at a time, which you definitely don’t do at work. Similarly, I doubt you often kill hours at a time with random people you don’t know or your neighbors. And your dad/sister’s people are different too if your dad/sister are there.

Folks like me aren’t sociopathic lol. I like a good casual conversation with a neighbor when you happen to be getting the mail at the same time. I had a great conversation today with a stranger about Apple watches.

It’s sitting in the garage with your roommates (and whoever else) for 6 hours on a Saturday smoking cigarettes talking shit that I’m highlighting as boring. (And the article is praising.) It’s not “lost” as the article states, I just have better things to do. And that used to be every Saturday for me (pandemic aside).

Nope. I definitely do kill hours at a time with people from work or people I never talked with. :D

My team has weekly happy-hours which are obviously after hours (I honestly thought every team did it!), my landlady often invites us tenants a monthly dinner that goes into the night, I attend random Meetups and just stay for several hours chatting, I participate in our co-working space "parties" and stay until late with people I never seen. Heck, yesterday I went to a restaurant with my (recent) language class and we stayed until 2AM.

Of course you can claim "this is not really hanging out, this is other stuff". I hate cigarettes and don't have a garage, but I guess drinking and random location is equivalent, as long as we chat for hours, so why not?

But I definitely do not consider "chatting while picking up the mail" as hanging out. Not even in the same ballpark.

In Germany we have a thing called "Men's day" where we get a cart of beer and go to the middle of the forest just to do nothing at all for a whole day. Now THIS is what I call hanging out. I wonder if the culture is where the disconnect is coming from.

EDIT: Although honestly pretty much every other country I lived in my life had a similar culture and... it was the rule as far as I could tell.

EDIT 2: I also don't think you're a sociopath! Far from it! I just think you're someone who doesn't enjoy long aimless chats with unknown people.

Me too. If someone always needs some activity/entertainment happening, that's just too high maintenance for me and I lose interest in spending time with them.

That’s a good way of putting it. I enjoy a board game once in a while, or doing some random sport, but when an activity is “mandatory” and the person is averse to anything else, it can be a bit much. In the end those relationships just fizzle out.

Unstructured is uncontrolled, and uncontrolled is anathema to a culture that obsessively quantifies everything.

I feel like a lot of religious activities at temples/churches/whatever serve this purpose.

The ceremony or whatever is an excuse to get together, and most people might not really care about the beliefs portion, but it provides a backdrop to hang out as a community.

That's true of a lot of things. People ostensibly go to conferences and the like to learn stuff. In practice, I think a lot of the structure of conferences exists to give people an excuse to attend whereas, I'm going to mostly go hangout with professional peers in some nice city wouldn't.

Most of the time, social clubs and interest groups serve as an excuse to hang out. When I hang out with my friends, we play board games, work out, try out new breweries. There's always a reason, but the reason we find a reason is because we want to hang out. There are a lot of specific, structured things you can plan to do together that leave your social interactions completely unstructured.

Even in the case of something that also serves a practical purpose, such as working out, the fitness purpose exists in symbiosis with the socializing purpose. Sometimes the reason I get a workout is that I want to hang out with my friend, and sometimes the reason I spend time with my friend is because I wanted to work out.

Having another reason to hang out also helps friendships endure through times where you don't have much to say to each other.

I wonder if there are any "just hanging out" groups on Meetup.

There's often meetups for going to bars.

Thing about bars is that they suck ass, though.

Well, they're great here. There's probably meetups to go to other random locations, maybe restaurants, I'm not sure.

Either way, I wish there were more public places for random people to meet other than commercial establishments.

I think of clubs and interest groups as a good way to make friends that you can then hang out with.

What if you already have lots of friends? I think the crux of the issue is that there's lots of clubs and a lot of purpose but not enough "just hanging out".

Then you probably are hanging out with them plenty already. Start inviting them over to your place to hang out if you feel like you don't have enough hanging out time.

The best clubs are the ones where you can hangout. It is just a way to gather like minded people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com