I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic

wave3.social

303 pointsnswizzle31662 comments

The other day I saw a post here on HN that featured a NYT article called "Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44098369) and it definitely hit home. As a guy in my early 30s, it made me realize how I've let many of my most meaningful friendships fade. I have a good group of friends - and my wife - but it doesn't feel like when I was in college and hung out with a crew of 10+ people on a weekly basis. So, I decided to do something about it. I’ve launched wave3.social - a platform to help guys build in-person social circles with actual depth. Think parlor.social or timeleft for guys: curated events and meaningful connections for men who don’t want their friendships to atrophy post-college.

It started as a Boston-based idea (where I live), but I built it with flexibility in mind so it could scale to other cities if there’s interest. It’s intentionally not on Meetup or Facebook - I wanted something that feels more intentional, with a better UX and less noise.

Right now, I'm in the “see if this resonates with anyone” stage. If this sounds interesting to you and you're in Boston or another city where this type of thing might be needed, drop a comment or shot me an email. I'd love to hear any feedback on the site and ideas on how we can fix the male loneliness epidemic in the work-from-home era.

Open articleView on HN

This idea appears every once in awhile, as it’s obviously a major issue in modern life.

The interesting thing though is how the solution is always location-agnostic. By that I mean it’s never really about a specific cafe or restaurant or soccer field, it’s always an app or service that organizes people to show up in various places.

I bring this up because if you look at places that had lively social activities a few decades or a century ago, they were almost always a specific place.

The neighborhood cafe where locals can stop by at any time and see other locals. The bar that everyone stops by after work twice a week. These are stationary physical locations that don’t require pre-planning, schedules, apps, or anything else.

It’s not always location-agnostic, but you’re more likely to hear about location-agnostic efforts because they have further reach.

For instance Men’s Sheds are a local effort with a thousand locations in the UK:

> Men’s Sheds encourage people to come together to make, repair and repurpose, supporting projects in their local communities. Improving wellbeing, reducing loneliness and combatting social isolation.

> Research gathered by the UKMSA Health and Wellbeing Survey, 2023, suggests 96% of Men’s Shed attendees feel less lonely since joining a Shed.

— https://menssheds.org.uk

Unfortunately, sometimes you get things like this happening:

> 'We put the pressure on to join Men in Sheds'

> The 74-year-old added: "Eventually they let us in, just one morning, eventually it became all the time, and now it's 50% women, and we absolutely love it."

> When the women were allowed into the workshop, members decided to keep a quiet room with a model railway display in it, just for men.

> "We [the men] escape now and again [to the quiet room] and have a chat and weigh things up."

— https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg5qd9l3094o

Why didn't they start Women's Sheds?

Oh, but why if they're having a functional clubs already?

I feel like men only spaces in the UK are frowned upon (see Garrick club narration). No matter the reason, the only way single sex spaces work here is women only.

In UK law, it is generally considered sex discrimination to exclude someone on the basis of their sex, unless that exclusion is a “proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”. It’s fairly well understood that women have sex-based needs that justify this aim, but very rarely recognized that men might have such needs too. Maybe this is one of them.

The fear will always be that male-only spaces will become centers of power and decision-making that women are excluded from. That’s where the private London clubs sit. Doesn’t seem as likely to happen in a shed, but who knows?

Generally speaking women are more than welcome at Mens Sheds (In Australia, at least). The ratio of men to women that enjoy sanding wood and tinkering with lawnmowers usually leans more heavily to men, but I've seen the girls around the traps too.

>it is generally considered sex discrimination to exclude someone on the basis of their sex

So are women-only gyms not a thing in the UK then? Here in NA they're everywhere, we even have a women-only version of the YMCA (YWCA).

> Here in NA they're everywhere, we even have a women-only version of the YMCA (YWCA).

Despite the names, neither the YWCA or YMCA as broad organizations strictly restrict membership by gender (or religion, for that matter.) My understanding with YWCA specifically is that inclusiveness on gender varies considerably by individual local association.

> In UK law, it is generally considered sex discrimination to exclude someone on the basis of their sex

Whether or not the law prohibits or permits such discrimination, differential treatment (definitely including outright exclusion) on the basis of sex is, obviously sex discrimination, that’s just the meaning of the words.

I'm under the impression that women's only spaces are very much frowned upon in the English speaking world, whether it be in sports, book awards, knitting circles, toilets, or prisons.

This isn't an x-has-it-worse comment by the way. I think every demographic is entitled to self-segregate without shame, and the ladies definitely face their own struggles in achieving this.

Your impression is mistaken.

E.g.

Girl Scouts: allowed to be girls only

Boy Scouts: now “Scouting” because girls are allowed

My intramural sports in college had coed and women only teams

BSA made the decision to allow girls on their own and it's been fantastic for the program.

You actually think this organization made this decision on their own with no outside pressure, or internal pressure from women?

I have a bridge to sell you

The "external pressure" was largely just the pressure of declining membership.

What pressure led to declining membership?

Did it have anything to do with "Boy Scouts is a sexist organization" narratives?

Uh, no, I'm sorry you had to find out this way, but the primary reason was because the boy scouts have rampant sex abuse scandals like the catholic priesthood.

Also Tiktok means fewer young boys so bored that they set things on fire.

Ah yes

Opening up the organization to young girls as well seems like exactly the right fix for

Rampant sex abuse scandals

That's how I would fix that problem too

Nah these decisions actually resulted in membership declines because they lost the Mormon population and with them a huge chunk of the patrons

I'm pretty sure you have the order reversed. They were already losing the mormons.

I mean if we are talking about BSA declining membership, one pretty large reason could be...

https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-lets-246-bill...

Those two scouts programs aren't even remotely comparable, both in substance and prestige. Many girl scout troops barely did any camping/outdoor activity, whereas boys got to earn the prestige of "eagle scout" and go on various outdoor adventures (multi-day treks through the mountains, building igloos and camping inside them, camping on an island only accessible by a canoe, etc). It was a tragedy that girls didn't have the opportunities available to boys.

(Source: My sister and her friends were the type that would have thrived in boy scouts, but they had to join a "venture crew" run by the same scout leader as our boy scout troop)

Whether a boyscout group sits around and does lame crafts or goes into the woods to start fires and hit each other with sticks is entirely down to the leadership (boys and adults) in that troop. So to is it with girlscouts. There is nothing intrinsic about boyscouts that makes it more exciting, except that it was lead by guys.

> There is nothing intrinsic about boyscouts that makes it more exciting

The chance to obtain Eagle Scout status is itself more exciting. It difficult to deny that it is one of the best leadership programs for children available. The girl scout equivalent is not even close to producing the leaders the Eagle Scouts do. They also have their own network for eagle scouts to connect. It can be an opportunity to get into a Good ‘ol Boys club (future business & money connections) before moving out of their parent’s house.

If a male or female wants to learn more about extracting money from family/shoppers by selling cases of cookies, or learn about female social empowerment and financial skill, instead of learning leadership through self reliance/accountability skills mixed with teamwork, then why not let them choose the programs they want? -- but they are different. Their Gold Award is nothing like earning Eagle Scout status.

The credentials and awards is definitely the least important aspect of boyscouts. As for leadership learning opportunities, there is no reason the girl scouts couldn't have this too.

Flip your own framing around - aren't there likely boys who would have preferred the Girl Scouts coded activities, and being disallowed from membership is therefore also an unfair dis-opportunity?

Yup exactly. Same as all the "feminist" groups campaigning to disallow trans women from such groups, usually using the excuse that they'll get assaulted by the "really just men" trans women a la "won't somebody please think of the children!" when the incidences of this happening is almost 0 comparatively.

Turns out some are allowed to have special clubs, but others not so much. And we only have societal perception of women to blame; the thing they're relying on for all this "they need their own space to protect them" is demeaning, imo. Besides the fact that the majority of victims of crime are male (and before someone points out that the majority of criminals are also male - did you know that's a sexist statement to make? It's judging an entire sex by the actions of individuals).

> I'm under the impression that women's only spaces are very much frowned upon

Centre of the English speaking world here.

My gym has a "mixed" workout area and a "women only" workout area. The pool and sauna have "mixed" sessions and "women only" sessions. Classes are segregated to "women only" or "mixed". Membership fees are the same for all.

The Women's Institute is going strong in the UK. There are far more girls' schools than boys' schools. I don't think female only spaces are frowned on at all, at least here.

>I'm under the impression that women's only spaces are very much frowned upon in the English speaking world

That is the impression you would get from online journalism. The reality is basically the opposite. Women's only spaces are celebrated and the narrative is that they're brave and strong and defiant and resisting sexist oppression. 80-90% of men are totally ambivalent about it.

So there’s at least one type of men’s only space in the UK; some gay club nights are men-only, and enforce this with registration/membership. Was a bit of a culture shock visiting from Ireland, where, as far as I know, this is not a thing (even the most male-oriented club nights _allow_ women, and there’ll usually be one or two; I’ve never known anyone to have a problem with this).

I’m unsure whether there’s a legal issue here (one thing that comes to mind is that I know the UK at least historically had weird laws about what constitutes public sex, so maybe excluding women allows them to legally have darkrooms or something?) or if it’s just cultural.

Anecdotally I heard this was because straight-women would prefer these clubs due to less pressure and more fun, which caused straight-men to try get into the clubs just to hit on them.

As a straight man can confirm

That's because gay clubs/bars have ended up chock full of straight women. People claim it's because it's "safer from all the gross men in other places", which may be partially true. But also I believe it's because gay clubs can just be nicer overall, plenty of interesting drinks like cocktails available rather than just beer, more variety in music, etc. I think they may disallow women because for the bi/pan men in the crowd - their behaviour changes when women are present, they get more aggressive, domineering, chest beating. I notice it all the time in queer but non-gay friends constantly.

Which always annoyed me because I've been to a few Soho "gay" bars since and they're just full of straight women/hen dos. Asked for a cocktail..."we don't do cocktails". How the fuck do you call yourself a gay bar anymore then!

I go to a regular meet and one of the places next door is a drag bar, whose entire purpose seems to be to host hen dos. Ugh.

Women do have their own spaces, at least here in the Midwest US. But women tend to think the men are having more fun over in their male-only spaces, so they want into them, and then those spaces become co-ed, and pretty soon the men are looking around for a new male-only space. Not because they don't enjoy spending time with women, but because there's something about a male-only space that lets a man relax and recharge in a different way.

That cycle tends to repeat, and you don't really see it in reverse. Men are mildly curious, at most, about what women do in their own spaces, and generally don't seek to join them. That probably adds to the perception women have that the male-only spaces are more fun.

It’s because women fight vigorously and scream loudly to keep men out. They call them creeps and that’s almost always effective

Ireland has women's sheds I believe

You have selectively quoted that article. Note the last four paragraphs are:

>Andrew McNerney, 70, admitted there was initially some resistance to becoming a mixed group.

>He said: "There was apprehension, but in all honesty, it's turned out well.

>"We [the men] escape now and again [to the quiet room] and have a chat and weigh things up."

>But he added: "It's a lovely atmosphere, and it's been good."

Yes. I selectively pulled out the bits that I thought were relevant instead of quoting the whole thing.

I know he said that it’s been good, but taken in relation to the rest of the article, I don’t place much weight on it.

The women persistently pressured the men to join, the men were apprehensive, they allowed them in for one morning, one morning turned into all the time, women now comprise 50% of the group, and the men’s area is now relegated to a back room they escape to.

They got one of the men to say it was good, but that’s not the story that the article was telling.

> that’s not the story that the article was telling.

It is though? Reading the article, I'm fully getting a sense that its point is that it was an improvement for everyone (despite the article describing it as being triggered from nagging from the women).

Now you can choose not to believe that, but that _is_ the story the article was telling, or at least it's how I understand it.

> the men were apprehensive, they allowed them in for one morning, one morning turned into all the time

Your assumption is that it “turned into all the time” against the wishes of the men but that’s not clear at all. Being apprehensive about change and then quickly discovering it was for the better is something we all experience in life.

I agree with the post, if the genders were reversed, people wouldn't generally feel this open about it.

That's because the genders aren't valued equally by society, so they don't permute. Once gender equality is established they could switched and the statements would be equivalent.

I dunno, generationally we may be correcting a problem that will soon no longer exist, or even invert.

Women are attending and graduating college in higher numbers than men in GenZ. Much of the man-o-sphere GenZ rightward turn seems to be resentment at society being sure what the use of men is anymore.

That is, from a very young age girls are told they can do/be whatever they want. Often now, boys are described in terms of what they can't/shouldn't be, or in how their very gender gives them a sort of ancestral debt of shame for wrongs done by the men of previous generations.

You'll hear left wing progressive parents in places like NYC tell stories like "my 8 year old boy came home from school crying because his teacher told hime everything bad that has happened in history was because of men" and stupid stuff that's unthinkable if it was reversed.

Men by and large are still expected by society to be the provider, and shamed if they aren't. Women generally won't "date/marry down" anymore than they ever did. But women are now achieving higher educational attainment than men. It's a setup for future societal disfunction, so I do think we do need to solve the male part of the equation after spending the last 50 years raising women up.

Yes, I know parents who wonder why the boys at school seem to have no ambition, and don't apply for scholarships and get involved in things as much as they used to. The same parents also notice that all the literature at school now has female protagonists--not half of it, but nearly all of it.

They don't seem to make the connection between these things. Boys at school are told to sit down and shut up (and take drugs to do so if necessary) so the girls can thrive, and they internalize that. Some people act as though this is reparations for the many years when the reverse was true. But even if they're right about the past, they're not improving the situation by swapping the injustice.

People have a hard time reconciling the difference between “raise group X up” and “knock group Y down”.

The former is a universal good and the correct way to remedy historical injustice. The latter is punishing people, literally, for the sins of their fathers.

There is of course complexity and some zero sum situations where raising X harms Y, but most of the world is not zero sum and you do not have to start from that default position.

True. I suppose the problem is that knocking down Y is often easier than raising up X. And group revenge can feel good.

Indeed, it is a dysfunction of our political system that the most politically engaged & active on each side .. rarely touches grass.

>You'll hear left wing progressive parents in places like NYC tell stories like "my 8 year old boy came home from school crying because his teacher told hime everything bad that has happened in history was because of men" and stupid stuff that's unthinkable if it was reversed.

People are bashing their heads on the wall trying to figure out why young white men are moving towards the right in droves...and the best answer they can come up with is misogyny.

You don't think it could be becasue life is just hard and someone is providing an easy scapegoat for their own problems?

My son was the gentlest soul. He did city year to help inner city youth with their schooling. He has a very liberal sexuality. He loves and accepts everyone.

He has gone over to the dark side and I am heartbroken. The final straw was he built up a business from scratch, with the laid out plan that if he got it running and was successful he would run it. Once it was all successfully running the promise was broken and he was passed up because he was a white male (this was explicitly the reason. The business was in a high minority area and they felt it would look bad having a non-local white man running things as the product's identity was in part it's location). He dedicated years of his life sacrificing building a career somewhere else getting this off the ground and an explicit promise that was broken purely because of his skin color/gender once his usefulness/startup level effort and dedication had made the business successful enough that they could replace him.

After having to move cross country back home to restart his life purely because he was a white male (and in spite of him having been successful at building the business) he very much sees the world as white males versus the left that hates/betrays him. Remember this kid gave up a year to do city year to help raise disadvantaged minority youth up (and did many, many other things before deciding things were rigged against him).

He is not scapegoating anyone, and that you judge someone's view of the world being a character flaw on their part instantly instead of trying to have any empathy, is fucking gross to be honest. Do you think people with your opinion are being intentionally obtuse out of some sort of racism on their part (they feel uncomfortable with empathy for white males), or because they just lack empathy? My last statement is as valid as your sentence above and as helpful/insightful are yours (which is zero).

Okay. Let's say everything you said was true. Why is it acceptable for white men to say, "hey, I'm being discriminated against, I would like to oppress everyone else so I can feel better" instead of what historically oppressed minorities do which is advocate for the better of their demographic even in the face of opposition.

This difference in action is why I think that people have a hard time having empathy. These said to be white men are not pushing for bettering themselves by making an equal environment, they are pushing to better themselves by knocking everyone else down. We can't say that others would do the same in their shoes because they didn't.

Because the response they are receiving when they 'advocate for the better of their demographic (and the type of response that is turning them sour/disillusioned) is:

"Let's say everything you said was true" - iteria (needlessly implying it's a lie/not happening)

"someone is providing an easy scapegoat for their own problems" - tayo42 (implying what they are experience/feeling isn't real/valid. This takes some temporary bullshit that they are feeling and ends up ossifying it into ugliness/a horrible position/a shit worldview, and drives them into horrible online communities designed to take advantage of this all and feeding them into the trash right pipeline).

I'm not justifying it, I hate that I'm losing my boy into it, but I can only push so much without it pushing him harder into 'one side doesn't validate my feelings so I'm going the other way'. I think a little empathy from his peers would have gone a long way. Instead he was ostracized by his peers when he moved back home because he went through a crappy situations that seriously impacted his life and wanted someone to share a little empathy with him, because he was a white male asking for that empathy.

I can have a lot of empathy for someone who had explicit promises broken but apart from this sounding like a completely made up story it has no bearing on his skin color or sex. People are taken advantage of all the time and promises, even contracts are broken all the time. Your 'son' has taken the route of victimization rather than taking the high road. Getting screwed over is one thing, turning that in to bigotry is quite another. Like even if you were screwed over BY bigots its not a reason to become one.

You first say "sounds like a made up story" and then you go on to assert that "it has no bearing on his skin color or sex"

Where are you even coming from with that?

The Op said directly "Once it was all successfully running the promise was broken and he was passed up because he was a white male (this was explicitly the reason"

Wow, glad you can tell I'm a liar based on absolutely nothing.

People can have down/shitty bits without just throwing them away/writing them off as irredeemable. Especially when they are frustrated over a specific event. Frustration that normally we try and help them leave behind. But for some reason in this situation 1. It's not true/didn't happen and 2. My son is trash for caring about it. I'm not around this stuff much, I don't do social media, I don't watch TV, and I live remote, but I'm getting a better sense of how my son went such the wrong direction over this.

Nowhere did I justify anything. I complained I want my son back and I refuse to write him off. Maybe check your lack of compassion, quickness to judge, willingness to write people off, and reading comprehension.

Believe all men.

What a toxic, sarcastic, zero value response.

> advocate for the better of their demographic even in the face of opposition

Whenever they do that they get told their problems aren't real, and that they are, in fact, the problem. You're doing it right in this post:

>Let's say everything you said was true.

I've never heard anyone say that happened but I've heard plenty of people say that they heard someone say that happened. I think it goes in the same file as "Litter boxes in classrooms so that furries can poop in front of everyone" and "It's illegal to be Christian in schools now".

> I do think we do need to solve the male part of the equation after spending the last 50 years raising women up.

When left-wing progressives talk about dismantling...let's just call it the "p-word", dismantling the expectations about what a man should and shouldn't be is very much part of that.

The system victimizes men as much as women, and we should be tearing that system down, not leaning back into it in a misguided attempt of trying to rebalance the scales.

Human beings will never be so fungible.

>Once gender equality is established

Lol if you don't think it has been already, you never will.

> > But he added: "It's a lovely atmosphere, and it's been good."

Which man, who ever wants to get laid again, would be stupid enough to give anything short of an absolutely glowing review about that change to a reporter.

Yeah, you can imagine the headline they'd put on that one.

And that's how the ratchet works. Go to any subreddit that talks about relationships, and every time there's a man versus woman scenario, unless it's very clear that the woman was in the wrong, nearly all the women will side with the woman. But half the men will also side with the woman, because they don't want to offend the women -- even anonymous women on the Internet who almost certainly will never sleep with them. The other half of the men get downvoted to oblivion, or they learn to keep certain opinions to themselves, and it ends up looking like everyone thinks women are always right.

/r/askmenover30 and /r/askmenadvice are not like you describe (yet).

The men are there to meet each other, not to avoid women. Gender segregation isn't the point - it's about building relationships.

They had to be persistently pressured into letting women in, and when that happened they set aside a men-only room to escape to. Gender segregation may not be the point but it seems like it’s important to them.

> The men are there to meet each other, not to avoid women. Gender segregation isn't the point - it's about building relationships.

I'm not sure that's quite true. Men tend to talk and joke in a different way to women, which they then modify around women or be punished. The main difference between an old-school Personnel department and a modern HR department is HR is (self-)tasked with making sure the environment is always suitable for women.

Men have very few places, if any, where they can just be themselves, unmodified. And when those places exist, large shaming campaigns and marketing appear to tell them off and to entice women into them.

No one is ever themselves, unmodified, when around other people. There are jokes and attitudes that are unacceptable in stereotypical masculine social situations too (having a feminine interest, for example, or simply speaking in the wrong way).

The Overton Window moves. It narrows and widens. That isn't the same as being unable to be yourself.

I agree that men should be socially allowed to have spaces where women are excluded and society does sort of tend to look down on that kind of thing, but I also think that in a world where many professional environments are still male dominated some sensitivity to the exclusion of women is warranted.

I mean plenty of jobs out there are still 95% or more occupied by men only.

Sweden has a government department for statistics and one data point they collect and publish is work statistics. The most gender segregated work places are dominated by women, with a few being around 99%. The only male dominated profession in top 5, last time I checked, was stonelayer, which was around 95%.

In term of total gender segreation in the work force, about 15% of men and women work in gender equal profession. The majority, both men and women, work in a job where their gender outnumber the other gender by 2 to 1 or more.

A common finding in studies conduced on this statistics is that gender segregation occurs also within a profession. Teachers is used as the typical example where gender segregation occur on both subject but also on level. It also get worse as people advance in their careers, with each "step" on the ladder being a point where the minority gender decrease.

> No one is ever themselves, unmodified, when around other people

I see what you mean. To clarify: I meant as a group, rather than as individuals. I appreciate there are smaller-groups that also can't be themselves somehow, but if that's a sin, then perhaps the larger group not being able to be itself is a larger sin.

Don't disagree, but some hard things don't get said when the other gender is around, especially with men of a certain age. It takes a lot for many men to even out loud say the word "lonely" or "sad" or "worthless". A lot of male conversation is silent. The whole spiel is to project and feel capable of dealing with the world, to feel useful, to be a Man. To feel otherwise is not "masculine". To admit this to mixed company is a couple of bridges too far for most of us.

Funny, because the traditional role of a women is exactly to be the one who hears all these hard things and helps the man overcome them.

Extra funny hat women should be excluded so men can talk about feeling lonely and how they wish they had a woman.

It’s not complicated. Men need women. But men need men, too. The needs are distinct and not interchangeable.

Fine, but why do you list two needs with enormous female gendered baggage in that case?

Perhaps the baggage is a projection based on your own experiences?

It only takes one time: a woman who sees a man as less than for admitting his weakness makes him never talk about that stuff around women again.

Unfortunately, there are many women who react this way, so the cycle continues. I don't necessarily blame women for this, it's more about the social expectations for men, the moment they violate that expectation and are "punished" for it, they follow it to the letter, because they then know what happens if they don't.

find different women. Obviously many woman would have similar social expectations due to the way things have shook out.

That may be the traditional role of a wife, though even in marriage a man who dumps all his fears and worries on his wife will soon find himself without one. Women want a man to open up and share his feelings, but in practice a little of that goes a long way.

But in any case, it's not the traditional role of whatever women happen to be in earshot.

Phew, I have very rarely heard something so wrong. Women are absolutely not traditionally an emotional support for men. In fact, being vulnerable in that way as a man is just about the surest way to make most women suddenly quite uninterested. Every woman has a story where some important man cries in front of her for the only time. In his entire life.

Women want men to be emotionally open as it applies to supporting them. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but let's call a spade a spade.

Wish they'd taught me this when I was young. They told me being open and vulnerable was attractive.

They also told me I had to verbally ask girls if it was okay to kiss them and if they didn't verbally say yes I was assaulting them.

Intimacy has not been absent from my life, but it has had a very small role.

The problem is you only need one woman yelling at you or causing drama, or one man getting overly friendly to get a very strong sense of having to be careful. Most people, male or female, are perfectly good people with some flexibility to take a bit of strife and emotional turmoil. A lot of the bad vibes between men and women are about a select few individuals or ordinary people in particularly bad moods causing traumatic experiences.

My experience has taught me trust and safety are important to women. Sometimes a man is not in his best state ready to provide that solid rock feeling. It is generally not a good situation if a woman feels she is bigger or needs to be bigger than the man and can't put herself in his hands safely.

>A lot of male conversation is silent.

No it isn't! Men need to talk about their feelings just as much as women! There isn't some major difference in how we handle emotions!

We are all human, and humans are emotional creatures.

So many men need to Grow the Fuck Up and realize that being vulnerable is not the same as being weak. You need to be talking to your friends or confidants about your feelings.

>To feel otherwise is not "masculine"

Wrong. If you need to project a constant air of competence and stoicism and power, you are insecure and emotionally stunted.

I blame media honestly. Watch what women protagonists in American media do compared to male protagonists. Watch how male characters just do not talk through their feelings and emotions to other men, except as essentially a crisis point. Watch as women characters are much more likely to talk about how they felt about something.

Meanwhile, outside the US, male characters are allowed to have feelings. The Doctor is an insanely emotional man, full of complicated feelings that he is constantly having to face, and yet is portrayed as a man of immense power and prestige.

What male role model to American men have that portrays emotional development as a good and important thing?

> Men need to talk about their feelings just as much as women! There isn't some major difference in how we handle emotions!

I... I've never heard this before, and it is in stark contrast to decades of my personal experience.

> You need to be talking to your friends or confidants about your feelings.

What do you mean "need to"?

> No it isn't! Men need to talk about their feelings just as much as women! There isn't some major difference in how we handle emotions!

Yes there is. It isn't some societal thing either. It's ingrained deeply in biology. Saying men just need to be like women is asking them to go against their nature.

> Men need to talk about their feelings just as much as women! There isn't some major difference in how we handle emotions!

You are categorically wrong. In fact, you couldn’t be further from the truth.

Men process emotions differently than women do. A real, biological difference. There is a reason why men don’t cry at the end of titanic. And to imply men are somehow emotionally stunted because they don’t emote like a woman does, is not only wrong but is harmful.

> vulnerable is not the same as being weak

Go read a dictionary. Showing vulnerability is the same thing as showing weakness and society shuns and shames weak men. There are reasons for that, and men have every incentive not to show weakness.

Then why women segregate themselves in groups? I'm not saying I'm pro gender segregation but if women can have their own gender segregated groups, why men should be treated differently?

Both genders segregate themselves into groups on occasion, as the quotes explicitly highlight.

Why does the presence of women cause men to not have male friends?

The group dynamic changes the moment it is not single sex anymore.

Yes, it basically changes to men complaining about women. The people with a good sex life end up becoming therapists for the group.

Mixed groups on the other hand turn into a soap opera.

What is needed is a strong common interest that binds the group beyond these tendencies to stave off the soap opera entropy. The soap opera entropy will always increase with time though until the group dissolves.

It is still more stable though than the misogynist entropy.

>Yes, it basically changes to men complaining about women. The people with a good sex life end up becoming therapists for the group.

Just not true. Men only groups are rarely misogynist, more often they are homophobic in the sense that everyone is trying to imply that everyone else is secretly gay.

There is also various forms of dick measuring contests - who can grill better, who caught bigger fish and so on. Also for hobbies. And a lot of stories. You have no idea the acts of bravery worthy of medal of honor you will hear.

Bitching about women is minor.

On the other hand being able to overhear what my roommate and her girlfriends (early 20s) talk about - on some evenings they don't pass the Bechdel test in real life. On other evenings it usually evenly split between men, fashion, professional.

> There is also various forms of dick measuring contests - who can grill better, who caught bigger fish and so on. Also for hobbies. And a lot of stories. You have no idea the acts of bravery worthy of medal of honor you will hear.

This is exactly what I do not want to be part of.

Women tend to behave very differently in all-female group compared to when even a single man is present.

And if that man is charismatic or handsome its completely different dynamics and resulting behavior again.

Never thought about it myself but one female friend mentioned this once (how toxic their work environment becomes when there is no man), so started noticing it around.

As a married man I can understand these clubs fully. A man is never so relaxed, open and honest as when with other men, only men. I would expect the same among women, while accepting they always play their little games also just among themselves (which are very tiring for most men in long run and thus those clubs' popularity)

You're more open and honest with any man than with your wife?

I am very different around my wife than random women.

We aren't talking about spouses.

I'm more open with many men than my wife, who famously laughed reminiscing on one of her exes who opened up to her and cried.

I've yet to see the clam closing up than I did on the day. Sadly it happened way too late for some things.

So yeah, don't be vulnerable around women. That's the warning my wife gave me.

In some topics yes (not just any man, male close friends), but not in some others.

All in all, I am most open to her from whole mankind, but thats also due to the fact she is not same as typical women are in these aspects. It took me some time (and painful breakups with other women) to realize who I am, what and whom I want next to me and then find her.

Still, some topics are simply not built for women, and thats fine, some are not built for men.

Is it really so hard to understand this?

In my experience (as a man) men tend to behave quite differently when there’s no women present too.

Generally I much prefer mixed gender socialising!

All sorts of weird hazing and one up manship happened when I was a young man in these groups. That’s how you get these crazy Dubai guy videos of people skiing in sandals on a highway or driving on 2 tires.

> A man is never so relaxed, open and honest as when with other men, only men.

That's not been the the case in my experience, as a man.

What I find a bit remarkable is how they lost control of their club dynamics so severely. I've been a regular attendee of a few hacker spaces that were open to the public but never had the problem they describe.

I think maybe a key aspect is ensuring that all men, particular the ones that are classically unattractive (even repulsive) feel welcome as valued equals. Many women cannot countenance this and will try to shape group membership to be more agreeable; those women are free to leave. The rest are welcome to stay and at that point there shouldn't be any issues.

(Of course it goes without saying that actual harassment isn't tolerated, but being a smelly fat slob with a heart of gold doesn't count.)

Uh, they don't describe any problem though? The piece is about how everyone agrees the change is for the better, its only people in this thread that describe women and men woodworking together as a problem.

Obviously the remaining members think it’s better but as an adverse selection problem you can’t ask the ones that left

The notion that any members left is your own invention.

From a Reddit discussion about the same article:

> I spoke with some men at the Man Shed in Edinburgh at Christmas and they mentioned that in the cases they had heard about where women had been let in the number of male members dropped.

— https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1k6w3pr/we_p...

Aside from that, just take a look at what happened. When women joined, the men responded by finding a men-only room to “escape” to. It’s hardly a great leap to think that some of those men will escape someplace else instead.

Oh, rumours from a completely different place are to be taken as facts for this group? Very level headed analysis you got there.

Besides, as is abundantly clear from the program, they "escape" in there to have a "quiet chat" because the band saw in the big room is fucking loud.

This is a hilarious take.

Men must be welcome as an absolute, women must conform to your expectations or be excluded.

In a men's club?

If a woman cannot tolerate the presence of unattractive men in a club meant for socially excluded men, then she doesn't belong in that club.

> absolute

As I said, harassment shouldn't be tolerated. Men who do that should be kicked out.

I had never heard of Men's Sheds before. Thank you for mentioning it.

Yes, unfortunately sometimes social events are wildly successful and even more people want to join, and the existing members let them, and everyone has a great time together.

It's unfortunate, but it happens.

Last one I tried was Grouper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grouper_social_club

You'd meet up for dinner at a local place that was usually pretty good, with 2-3 other people, mostly tech-adjacent. Dinners were pretty polite, a little awkward, mildly stimulating, but I never made real relationships from it. Seems like the same idea has emerged with https://timeleft.com.

I don't know. It seems like the best way to make friends is to force people to do some other task next to each other a few days per week and let things form organically after they are around each other for a few years.

> ... with 2-3 other people, mostly tech-adjacent.

This IMO is a part of the problem. I don't want more tech friends. Not that there's anything wrong with us, but I want more diversity in my friend groups. And I'm tired of many hangouts eventually devolving into chats about tech-related topics.

This is a problem with these solutions in general. Most of them are offering generic friends, as if everyone is interchangeable and you just need to sit two people together to make things work.

And some people need that, or at least claim to need that. Reddit R4R personals that go - "I'm at home, I'm bored, and looking for someone to talk to. About me, I like music, movies, and food."

But I think most of the people who are lonely aren't lonely because they've never had a chance to meet a friend before, but rather because they haven't found someone that clicks with them. And most of these solutions don't put much effort into finding people who match.

> I don't know. It seems like the best way to make friends is to force people to do some other task next to each other a few days per week and let things form organically after they are around each other for a few years.

You need a “shared struggle” to build tribal bonds. Some kind of us vs it or us vs them narrative. A simple get together where everyone spends money and has a good time is never going to accomplish that.

That is why immigrant groups, religious groups, professional groups, etc are more resilient, and successive generations that experience more independence end up splintering and otherwise loosening the bonds.

See also hazing in militaries/sports teams/“Greek” organizations/etc (not that I condone hazing).

I don't really think that it has to be a struggle. For example if you started hobby A (which could be an easy thing) then you'd meet other people doing the hobby and could bond over your shared interest etc. But having said that, difficult things will always bond people faster and better, especially if it turns the dynamic into an us vs them situation.

I find that really outgoing people do great with any situation such as e.g. a dinner, but the truth is they do great because they don't need the shared interest. If we were kids and a really outgoing kid showed up they could just hang out with us without having the slightest interest in our games, simply because they were fun to be around.

Personally the kid analogy works quite well to help me understand the dynamics, and sadly what we lose as adults is the ability to walk up to any other person and go "oh is that an abc", and then just joining them AND to be accepted for having done so.

It's a matter of process: first exposure to many people, then filtering. That's how it works in school, work etc. Ideally one would plan to gather a ton of people in a crowded place, like a large concert or church.

There's something irreplaceable about place-based community

Probably that's just how we were wired. I'm probably often guilty of invoking an appeal to nature [1] when it comes to these things, but it's striking to me how few people who exist in modern society have the capacity to acknowledge that to live in this society is to entirely live within an experiment whose parameters have evolved from generation to generation over the past few centuries. We do not think critically enough about which of the technologies that "enhance" our lives actually enhance them. If personal automobiles are good for us, then to what end are they good? If social media is good for us, then to what end is it good? When you go beyond the first or second question, you start to realize the societal good is dubious at best.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

You are not supposed to stop by. You are supposed to spend money and keep going.

Here in the Balkans and most of European countries always have public squares or similar gathering place for each neighborhood. I was shocked when I visited some USA states that absolutely have nothing of that sort. Not even a park that is tailored for a few hours hangout sessions. Even some public spaces like parks and library gardens are filled with corporate interests like Starbucks. You absolutely are expected to spend money whenever you go out which is depressing af.

If the business doesn’t make enough money it will not be able to pay rent, and will be replaced with a more profitable business which will make enough money, probably by pressuring people to instead be customers, pay and move on. It’s what the system will produce.

It's about brand. This is tailored to a kind of person that feels confused and lost in a setting without a brand, so classics like joining an association around a hobby or a union or the freemasons or whatever makes them feel uncomfortable.

It's not only about one's own identity, but also the other participants.

> The neighborhood cafe where locals can stop by at any time and see other locals

This is still the norm in some places. When I was cycling through the Balkans, I was surprised how many people sit in public spaces, usually close to a kiosk, and play cards, throw dice, or just chatter

Whole southern Europe is like that (sitting now in a small trattorria in Liguria province in Italy, I see this everywhere, and ie Spain, Portugal or Greece is same).

The problem mostly arises in big cities where a lot of young move for work, I'd call those socially sterile places.

Real estate is too expensive in the USA. To stay profitable you need to turn customers around quickly

But not on a park bench or park area with tables?

In the USA people would graffiti the benches pee on the seats and a homeless person would move in. Almost no protection exists to prevent destruction of public property. I think that’s intentional to discourage people from embracing socialism.

Modern benches and even parks have anti-homeless features. iirc some park in Minneapolis removed their basketball courts because black people would congregate there (also there was drug-dealing). In USA its spend money or get out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_architecture

In the US homeless people might sit on park benches and be seen so benches are sloped to be uncomfortable for more than short periods. Benches are intended as a temporary rest for those that need it as they walk, not a place to just sit and chill.

My area's solution is we don't have parks, we have public land trusts that are actually private property and can ban people. They're pretty nice for those of us allowed.

Many of us are alone and not lonely and I think most men who feel "lonely" are lying to themselves about what socialization really is.

Yup, a lot of the men who are lonely are also a bit of an outcast whether it's self-imposed because of their warped sense of socialization or they're ostracized because they have weird takes on life issues or just life itself.

Not always, but this is the Internet, and Hacker News : if you freaking love hammers, everything starts to look like a nail.

> The neighborhood cafe where locals can stop by at any time and see other locals. The bar that everyone stops by after work twice a week. These are stationary physical locations that don’t require pre-planning, schedules, apps, or anything else.

I’ve seen a number a theories on why these spaces declined:

1. Social media became more engaging than actual hangouts.

2. Rising levels of cultural and ethnic diversity lead to lower levels of social trust and a subsequent exit from public spaces (see e.g. Robert Putnam).

3. Independent bars and cafes got bought out by chains that favored higher rates of table turnover.

4. Civil Liberties movement made America into an open air insane asylum that normal people avoid venturing into.

5. Wages not keeping pace with inflation leaves less discretionary income available to pay for these spaces.

6. Decline of fraternal orders, friendly societies, and veteran clubhouses which were often the owners of the bars and / or cafes.

(Similar to 2)

7. A loss of a common religious practice creating a space for community, and in the case of evangelical Christianity a shift to a female driven congregation and preaching.

(Which, ultimately, is very sad for the women in the church, too, because a lot of them want to be married to a Christian man, but struggle to find one if only for a purely supply issue)

1. True. When I was younger we all went to XYZ coffee shop in large part to see who we ran into there, catch up on gossip, let people know where to come hang that night. With social media you don't have/need that.

3. When I was younger we did item 1 above, but at Denny's late at night after everything shut down. The fact it was a chain didn't seem to impact the hang potential.

4. I grew up in Santa Cruz and it was always an insane asylum and had a homeless problem before having a homeless problem was cool, but it was also always a city full of people hanging out (don't know anymore was forced to move away).

Yeah, to me this is another arm of that old idea that every few years, someone in Silicon Valley reinvents the bus.

Place-based community is key, and can't be fixed with an app, or a service. Not long-term anyway.

Yeah my first thought reading the headline was “isn’t this just called the pub”?

I mean, you do realize you FIRST need to be location-agnostic to find some people, right?

Only then can your group start to develop favorite local places to hang around at.

> I bring this up because if you look at places that had lively social activities a few decades or a century ago, they were almost always a specific place.

Which is basically irrelevant, as you can come up with a similar example of pre-covid, during-covid and post-covid changes for how people hang out. People adapt pretty quickly.

> The neighborhood cafe where locals can stop by at any time and see other locals. The bar that everyone stops by after work twice a week.

I'm not sure these places really ever existed with such a stability as you describe outside of _really_ small towns. Like under 5000 pop towns.

I'm not sure these places really ever existed with such a stability as you describe outside of _really_ small towns. Like under 5000 pop towns.

These places exist today, in numerous major cities around the world. I live near one.

Isn't this merely a technological change? "A few decades or a century ago", being location-specific was the only possible option for a social club. Now there are more options; location-specific options still exist, and location-agnostic options exist also.

You can totally pick a convenient cafe or pub and start hanging out there & inviting your existing friends. In time you'll start to recognize the other regulars, and you can make a point of chatting with them regularly (but not overstaying your welcome especially early on!), find out what they're interested in, offer & request small favors, crack jokes, eventually a bit of friendly competition, casual debate about mutual interests while intentionally trusting them enough to let them change your mind a little, etc -- all the things you'd normally do to build a social connection with another man. The upside and downside of a location-based approach is that it's a very weak filter. The other regulars may be people whom it's a real stretch to learn to connect with.

Location-agnostic social activities are typically focused on an activity or interest, e.g. people who want to hike, watch a movie, play a game or sport, do political activism, do community service, etc. So the social group comes with a filter attached that ensures you will have an easier time connecting with them. This is great! There are some downsides, too, but nothing serious.

It seems to me that an underlying assumption of every so-called "social" app is that its users wish to avoid contact with people in real life. That the users wish for some sanitized, safe and dimensionally meager simulacrum of human interaction.

Obviously, that's not an absolute; clearly people yearn for human contact. But as you point out, there was a time when people participated in social activities and public life with a much higher degree of physical presence than they do now, and the popularity of apps which sidestep this indicate to me that people also desire not to engage with others so proximately.

If you want to have relationships with people, go to where people actually are, buckle your belt, set aside your dread of rejection or indifference, and introduce yourself.

Last time I was in Prague my friend brought me straight to the local pub, and without even ordering beer came out. Everyone knew each other and each other's dogs (Prague is very dog friendly, in fact one of the dogs was in the kitchen begging scraps). I have vague memories of similar scenes growing up in Australia, and have seen similar in Ireland. I don't know if anywhere like it in US cities, but maybe it's still like that out in the country.

Location specific is better, because if you just know that a particular spot has the kind of people and atmosphere that is inviting and pleasant to be in, you just go there. No need to check-in or schedule a meeting or anything else. Frequent regular interval fixed-time events are good too. I used to part of a racquet club that just had an open session all evening twice a week. You just show up and play and so did everyone else. You put your name up and are just play whoever is next for a game, then wait, then play someone else. You get to play a variety of people and when waiting your turn you can chat and get to know the other players. 5 stars system.

I co-ran a very transformative social club as a co-working space for several years.

People still talk about it years later.

It's not hard to do if you have the space.

But you have to have the space.

sounds like someone was never a foursquare mayor :)

pokemon go was a notable example that got people out of the house (and sometimes into adventure..)

I agree with this; I think part of the societal problem is one of poor urban planning. I’m lucky to live in a neighborhood in New York (Sunnyside) that has a park that is the hub of everyone’s social life—most nights of the week, people show up, bring some food, and chat/share dinner and drinks while the kids run around playing unsupervised. This is extremely rare in the US, which is dominated by suburban typologies that feature individual homes and relatively few communal spaces. The shared spaces, like restaurants/bars/etc. tend to be places you have to drive to, and therefore have less of a connection to their community and less of a regular clientele. Everyone wants to have their own backyard…which is fine, but leads to people hanging out alone in their own backyard rather than with their friends and neighbors.

I run local communities (specifically a London based Russian Language Machine Learning and AI community, hit me up if you are interested) it's 100% cannot survive long term without a locus in physical space. Online only exists to facilitate offline, if people are just avatars and not real people, there is a hard limit to what can be achieved in a community, its a question of trust.

The lack of deep friendships feel like a 3-fold problem.

1. You can't ever be real, if you are real, you are likely to be recorded doing something someone somewhere on the largest stage in the world (the public web) that someone will disapprove of, and someone else will raise their own profile by mining your impiety to prove their own concern and moral superiority.

2. Everyone is so mobile and connected online, they never have to break the ice and talk to those around them in the breakroom or geographical space, so all of our social skills have atrophied at best, or were never learned at worst. We know just enough civility to not get in fights, but we don't know how to easily break the ice or become acquaintances.

3. All the people that live in the cities are not close with each other, they didn't grow up together and don't go to church / rotary club / male-only spaces any longer because we are all supposed to pretend to be cool liberated yuppies in a hookup culture. Can't have real ties or any strongly held beliefs, that would make you religious (or worse, Religious on an actual religion), those people are bad. So I'm okay, you're okay, and we all smile. And inside, no real connections are ever made.

Not to mention testosterone levels dropping, schools being geared towards women, always co-ed spaces, and a breakup of younger and older generations because of cultural differences there too...not that the old people are always nice.

Appreciate the thoughts - totally agree on those issues, but I don't think the problem is insurmountable. There is a real - albeit latent, maybe - demand for deep friendship and male-only spaces. Everyone recognizes it's an issue, at the very least, and is being more vocal about it in the face of the dramatic enshittification of the internet over the last few years.

It just takes too much self-discipline to break out of the internet consistently enough to build meaningful relationships without someone / something taking the initiative. I am sort of trying to replicate that at a larger scale by removing any friction to making plans.

Would love to hear your thoughts on if / what you think the solution is.

Here are my thoughts… well, an article about my thoughts anyway:

https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

> deep friendship and male-only spaces.

Gun ranges?

Too loud

> male-only spaces

> Everyone is so mobile and connected online, they never have to break the ice and talk to those around them

one of the unexpected consequences of social media is that people have been conflating being informed with being connected.

asking "what have you been up to?" was to be a nice easy opening into a conversation that lead to connection.

but thanks to broadcast updates on social media, your friends already know what have you've been up to, so they can delude themselves into thinking that they've maintained a relationship because they know superficial details.

but a relationship isn't built on updating a list of superficial facts. it's built by having a conversation

> thanks to broadcast updates on social media, your friends already know what have you've been up to, so they can delude themselves into thinking that they've maintained a relationship because they know superficial details.

This is a huge reason (possibly the top reason) why I quit Facebook. I wasn't getting value from my "connections", and I figured everyone knew, more or less, what I was doing (& I knew what they were doing), so we didn't actually interact. I figured if I was no longer going to be friends with these people, I didn't want a facade. So I quit it, and I don't use the other usual suspects (Instagram, Snapchat, tiktok, etc.)

It's great. I actually have some honest to goodness friends IRL that I hug, with whom I talk about real things, etc.

>but thanks to broadcast updates on social media, your friends already know what have you've been up to, so they can delude themselves into thinking that they've maintained a relationship because they know superficial details.

I don't think this is really a big deal. "hey I saw you posted pictures from your trip. How was it" there, conversation started. Social media posts are basically all conversation starters.

Assuming you can even remember. I pretty quickly forget people's posts and updates.

The problem is more that you never bother to have the convo where ask how things are going because your in your mind you think you’re all up-to-date.

I get the hypothetical but in reality it doesn't happen. Social media posts don't have details.

Do you know ignore your friends because you think your caught up?

Hasn't this kind of usage of « social media » died down a decade ago ?

I don't think so. I think some of us early adopters of this stuff got tired of it and dropped out before being tired of social media was cool, but we were replaced by a new crowd that's as hooked on it as ever.

This is incredibly fatalistic.

I lived under all of this, plus two immigrant parents with no community / role modeling, isolated in suburbia as a kid with a chronically online 20s.

Yeah that nurturing left its mark. Yet I learned to see it, and learn new patterns. In my 30s I have deep friendships. Younger, older, men, women, nb. Most are still shallow, my energy is limited, but even there sometimes we touch into depth when it comes to relationship or existential stuff.

Rewrite your programming.

For me things like “loneliness epidemic” is fatalistic. End is nigh if some specific stat is not maintained. Giant foot will squish us all.

It’s pop-sci, gate-keeping, always be hustling zeitgeist obfuscated by high minded toxic positivity.

Media post says there’s an epidemic. Academics come up with a theory of social science in a world where the Executive branch is blatantly manipulating the market. Fed and Congress manipulate employment options, COL through rates and tax code.

Predictions of 10-12 billion people by 2100 do not line up with real birth trends.

So much of our social truisms are made up cable TV hype that zapped the elders brains into anxious compliance. Narratives propagated in service to a random researchers rent and food money search.

Fatalistic towards a social concept is not the same as “launch the nukes, humans suck.” Non-Christians can not believe without going about shooting Christians. Not accepting someone’s dissertation is the same thing.

Your points are valid, but this I do not understand:

> Not to mention testosterone levels dropping

Why should declining testosterone levels prevent men from socializing and making friends? Logically, it should be the other way around, right?

It’s just the adders for all the other health metrics declining. Most are due to addiction to pleasure, lack of movement, obesity, etc.

Increased testosterone increases confidence, motivation, goal-oriented behavior, risk-taking and social assertiveness.

> You can't ever be real, if you are real, you are likely to be recorded doing something…

I'm real all the time. What am I missing here?

The 800lb elephant in the room about this whole idea - some people have trouble building friendships because they can't stop themselves from bringing up fringe topics with people they just met, and insisting on having conversations about them.

Elephant's weigh more like 11,000lbs. I think you mean Gorilla?

Speaking of Gorillas, have you ever read the book Chimpanzee Politics? Crazy how at the end the other two chimps break into the one chimps cage and literally rip his nuts off. Crazy huh?

Oh wait... I'm doing that thing again, aren't I?

It's a very small elephant, like the opposite of a jumbo shrimp.

This is the humor I’m looking for in a men’s club!

Ah yes, shrimp... the cockroach of the sea. Jumbo sea cockroach.

I think it’s mostly men just not being that interested in being friends with other men unless there is something tangible to gain. Also 1:1 friendship is hard to maintain if you don’t have a shared 3rd space. A 3rd space allowed you to maintain friendships much more time effectively.

> I think it’s mostly men just not being that interested in being friends with other men unless there is something tangible to gain.

This is particularly egregious among single men who only want connections to women.

Isn't RFK diligently working day and night to find a cure?

> What am I missing here?

"Friends" who prioritize being angry and spiteful online over their meatspace relationships, sounds like.

You’re missing that you’re probably not the kind of person who has the problem being outlined in the comment you’re replying to.

For what it’s worth, I remember being a closeted teenager, I remember feeling like I “couldn’t” be real - but that feeling was wrong. I just hadn’t figured that out yet at the time. It seemed too scary, too risky to be real. That’s probably one of the only pieces of advice I would have given my younger self if I could go back in time - come out sooner, come out before you’re ready, come out as bi before you know you’re gay, come out as curious/questioning before that even.

Force other people to deal with you as you are, instead of constantly working to make yourself into something that you think will be more acceptable to them. Take the risk of being real.

"if you are real, you are likely to be recorded doing something someone somewhere on the largest stage in the world (the public web) that someone will disapprove of" -> is this a concern for many men? It's never crossed my mind or been a problem for anyone I've known.

"they never have to break the ice and talk to those around them in the breakroom or geographical space" -> I've always talked to people at work and also I joined the most socially awkward hobby I've ever seen (historical sword fencing) and people are still very chatty. I also recently started volunteering at a wildlife rehabilitator and find myself just constantly chatting.

"Can't have real ties or any strongly held beliefs, that would make you religious (or worse, Religious on an actual religion), those people are bad" -> I've been friends with a lot of religious people but also non-religious people have strongly held beliefs (I hang out with a lot of vegans and I cannot imagine claiming they are afraid to publicly hold strong beliefs).

I think your post just goes to show how different mens' experiences can be because, while I'm sure a lot of men probably can connect with this, my personal experiences could not be more opposite. I think it depends a ton on the sorts of crowds you run in, it almost sounds to me like the people you meet are generally judgy and antisocial but I've found people I'm around to be generally friendly (though I've found many people are happy to chat but are often hard to actually organize to otherwise hang out since people in their 30s are busy and some of my friends have kids now).

> is this a concern for many men? It's never crossed my mind or been a problem for anyone I've known.

Not for me, I have been to plenty of meetups in my city. If you're not liked or don't get along with the others, the worst that can happen is that you'll be politely ostracized. The paranoia about being publicly "cancelled" seems very overblown.

Well we already have people on this page commenting on the demograpic represented on the submitted web site. Yes, in today's world there are almost always people looking to play "gotcha" and will try to pin you as a racist, misogynist, homophobe, or some other sort of bigot or pariah.

How would that apply in a real life setting? You're assuming that busy people would take time out of their day to attend a social event in person to nitpick the demographic makeup of said event instead of making friendly banter. How often has that happened at social events you've attended?

Anecdotally, when I lived in Victoria BC (a very lefty city) this did actually happen at events I went to more than once. I didn't go to events much so unless I just was unlucky to witness this sort of thing more than once, it was frequent

For what it is worth, I didn't think the complainers went out of their way just to complain, they did have a genuine interest in the events. They just also liked to complain about the demographics and steer the groups towards things that would make us "more inclusive"

It always ended the same way: the group mostly dissolved

Fact is that in a social situation, you don't get to decide how you're viewed. If someone says you're being a jerk, then in their eyes, you're being a jerk. You can't change society or whatever so that they don't view you as a jerk. It's not up to you how they view you. This is not a flaw with society, it is by design. By definition it is how socialization works, and it goes both ways.

You DO, however, control your own words and actions, and generally those have a strong correlation with how you're perceived. Food for thought.

Ok, but it still seems to be quite rare? I don’t live in the woods or anything and I’ve never been the victim of a “gotcha.” I’ve definitely offended people on various occasions (which I mostly felt bad about), but none of those people ever felt so strongly they tried to ruin my life over it. Nor have I ever known anyone that was “gotcha”-ed as you described.

I unfortunately have known people that have died in car crashes, which is very tragic, but I don’t refuse to drive anywhere as a result. There’s no data on this but I suspect we have far more car deaths than we do individuals who have been socially ostracized as a result of someone spinning their comments as racist/misogynistic/etc…

Basically, it seems like a bad way to run your life. “I might get hit by lightning, better not go outside.”

I think the "They might 'gotcha' me and then cancel me as a [racist/sexist/bigot/etc]" fear is overblown and comes mostly from people chronically online and people who care what randos on Twitter write. Yes, the Internet is full of keyboard warriors just waiting to catch you saying something they can twist into some -ism, but these people don't exist in real life, or at least they keep their opinions to themselves in real life. I personally don't care what random people on the Internet think. They might be over there on Twitter canceling me as a racist or sexist right now, and it doesn't affect my life even slightly.

> I think the "They might 'gotcha' me and then cancel me as a [racist/sexist/bigot/etc]" fear is overblown

Even if someone films you saying something, unless it's something that's offensive to enough people for it getting out to actually impact your life... what are they going to do with it? Real life is not infested by these hyper-politically-correct boogeymen people seem to fear. Nobody really cares.

Don't go around saying stuff that would disgust your grandma/boss/etc in such a way that they'd feel the need to distance themselves from you, and what power does anyone really hold here?

The only way I can really take this as a legitimate worry is someone asking for a space where they can say overtly [racist/sexist/bigoted/etc] things without consequence in which case... yeah, there might be consequences. But then at least be honest and just say "I want to start a racism club." instead of trying to convince us all the boogeyman is real.

And hell, even if someone catches you calling an autistic 5 year old black kid racist names... just start a GiveSendGo and apparently people will just give you almost a million dollars for your trouble.

> is this a concern for many men? It's never crossed my mind or been a problem for anyone I've known

Yes, I talk to an older guy, probably mid-50s, at my gym. He completely stopped helping women at the gym or even giving advise. To my knowledge, no one ever accused him of anything, but he acknowledge that he absolutely have no experience talking to or otherwise interacting with younger women. He is terrified of doing or saying something wrong and lose access to the only gym in town, so he simply avoided women at the gym. He helps out the men, young and old, just not women.

> he absolutely have no experience talking to or otherwise interacting with younger women.

A sad fact of life, but at 50, most men aren't attractive to women 10 years younger than them, and it becomes pretty awkward and socially unacceptable to do anything that could be interpreted as flirting.

Now I don't know about the situation in gyms in the US, maybe the situation is extreme there. But generally speaking, I don't find it particularly sad if people mind their own business in the gym.

> I don't find it particularly sad if people mind their own business in the gym.

But that is part of the whole loneliness issue isn't it. I can certainly understand people wanting to just do their workout, but it's one less source of interaction between people. We don't talk to be people at the supermarket, we don't talk to people waiting for the bus, we'd rather listen to a podcast during our workout, than talk to the guy sitting on the next bench.

Very anecdotally: I'm fairly introvert, but have issues not talking, so I'll fairly regularly talk to random people. Some people will clearly prefer to be left alone, but frequently people smile and light up and start talking about all sorts of random stuff.

From a guy's point of view, initiating a conversation with a random woman anywhere, not just in the gym, is fraught with peril, and probably not worth it. The difference between "flirting" and "creepy" is entirely in the mind of the recipient, and if you initiate a conversation, you really have no control over how it's interpreted. The downside can be pretty bad if it's received poorly.

I'm exceedingly grateful I'm already married and don't have to put up with this minefield anymore!

IMO this mostly stems from not having walkable, livable communities. People live in detached homes and they drive to work and the grocery store and… that’s it.

There’s next to zero room for random events because travel becomes such a deliberate action. I can’t just pop into a cafe - first I need to find it and drive there.

Also our social signals are completely fucked up. Headphones and phones means that most interactions are off-limits. Probably a lot of these people do want to talk, but they’re not signaling it. And I’m not gonna be the one to bother a stranger.

To add, in walkable communities you are much more likely to be a “regular” at more places, since you are walking to the places nearby, and to share multiple regular places with other people. Walking 15 minutes to 30 minutes still keep you in about a 1-2 mile radius, which is pretty small and has a lot of overlap with other people walking. So you are likely to see the same people at the bar as at the gym or the coffee shop.

If you are driving 15 minutes to 30 minutes, especially if you get on a highway for any amount of time, you could be anywhere in a 15+ mile radius. Your grocery store and your preferred bar could be 20 miles away from each other, so not likely you will run into Jim from the bar in the cereal aisle.

It's more cultural than walkability. I've lived about 20 years in NYC but now spend months at a time outside the city as well.

In the US, in VHCOL places like NYC filled with upper middle class striver / PMC types.. everything is so fleeting & ephemeral you just don't have "regulars". You just feel anonymous. Everything is moving/changing all the time, expectations and trust are low. There is a lot of classism.

I lived in buildings 8 years & had neighbors on my floor who re-introduced themselves to me many times, somehow forgetting we've met. I knew their dogs names.

The shops I go 2x/week have 50-150% annual staff turnover and even the staff that somehow last 5 years barely acknowledge recognizing me. The staff who work in my building disappear without a trace one day. My condo board president introduced herself to me for the third time recently. We stopped having package pickup for a couple years because allegedly our staff & mail woman didn't get along.

Meanwhile in the small town I spend more time, I drive, but I am a regular at some restaurants that I go maybe monthly or less. Regular to the point of waiters sending us free drinks, or knowing the same waiter from 3 different restaurants he's worked over the years, being on a first name basis. I knew my last mailman by name and sent him a retirement card. I bump into the postal clerk at my vet. The guy who cleaned my chimney gave me a great greenhouse recommendation recently.

I mean, Manhattan is the most densely populated place in the entire country. I’m talking about communities designed around walkability, not places where people are so densely packed your local services are basically within the same block out of necessity.

Philadelphia, Chicago, and Seattle are extremely walkable for a large part of the city proper, in my experience. Whereas places like Phoenix, Orlando, and Dallas are sprawls where almost none of the city is walkable.

In a small town, it is easy to become a regular when there are only 5 restaurants and one vet. But in a proper "city" walkability is a major factor in community level.

Backing up a sister comment on this thread: I've lived in SF and Chicago, both also as walkable as it gets for the US, and in both had relationships as a "regular," whether at a corner store, cafe, or the grocer. I remember our Albanian corner store guy in particular, who would comment on me gaining or losing weight. Our neighborhoods felt like a small town where we all knew each other (including the homeless!).

I live near New York now, and while I hear from friends that they find that kind of community in some faraway boroughs of NYC, everyone in Manhattan reports your profound and deep sense of alienation from their fellow man, though some with a positive spin.

I have not seen this alienating anonymity in any other part of the country, though I have felt it whenever I'm there. As there is no other place in this country even remotely as dense or with faster turnover (not even SF), I'm fairly confident Manhattan is unique (in this country).

Brooklyn the same as Manhattan though.

I think I'm just pointing out the urbanist utopia walkable American city NYC kind of already fails the claim.

But I'm pointing out that just because NYC fails the claim does not mean that the claim is wrong.

I think there's a goldilocks zone of walkable, at least for the purposes of this "urbanist-I-know-everyone-utopia" feeling – you could have perfectly walkable places that aren't dense enough (people wise), so they won't work. I'm thinking of Gorham's Bluff, Alabama, which is an attempted New Urbanist project. Or, you could have Manhattan, which is also walkable but frankly mind-boggling in its density.

No offense to New York. I sometimes find myself in wordless awe of its sheer power.

Male cops have changed from being thin and fit men (or average man) in the 1960's to large men with muscles, and sometimes roid rage.

People earn good money playing video games now (that wasn't the case in the 1980's) or streaming video games.

The sports heros children had while growing up used performance enhancing drugs in the 1990's.

> Not to mention testosterone levels dropping, schools being geared towards women, always co-ed spaces ...

If your childhood heros take the lazy way to success, why do we need to blame it on the other things? Using your brain is hard, as it turns out.

I've always detested parents who saw sports as the only path of success for their children. So often they were disappointed. If the parents spent time and sucked up and learned the math/science/etc their kids were learning, it may have been a better outcome for all involved.

Is your comment just in response to the falling testosterone levels point? Because that’s been an ongoing trend since I believe the 80s and has absolutely nothing to do with performance enhancing drugs. Testosterone levels being in healthy range is absolutely critical for men’s health for psychological as well as physical reasons and being in said healthy range is unrelated with sports culture. Whether meathead or whiz kid, physical activity, healthy food, good sleep, limited drugs & alcohol, and minimal or no pornography are all essential parts of reaching one’s peak.

Maybe I’m totally misinterpreting your comment but it kinda just seems like a diatribe unrelated to the comment you’re responding to.

1) Real friends certainly let you be real. And the scene I frequent deeply frowns on unconsensual photography. Most of the events I go to they sticker all the cameras. I love that. I go there for the people not for Instagram.

That's not to say nobody takes pics but they do it in a quiet corner so they don't catch anyone by mistake. It makes it very respectful. The stickers are just a reminder so you don't just start flicking away when you're drunk. It makes everyone feel safer and more genuine.

2) I guess but nothing some quick ice breaking games won't fix

3) In a small town there's much more familiarity yes. But also a much deeper sense of being watched and judged. I can't live with that. Even the small city I lived in was too small for me. Everyone knows everyone's business and constantly gossip behind your back.

The nice thing in a big city is meeting new people and finding new places. And the variety. In a small town there's a lot of pressure to conform, eg often you're an outcast if you're not religious. I don't think they're bad but there's little acceptance of people who are different. So what do you do? Pretend. That's not real connection.

In a big city you can really be yourself because there's always others that are like you and you can meet them in like-minded places or events. And you can make real ties there. And even find out about other communities you might fit in.

I really hate going to male-exclusive places by the way. There's very few men I have a deep connection with (I'm male) because the whole BS thing that it's frowned upon to talk about feelings. "Men's weekends" just end up with too much beer, macho talk, shooting the shit and hanging in front of the TV watching boring sports or crappy porn. Nothing serious, fun or enlightening. That's my experience with those anyway. I find that exhausting and I always excuse myself from them now. I used to try to fit in but the others would know I hated it anyway so it was awkward.

I have much deeper relationships with lady friends. They're more open and less judgemental in general. I feel safer around them. So mixed events are a must for me.

> In a big city you can really be yourself because there's always others that > are like you and you can meet them in like-minded places. > And you can make real ties there.

This is a massive assumption, but maybe 'yourself' is limited to a standard deviation from the accepted mean.

Well yes of course there's a maximum deviation. If you're too different you won't fit in. Not a bad thing because then there's no real point in being there anyway.

That's why you have to pick the communities you engage in so you fit. You don't have to change yourself but you pick the community to suit.

It's not an assumption though. I live in a city of millions and I'm in some communities of only hundreds of people. Which thrive and even have their own places. That's the nice thing, in a city it's easy to have enough scale even to make niche communities thrive.

Is it really that outrageous of an assumption to think that most people are not too far from the majority?

What's the majority? There's so much difference in people. There's the IT/intellectual worker and there's blue collar workers, there's sport fans and book enthusiasts, there's religious communities and lgbt-friendly ones. All examples of dualities that are common to some degree but don't have so much overlap in interests.

In my experience social settings work a lot better when they're a bit more specific. Like, about something. And there's not really one majority that fits all. In the US even the two major parties are extremely polarised and yet they are about equal in size.

Where do you go where they sticker cameras. Seems like my kind of place.

Queer nightclubs - Berghain and FOLD (London) e.g.

Some parties I occasionally go to in London have a “we really really don’t want you to use your phone on the dance floor and will tell you off” policy.

Like te_chris says, they're the more expressive parties. The "embrace different" ones. Not specifically queer in my case but certainly queer friendly.

Not necessarily as extreme as Berghain mind you. But just places and events where people are encouraged to dress or behave less typical.

Even the cosplay community now has signs to always ask before photographing a cosplayer as they might not want to be photographed without their knowledge.

Places where people are doing "weird" shit.

Not just there. It's coming to the more mainstream dance parties too.

In fact the really 'weird shit' places usually don't permit phones at all.

> Men's weekends" just end up with [...] hanging in front of the TV watching boring sports or crappy porn.

How many situations are you in where group consumption of pornography is normal? I've been in very few.

"Everyone knows" a gathering of women will involve a lingerie clad pillow fight and a gathering of men will involve watching porn.

Many. And I don't even mind but it's usually really bad porn. Also it's not like anyone does anything, they just sit there and pretend they're not interested or ignore it. It's really weird. Also a kind of macho thing I think. Anyway in Holland this is not uncommon.

I have nothing against pornography at all but I do have a minimum quality :) I like the more stylish stuff.

Though I prefer watching people in real life, I'm lucky to have some other friends who are into that too.

It sounds like when you say you go to "male specific" events, you have a very specific set of male-specific events in mind. I suspect the experiences you described earlier are less due to the male-ness of those present, and more simply a function of the social events you tend to go to?

Like, not that that's a bad thing- live your lice how you want- but complaints of "my complaint with all-male gatherings is that the collectively viewed pornography is of insufficiently high quality" are not necessarily the most relatable.

That wasn't the only complaint :) It was more the overall uninterested feel and senseless macho behavior that maybe they have pent up being with the wife or something and they need to act the tool to justify their manhood. Or to forget the day to day family routine or something. Most of the time they sit around bored.

What my friends don't know is that I'm pretty 'liberal'. And I don't have this pent up need for horseplay. I get enough of the more real kind of play :) I just felt so out of sync. It's just so senseless and not enjoyable at all.

The kind of event is pretty common in Holland. It's a pretty typical thing for male friends to go off for a weekend once a year or so in a cabin somewhere. I've done it with several different groups.

I do think that the kind of people that complain about the male loneliness epidemic are the kind of people who would struggle with those issues-

The only way to establish relationships is to be real - so of course if you believe you can’t be real, that’ll be a problem.

Relationships kick off and grow and solidify via socializing - so of course if you’ve let your social skills atrophy and believe you have no chance to practice and improve them, that’ll be a problem.

Your third point sounds like it’s really just a combination of your first two points, discomfort with being open and honest with others, and discomfort with intentionally socializing with strangers. Of course if you avoid those things to spare yourself the discomfort, you’re also avoiding the opportunity to make friends.

The rest of it (testosterone? Co-ed?) sounds like bullshit to me.

What I hear you being concerned about is: people don’t see the value in leaving their comfort zone in order to pursue what they want. Those fears you mention about not being real, and not knowing how to socialize, and not being around others, and being forced to go to schools for women (??) just sound like irrational fears to me. None of that stuff will kill you.

If being a man is anything, then surely, being a man is facing those kinds of situations and saying “this makes me uncomfortable but it has to be done, I am afraid but I will do it anyway.”

For me, that is the male loneliness epidemic, if such a thing even exists - it’s the unwillingness of some men to face their fears and do what needs to be done to make a connection with another human being.

Overall I agree with the point that people don't take the effort to change themselves and connect with another human being.

> The only way to establish relationships is to be real

Personally, I found emotional dissonance when people tell me this phrase. For a long time, acting like myself has ostracized me from other people and built shallow relationships. It's only when I didn't act like myself and faked it until it became a habit did I build deeper friendships.

It's emotionally difficult when your natural way of acting is not accepted.

Don't get me wrong, I hate religion and everything, but America is still basically totally controlled by religious people and in many situations being non-religious is the weird thing. I can't imagine anyone would be feel stigmatized by religious belief in this country.

IME, none of those things are issues that prevent deep friendships in my own life.

1. I've never worried about this.

2. I regularly chat with strangers and acquaintances IRL, though I don't feel it does much to relieve loneliness or cultivate deep friendships.

3. I'm an atheist, but I don't think I've ever worried about being "religious" about something nor judged someone for being so.

I would analyze my own life as follows: friendship requires time spent together. I'm a parent with a full time job in a car centric city, which keeps me pretty busy. I may get one day or night a week to go be social or do hobbies or go to a rotary club or whatever. That's a limited amount of time, so there's a corresponding limit on how many friendships I can realistically maintain. Let alone start new friendships.

So I feel like "having it all" is not realistic. Everything takes time: working out, eating healthy, having friends, having a family, having a job, having a community, writing hacker news comments, and on and on. Most data shows that Dads now spend significantly more time with their kids than those of previous generations. So I think for people of my cohort (millennial dads) its just a case where we traded time with friends for time with family.

> You can't ever be real, if you are real, you are likely to be recorded doing something someone somewhere on the largest stage in the world (the public web) that someone will disapprove of, and someone else will raise their own profile by mining your impiety to prove their own concern and moral superiority.

Well said. This is a massive problem.

I've never felt more connected to people than in NYC. I knew my neighbors, I had a huge social network, I just didn't like the NYC that much.

I honestly blame residential zoning. The place we would get to know our neighbors was at the corner shop, bar a block away, salon and pizza shop downstairs. All that goes away when you're walking more than a couple blocks to do anything.

I always hear stereotypes about people in big cities being unfriendly and there being no sense of community, but I've had the opposite experience. Coming from a town with a population of hundreds, yeah, everyone knew everybody, but the connections people had were decades old. And everyone hated everybody who wasn't already part of their very tight social network (and they hated most of the people in the network as well, but they just had no other choice but to deal with it). And nobody wanted to associate with direct neighbors.

But living in a city, I've had shopkeepers who regularly see me set aside items that they know I'll like and make sure nobody buys it before I get a chance. I have neighbors that greet me every time they see me. Some chat me up. I've stopped in random hole in the wall restaurants and had other regulars (who I didn't know) randomly give me free stuff to welcome me to the community. People were willing to welcome new people in.

Now I know people will want to rush in and say, "That's not a city experience. My small town has all that and your small town just sucked!" To which I say, okay. That's your anecdote against mine. But cities are just as welcoming as people think small towns are. If you choose to stay in your room and grimace every time you do happen to go outside, yeah, it's lonely. But it's very easy to turn that around in a city with potential friends everywhere you look. And having been to cities around the world, I see loads of people chatting and laughing outside.

Yea, I loved the relationships in NYC, just not the grind. Everyone was trying to "make it" everything was expensive while at the same time there is garbage juice on the street in 90º heat. I'd go see my friends shows, but never got on the list because they had to get paying customers to get invited back. Tough living, and that's not even saying anything about trying to be a cyclist in the city.

I've lived in SF for the last decade, and I really see a difference. I know it's not that much less urban than Brooklyn or Queens, but it's the zoning. I don't have a convenience store on my block, much less a pizza restaurant or salon. We have a local bar, and have a similar relationship with the folks there as we did in Brooklyn, which is nice, but again, it's hard to get to know the folks in your "commercial zoned district" because everyone is slammed together, and you don't see them every day. Even though I live three blocks away, I'm still a face on the crowd.

There's honestly a big difference between a shop on your street and a shop a few blocks away... because everyone in the neighborhood is a few blocks away.

Americans will probably never admit it but they are really bad at urban planning.

Funny that you were downvoted after saying that. As an American I agree with what I think you mean, but I believe Americans think they are good at urban planning because what they plan for is just different. They plan for cars and single family homes.

Well, Europe has cars and families too, so it sounds like what Americans plan for is not different, but instead they are taking into account a very limited set of requirements.

I mean... it's pretty objectively obvious. We have the right tools and expertise, it's just that our electorate can't see the walkable city past losing their free street parking for their third car.

It's always, "but I want at train to exist and not have to change anything about the way I live my life."

Sometimes I wish we could have "gentlemen's clubs" of the sort that existed in Victorian Britain (not the US strip club version), third-spaces where one could go to read or converse or play cards with other men or even have a meal or a drink. Having social space that's limited to a set of people one knows, more or less, and that has rules on behavior seems like a civilizing influence that's missing today.

Those still exist but often have very high membership fees. Thousands per year plus minimum spend amounts

That is the exact long-term vision. Isn't that the absolute dream? Have to start a bit decentralized but I would love to eventually get a physical location to have that important third-space.

Hacker spaces are sort of like that, it seems to me.

I am very sad that my local hackerspace seems to eschew any of the social aspects and focuses (at least outwardly from what I can see) solely on entrepreneurship.

These places exist but are usually financially prohibitive for most people, and that’s even if they meet whatever requirements they have to join

To be fair to our modern world this is how the Victorian gentleman's clubs were too—it's even in the name. If you weren't a gentleman you had the pub.

There are also Working men's clubs and varieties thereof:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_men's_club

Hell I’d take a pub. Bring back the neighborhood pub.

They exist at either end of the class spectrum. Working Men's Clubs used to be very common around the UK and many still exist. The one near my childhood home is Victorian-era and was recently refurbished. As long as I can remember it had frosted windows. That's now gone and it's been rebranded it as a family-friendly event space. It's basically a member subsidized pub and your drinks should cost less.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_men%27s_club

That’s what country clubs have mostly been for decades. Makes me want to find the time to take up golf.

I feel like our culture has a strong anti-golf bias. Now that I'm older, any reason to spend a couple hours outside with my friends sounds amazing.

> I feel like our culture has a strong anti-golf bias

Golf, generally, is pretty expensive. It's like minimum $50 for an outing, you need equipment, correct clothes, etc. Some places require membership, often priced intentionally exclusively. It's pretty natural for something exclusionary to get a negative cultural bias.

Oh, and it is a terrible resource hog. You can't fit many people on a golf course at any given time without disrupting gameplay, and all that grass requires a lot of water and maintenance.

> any reason to spend a couple hours outside with my friends sounds amazing

This is, of course, available in many forms that don't involve hitting balls with sticks, but also there are many varieties of ball+stick that satisfy this.

Golfing is an artificial competitive activity that exists in an artificial and manicured version of nature. There is nothing wrong with it if you like the activity, but you can just go for a hike or stroll in a park if you want to be with friends outside.

Check out disc golf!

Japanese tea gardens are pretty artificial and manicured, and they’re awesome. It’s great to have undespoiled natural beauty, and it’s also cool to see what people can do with a landscape.

I recommend everyone watch the series Lodge 49. It's free to watch with ads now.

Not only is a great show that touches on relationships and loneliness and modern alienation with a touch of magical realism and esoterica and alchemy but it focuses on a fraternal (in name only, women are members) order that your grandfather might have been a member of but have disappeared due to rising individualism, rising rents and displacement.

But there's no reason we couldn't start building them again. Not high end exclusive clubs like Soho House but just a place with books and a reasonable membership fee and a bar with cheap drinks for added revenue and occasional "open to the public" events.

There could be ones for software devs, ones focused on philosophy or great literature, ones for musicians or artists.

I've run the back-of-a-napkin numbers and even in expensive cities it doesn't seem impossible if your goal is to just break even and foster a community.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2p1osv0jj8

I loved lodge 49. It inspired me to attend a welcome dinner at my local freemason lodge.

Sadly I discovered first hand why membership is declining (this lodge was a magnet for socially inept conspiracy theorists).

Yeah... We can't revive the old lodges. The way forward is to create new ones.

They have some awesome digs though.

> It's free to watch with ads now.

Where? I searched and didn't see any where free.

My mistake, I thought it was on Sling Freestream but it's on premium only.

Worth the $6.99 for AMC though.

Freemasonry is hit or miss depending on who you meet and who you hangout with. Liberal freemasonry is even better IMHO because you actively work on yourself. You can choose to stay with men, be in a mixed group, and there are female only Lodges for the women who don't want to be with us stupid men.

I live in a big city where every member ends up knowing other member (male or female) even if your own Lodge is restricted to one sex. It's a lot of fun and I do believe it could be beneficial for a lot of incels.

Think the main reason is because real estate is incredibly expensive now. To run some kind of social space and make it financially viable you need to be collecting a significant amount to pay rent and wages.

Only way I can see it working is if the government pays for social spaces. An extension of the library system but more focused on events and socialising rather than being a quiet space for reading.

>Only way I can see it working is if the government pays for social spaces.

The government effectively does financially support social clubs by exempting them from taxes: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/other-non-profits/...

Actively providing money to clubs would be a tough sell. Grant writing is hard, grant reviewing and auditing is expensive, and there could be a PR nightmare if the government provided money to an "immoral" club or didn't provide money to certain classes of clubs.

I don’t think it would be terribly controversial for councils and local government to just have a building somewhat like a community hall and just let people rent it out for very cheap for whatever social or club events they want.

There’s even an episode with a shout-out to Huell Howser! Can recommend.

Also, do check out the interactive map at the Huell Howser Archive, if you haven’t seen it [^0].

[^0]: https://blogs.chapman.edu/huell-howser-archives/

Soho House is pretty much the opposite of a high end exclusive club these days.

$3000 a year and expensive menu items is too much for most Americans. Those are not the price points that can address social alienation.

I’ve often wondered what a contemporary free mason movement could be. I know they’re still around but their whole system is wildly arcane.

Freemasonry cannot be modern by definition, but the closest would be liberal Freemasonry where the main rules are 1. Work on yourself with the help of your brothers and sisters (a bit like zen Buddhism), and 2. Apply the rules of Freemasonry in the outside world (mainly don't be an asshole).

the closest thing we have to that where i am are run clubs but they are now dangerously close to dating clubs

Those clubs still exist in London but they're just for the elite to make shady backroom deals with their rich buddies :)

They're really exclusive and they always have been. You and I would not get in, not now and not in the Victorian days. Even 'new money' is usually not ok. You really have to have gone to the right school and have the right family.

The working class used to have working men’s clubs, but they no longer serve the same purpose.

Ah I see, I misread that. I wasn't aware of those. Thanks!

Which new purpose do you allude to?

Only a guess but they all dropped the "working" and "men" requirements.

The latest incarnation was "Men in Sheds" which eventually got the traditional treatment - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg5qd9l3094o

Hmm yes I've seen men's sheds but they weren't actually men exclusive and very topical to making stuff. A bit like a makerspace but less focused on tech and more on woodworking.

Just to challenge that slightly. There is a range of clubs, some are honestly very easy to get into if you end up there for some work event and talk to at least two people. It's the ability to socialize, and lack of clubs focused on new industries that's made them elusive to the new-money (There isn't a National Software Club for example). I'll also knowledge most would run about £1-2k a quarter which is restrictive (by design) cost.

> Having social space that's limited to a set of people one knows, more or less, and that has rules on behavior seems like a civilizing influence that's missing today.

You just described a country club, right down to the innate classism and exclusivity rules.

Are male only country clubs legal?

No, but just like everywhere else, you can engineer a byzantine set of hoops to jump through so that the only people who "qualify" end up being the "preferred" sort of clientele.

Probably not, but the country clubs where I live all have men's locker rooms that have full bars, poker tables, and lounge areas with big screen tv's.

They may not be able to call themselves male only, but there are many private organizations that are all men. The Augusta national golf course was one for a long time

I have to ask, is the locker room clubhouse clothing optional?

It’s a locker room; making them not clothing optional defeats the purpose.

I’m talking about the non-locker room parts of this locker room

Why do they need to be male-only to solve the male loneliness epidemic? Why can't men socialize in public spaces in a way that isn't offensive to others?

I say this as a former dude who has spent the vast, vast, vast majority of my life as a man, socializing with men and not-men, in public. I have never had a single issue.

Same reason why women like having women spaces. There certain experiences exclusive to being a male.

Example?

Cigar smoking.

I'll have to let my HR manager know women can't smoke cigars. She clearly doesn't know, went through a bunch at our last company meeting.

I know of an older woman (has grandkids) who smokes cigars at the cigar shop I smoke at. The discussions with "The Boys" are different when she's around.

candid discussion of relations with the opposite sex without fear of offense

Talking about your feelings without fear of a woman getting the ick.

And so what? Given the display of men's feelings w.r.t. to "mixed groups", I (heterosexual male) get the ick about some people here... For me most of it is about the space/relationship where certain things should happen, but I guess scientific misogyny is a thing too.

Why so toxic without understanding (and caring to understand) the other side of the discussion?

Plenty of full explanations in this thread.

There are no women only spaces where I live. Nor were and no one complained. Unless you talk about monastery of toilette.

As a general rule men with money can’t behave well around women or at least don’t want to

Men who show off their money. Not all do. But then, some women like men who obviously have money; that was true back when money was invented.

They need to be male only spaces because introducing women to the space fundamentally changes the social dynamic among the men, especially the single men

I have seen this ever since the moment me and my friends hit puberty in high school, to this very day. When a group of men is hanging out they are more relaxed. The moment a woman is in the space the vibe changes

I cannot be the only person who has noticed this

What I've learned is that as an outsider, a group is less likely to be a threat to me (I'm male) if there's at least one women there. Maybe that's because attention is then directed inwards, and that, in turn, might cause the relaxed feeling at the inside to diminish.

This is a good point. I am a married man. As a woman, my wife cannot give me guy time - hence I love to hang out with my friends (who are all guys) - and I cannot give her girl time - hence she loves to hang out with her friends (who are all girls). The only women I am happy to be friendly with are colleagues (in a professional manner), family and ladies that my wife and I are friends with.

A lot of people baulk at this sort of arrangement/tolerance - but I bet it's quite common.

I'm sure it's common, but I've always hung around in mixed groups, doing whatever, so I'm puzzled and curious what guy time or girl time even is.

You'll note that most people saying this stuff are being extremely non-specific about what it means. My impression is that a lot of what they want to do would be offensive to lots of guys as well. Essentially they want a space to act in a way that women would feel quite threatened by. Not that mixed groups don't already have that as an issue.

You couldnt be more wrong in your guessing. The answer lies in games all women play with both men and women constantly, never being truly honest with words, expecting men to pick up meaning between lines, predict their emotions and so on and on. We have enough shit in our lives already, no need to add more.

Its frustrating and tiring experience for all men, thus the need to vent out somewhere else where these dynamics dont play out semi constantly.

I am pretty sure women see it similarly in reverse although details in dynamics are very different.

As a man I don't recognize that game playing as something all women do. It's just not something I've experienced in my relationships platonic or otherwise with women. Maybe it's a Europe vs. America thing (edit: from your other comments, you seem to be in Europe so not that) or something personal to you and your experience but it sounds very 'incel-adjacent'.

Yep, there's always a strong element of "what opinions, motherfucker" goose comic in these discussions. And we always end up at "tell me you're an incel without telling me you're an incel"

You've really never had an attractive member of the opposite sex show up and the girls/guys get all competitive? I'm wondering how that's possible, it happened multiple times a week - a day even - to me in high school and college. I guess always being in mixed groups meant it was always subtly in play.

5 dudes chilling is a different dynamic than 3 guys 2 girls. People who keep insisting it's about some weird need for men to be offensive don't seem to have ever observed basic gender dynamics.(not saying you are, other responders)

Maybe this happened when I was 19.

I haven't observed this sort of thing happening in decades.

Note I mentioned high school and college as the time of these interactions.

That being said it just comes more subtle as people get older or alternatively remove themselves from the dating pool.

>I cannot be the only person who has noticed this

The US marine corps noticed this and it was a huge point of contention (kind of still is).

Because men and women are different and have mixed and single sex spaces have radically different norms and interaction styles. Given that all respectable mixed institutions default to female interaction styles this is profoundly alienating for men.

If one has never spent any time in all male spaces or has and thinks that men are defective women, like the average male therapist or counsellor this may not be obvious.

Spot on. This is immediately evident at Primary School level, whereby normative female behaviour for that age is seen as the ideal. As psychologist Michael Thompson puts it “Girl behavior is the gold standard in schools. Boys are treated like defective girls".

In the US by the 8th grade, 48 percent of girls receive a mix of A and B grades compared to 31 percent of boys. More tellingly, Boys account for 71 percent of all school suspensions. The gap remains through high school and in college, with females representing nearly 60 percent of all college graduates.

“If you treat girls as the gold standards and boys as defective girls, that’s going to be demoralizing,” Thompson says. “What do elementary and junior high girls always say about boys their age? ‘You are so immature.’ If that’s the norm, then this system is just rigged against the boys.”

There's a wonderful bit in a 2013 Time article which illustrates that this predominant viewpoint is often indelibly coded on the (majority female) teaching staff, to the grave detriment of the male students:

https://ideas.time.com/2013/10/28/what-schools-can-do-to-hel...

//Peg Tyre’s The Trouble With Boys illustrates the point. She tells the story of a third-grader in Southern California named Justin who loved Star Wars, pirates, wars and weapons. An alarmed teacher summoned his parents to school to discuss a picture the 8-year-old had drawn of a sword fight — which included several decapitated heads. The teacher expressed “concern” about Justin’s “values.” The father, astonished by the teacher’s repugnance for a typical boy drawing, wondered if his son could ever win the approval of someone who had so little sympathy for the child’s imagination. ... If boys are constantly subject to disapproval for their interests and enthusiasms, they are likely to become disengaged and lag further behind//

Have you ever seen teenage boys? A lot of them are basically quasi-feral owing to the newly elevated levels of testosterone unleashed on their brains which are still a long way from being fully baked.

I don't know that "girls" remains the gold standard so much as girls are more able to conform to broader behavioral expectations. This is not to say teenage girls are immune from hormonal-driven behavior issues, but it manifests in different ways. I have a 13-yo daughter and let me tell you it's no walk in the park. But it's absolutely not a surprise to me that boys account for the majority of problematic behavior.

This sounds right. It's not like girls are being deemed "the gold standard." Instead, there's an existing set of behavioral expectations, as you put it, and girls (for whatever reasons) just happen to have an easier time conforming to these expectations.

If societal expectations are things like: kindness, respect, agreeableness, calmness, paying attention, not talking back, not fighting, and so on... and girls tend to conform to these while boys tend not to, that doesn't necessarily indicate a conspiracy against boys.

> Why can't men socialize in public spaces in a way that isn't offensive to others?

They can, and thats not the point of having men’s groups and men’s spacing. This only reveals your assumptions and biases.

They don't, and no one is stopping you from opening a gender neutral club.

> offensive to others

Sound like you have issues. It's a club. They meet up to play board games. Maybe you could start a club of people who are offended by everything.

That club would have very high comedy and / or soap opera potential.

Those clubs already exist: they’re often called HOAs.

So you are automatically assuming men are the offenders. This is very much a constructed prejudice. Did you ever consider that men want men-only spaces to avoid being accused and talked down to? While I never visited a mens only place, I totally understand why that would be the rule at some of them.

Then just don't go? I personally prefer mixed gender spaces but I can understand why some people might prefer single gender spaces. It doesn't mean they necessarily have "an issue".

Sometimes men just want to hang out with other men. I’m a straight man who usually gets along better with women than men, but I still also like spending time with just other men as well. It’s just different. I have no doubt that my presence in a group of women changes the dynamic.

There needs to be some place men can just spend time with other men. Yes, it’s a problem if those men only places become important to business or politics such that it disadvantages women, but there’s got to be something else instead, then.

Women should also have places where they can be together without men.

And there should be a majority of places where men and women can spend time equally.

> There needs to be some place men can just spend time with other men.

This is literally anytime, anywhere though. Do just not meet up with their friends? You can go to dinner, get drinks, go hiking, play sports, bike, ski, sunbathe, play videogames and many more things in single-sex groups without raising an eyebrow. The real classic for men of a certain persuasion from a western cultural POV is golf right?

I think there's some strange cultural hangup I'm missing where the entire place needs to be single-sex.

> Do just not meet up with their friends?

What friends?

Well that's a different issue. Are we really saying men can only make friends in single-sex environments because I think that is trivially untrue?

Why can’t there be some semi-public place where only men, or only women, or only whomever you choose, is allowed? Why can’t that exist?

What you described is unrelated. Yes, people can and do go out and do stuff.

Not only are they legal, many male only city clubs exist today!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gentlemen%27s_clubs_in...

Male-only country clubs also exist although are slightly more controversial and less common, such as Burning Tree, Garden City, Butler National, Augusta National (until the last ~10 years), Pine Valley (until the last few years).

The unfortunate reality for most of us is that these places are among the most desirable and hardest clubs to be accepted to in the world - and we probably wouldn't get in.

Maybe it's time start new and less desirable clubs for the common man.

A lot of new clubs are currently being founded in NYC and London in particular.

They're expensive to run, so they often target a wealthier demographic who can pay.

> many male only city clubs exist today!

Em. Nearly all clubs on that page that I checked are open to women or no longer exist.

Several appear to be women-only social clubs, placed on the page by mistake.

Private clubs have an exemption in several of the key civil rights laws, so they often can discriminate where businesses open to the public could not.

They can run into trouble when they allow the public to use their facilities, or grant membership so freely that they start to seem like they aren't really private.

In the US? Absolutely. Private clubs have a broad ability to discriminate.

For an example of gender discrimination at private golf clubs:

https://www.golflink.com/lifestyle/no-women-past-rock-chicag... lists Old Elm, Bob O'Link, Butler National, and Black Sheep Golf Club as four Chicago area male-only golf clubs.

> Perhaps no club makes its restriction more apparent than Black Sheep. At the end of the club’s lengthy driveway sits a large rock and the internal slogan amongst members is, “No Women Past the Rock.”

https://forums.golfwrx.com/topic/2013806-black-sheep-golf-cl... has a comment from last year verifying that gender restriction. I have not verified the others.

Of course, there are also women only gyms/fitness clubs.

Country club’s are really a subset of this kind of thing and tend to have an overly wide membership to the point where you’re unlikely to know every member. The VFW is another modern take that’s got a very different vibe.

Similarly historically it wasn’t just elitist hangouts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_men's_club

You just haven't been to a good one.

Does one need to be a true Scotsman to attend

Notably, VFWs are struggling because the Vietnam vets are not very welcoming to the War on Terror vets.

No women to blame there. What is the cause of the male loneliness epidemic then?

Is it resentment between draftees and volunteers?

The fact that anybody would blame women for the supposed male loneliness epidemic is just wild to me.

Isn’t the whole point that you get people of similar socioeconomic status? Half the reason expensive things are sometimes nicer is that there’s no massive crowd in those stores.

You also had Working Men's clubs and the British Legion for the working classes in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_men%27s_club

It sounds great.

Like a bar, but you know that if they're there, they know a few people and aren't crazy.

There's the Mechanics Institute Library in San Francisco. I used to be a member. If you want to see people sitting around in wing-backed chairs, half asleep, that's the place to go. It's quite a good library, too.

Back in the day I would just go to Noisebridge and see what others were working on. Is that place still worth going to today?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noisebridge

they had to move off mission around the corner to a backstreet, so there are less mission vagrant rogues trying to sneak in now, and still the hardcore of interesting people.

when i first moved back to the city from overseas, noisebridge was an awesome third place to hang out and hack on stuff while meeting regulars.

> mission vagrant rogues

I mean, I am a decent person, but somehow I ended up with a key that worked for the the building and the 2nd floor of the old Mission location of Noisebridge by my second or third visit, despite never having been a member or paying dues etc. I got it from someone else who had also gotten it from someone else if I remember correctly. Only members were supposed to have keys, I think? I wasn't shy about the fact I wasn't one, but I didn't flash the key around either. Hopefully they have tightened up on that if it's a recurring issue.

Stuff like getting the key was just part of the scene in SF that you could randomly encounter, like the time I was working security for the American Psychiatric Association trade show at the Moscone Center and the Church of Scientology protested against the conference right outside, then a flash mob counter-protest of anons in Guy Fawkes masks appeared. SF is just weird like that for some people I guess. Maybe it's just me?

> Hopefully they have tightened up on that if it's a recurring issue.

It was a huge issue. Noisebridge has had to do a "reboot" three times now, 2014, 2017, and 2024. The whole place was closed for some time, everything was cleaned out, and members were re-authorized.

Seems legit. I was last there around 2012 or 2013, fwiw.

You're not supposed to talk in a library, so it's explicitly not a social space.

My local library has both quiet areas and social areas, including meeting spaces. There are weekly social events for knitting, second-language practice, seniors, and more.

High school kids go there to work on class projects together, just like I did at the library when I was a teenager.

And the Mechanics Institute librarians will shush people for talking.

Of course you are. The stereotype of the librarian saying “which” is decades out of date.

How about just more third-spaces without the classist gatekeeping?

What's classist about having behavioral rules?

What sort of behaviors are you referring to?

I wasn’t the one referring to behaviors.

But I bet a social club that rigorously enforced the rules of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood would be more popular than anything goes.

You can but then you need some other way to gatekeep because a community of trust has to have an inside and an outside. Someone needs to keep people who don’t belong out, for whatever value of “don’t belong” you want to build a community around.

Cognitive habit problems aside, this is one of the primary provisions of churches/temples/et cetera. Frequently featuring gender divided activities.

I realize that it is silly to tell non-believers to go to church to fix their problems but it’s funny how often people talk about place or group or organization that seems to be missing in society that was fulfilled by houses of worship in the past.

That's true, but pretty much every religion beyond certain size focuses on growth and power at all costs, and treats the social function as a sidequest. I hate religion exactly because I see what it does to people's brains. Parents abandon their children "because priest told me to do so".

Same with any business. Fewer people seem devoted to a specific business though.

I co-ran a co-working space that focused on relationships, it's really powerful to have spaces that allow introverts a zero effort socializing experience.

We also threw open to the public art shows and parties with drink sponsorships and everything.

What's better than a church environment? A "city gates" environment.

I am not part of the church any longer, a properly run co-working space, not one that tried to emulate soul less corporate America, gives space for the wealthy tech bro and the poor artist to have multi round interaction that both build trust and provide implicit (and sometimes explicit) accountability. Most of us operate in environments where, outside of family and work there is nothing of value to lose, and churches and other places that exhibit ideological ratchet effects aren't great.

The city gates, that's really the best place to be, we far outpunched our startup weight in the city we were in because we built trust more than anything.

I come from a missionary family that has probably planted more churches by number than any other group, one family far outstripping many mission agencies. That experience and family knowledge was absolutely critical to making what we did work.

But in the U.S. I don't think anyone is interested in funding a 3rd places startup, it's sad that the same people who will talk about the power of 100 true fans don't get the power of 100 people in true community and the way that opens up thousands of paths for people to try things they otherwise wouldn't be able to.

I think you should start one!

They sort of exist and do have women in them - but there are tons of tons of men you can meet with.

Sports clubs are full of friends you can make. I'm close with alot of guys that I train with.

Try tennis, or lifting, or running, or golf. Do NOT go to DnD meetups and other low effort stuff. Exertion is what forms bonds.

A billion dollar company started with this idea.

Schultz envisioned Starbucks as a “third place” between home and work, fostering community and connection.

https://mulcahyconsultants.com/2023/12/14/howard-schultz-and...

My local one removed all its seats and is now take out only.

There is just too much liability, both legal and public relations wise, with operating cheap third places.

https://apnews.com/article/starbucks-racism-philadelphia-man...

In the U.K. there were lots of their places before American style capitalism invaded. Coffee houses predate America as a whole - on both sides of the Atlantic.

Whats the difference of your definition to a pub? Also they may be limited and there may exist rules on behavior.

At least you can/could play cards, converse with your fellows or some randoms.

> Whats the difference of your definition to a pub?

CAMRA's definition includes "Is open to the public without membership or residency" and a bunch more that amount to "does not necessarily serve food" to distinguish from restaurants.

You don't have to wish - these literally exist today, both in the US (see link below) and elsewhere. The problem is that they are expensive and hard to get in to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gentlemen%27s_clubs_in...

NYC and London are both having a bit of a renaissance of new clubs being founded, although most of them are coed.

Remember watching the Lyon episode of Parts Unknown where Bourdain goes to a men's luncheon club. Looked real fun. Wish we had more of those.

https://eastindiaclub.co.uk/ is a famous one that exists to this date with some of the antiquated rules. Been a few times with a friend who is a member.

It's alive and well in south america. let the haters hate.

I think any modern version would need to be way more inclusive and not just in terms of gender, but also class and background. The old-school gentlemen's clubs had a pretty narrow membership by design

I agree. It doesn't take much to topple this idea. A few lawsuits over discrimination that the club is bankrupt.

Start one! I personally love this concept:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kkryT4nOwA - Michigan Automotive Relic Society

For me those were always local role playing associations, I was a member of 3 during my youth.

Me and my brother would go there after school to play some board games or dungeons and dragons during the weekends.

These still exist in the US but the membership has plummeted. Some examples:

    - Freemasons
    - Odd Fellows
    - Fraternal Order of Eagles
    - Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks
    - Loyal Order of Moose

We have an Eagle's "aerie" in my little town. It has a nice banquet hall area on the main floor and a member's only bar in the basement with pool tables and a deck that overlooks the river.

I'd like to offer a contrarian view.

Much of the NYT article can be explained away by the Gell-Mann effect. During most of human history it was hard to maintain multiple strong bonds anyway; long distance communication pre-internet was hard too. There are plenty of modern opportunities for finding friends based on interests: conferences, concerts, sports bars etc. How much of this discussion is a moral panic caused by imprecise notions which by definition cannot be described by hard data?

I think a lot of this boils down to the fact that most men are too insecure to engage with each other meaningfully. This causes them to appear overly competitive, or uninterested. How many times have you spoken to another man that can't stop trying to one-up you, or cannot be bothered to ask you a single question? That's the majority of my interactions with other men.

Yeah, problems are way deeper and would have to be addressed in such a concept. Last year I read a Graphical Novel about it (Seek You) which goes into great detail. Root causes includes dysfunctional TV stereotypes (the lonely hero) among others.

Dysfunctional media is a big one, dysfunctional families, the disintegration of the middle class, the rise of techbro culture where a whole generation suddenly had this expectation that you can and should be as wealthy as a doctor, with a fraction of the training or oversight.

Is there a common thread between the men you describe beyond their gender?

I haven't experienced what you described since I was socializing with programmers and scientists on the East Coast. Now most of the men I socialize with are artists (at least part time) and IT generalists in the Midwest.

That's difficult to say. Right now, my cohort is mainly other dads at my kids school, so we're all busy and kind of tired. I want to make friends, but it's hard to find people that are (1) available and (2) friendly. Full disclosure, I have insecurities too: I've got zero interest in trying to make friends in a group where I feel like I'll be judged or looked down upon for whatever. I still socialize, and I've learned a lot about socialization from my wife, but yeah, I realize that I've got a chip on my shoulder also.

You put it in perfect words.

>How many times have you spoken to another man that can't stop trying to one-up you, or cannot be bothered to ask you a single question? That's the majority of my interactions with other men.

Very true. Statistically men don't care about other men, period. Conversely they care about women or their daughters more than their sons. A lot of it is biological - meaning mean are the dispensable gender. The term 'women and children' is not a coincidence.

Bouldering (indoor climbing) is the most social sport I’ve tried, and I’d highly recommend going on your own as you will find opportunities to meet new people, and others will talk to you (as long as you’re not wearing headphones!).

Bouldering provides an open space you can move freely in, with no inherent social hierarchy (no tutors, teachers), just people trying varying difficulties of bouldering routes. If someone can do a route you can’t, just ask them for tips, or if someone can’t do a route you can, ask if they want help, or cheer someone on when they do something difficult.

Bouldering provides lots of easy conversation starters, and as with all social situations, going on your own and showing vulnerability will always be endearing to others.

Is it usually done in natural settings outdoors, or in a sort of gym, indoors?

Both! Usually outdoor bouldering is a bit more of an undertaking to get into since you’ll have to travel and bring matts & additional gear. But look up “climbing gym” on google and you should be able to find some if you’re in a reasonably sized metro. Not sure if you’re in the USA but the southwest has a ton of great outdoor bouldering.

It ranges from high tech indoor and outdoor gyms with customisable holds all the way to a random rock somewhere in the middle of nature where local guys put a few mats under. If you start going to a gym you'll naturally learn about all the other places very quickly.

In my experience people will start indoors and build experience before heading outdoors.

You could ask people in the bouldering gym whether they have any experience with outdoor bouldering and people will start sharing their favourite spots nearby, and might even invite you along.

Outdoors requires:

- your own climbing shoes

- someone with a bouldering mat

Whereas you will hire shoes from the bouldering gym as a beginner

You won’t need to bring anything to the bouldering gym other than a water bottle and some loose fit clothing

it's like a daycare play space for adults. hopefully with less biting incidents.

I can disagree with this take.

For one, bouldering is not great if you have a fear of heights or maybe some mobility issues due to a previous injury. It's then a massively painful and risky chore and not a pleasurable activity but requires you to be at 100% health physically and mentally in order to do anything beyond kiddy walls. Otherwise you can fall and injure yourself pretty badly. Granted, that's mostly on you, not the sport but still, it's not a universally approachable sport by everyone by any stretch. At least I never gotten to enjoy it no matter how much I forced myself to based on the hype of those around me and the internet.

> with no inherit social hierarchy

Not 100% true. This might be your conscious way of wanting to see things, but in reality, all sports especially in male groups are inherently competitive where a clear hierarchy gets formed which leads to either admiration or repulsion based on abilities and results, even if it's just subconsciously, but it is there and everyone is aware of it even if we choose to ignore it for the sake of equality and inclusion.

IMHO, team sports like football, handball, volleyball, tennis, ping-pong, various martial arts etc are far better for socializing because you actually have to partner with others and play against others, versus solitary like bouldering.

> I’d highly recommend going on your own as you will find opportunities to meet new people, and others will talk to you

I feel like this take is 100% based on regional social customs of where you live, and not on the sport. This might be my experience of the German speaking country I moved to but from the locals, nobody here ever starts making conversation to you randomly. People tend to go with their social group and not interact with strangers, while those who go alone tend to want to be left alone to practice and not get interrupted with small talk by other who are there to make friends.

Just like the gym, it's definitely not a way to make friends here, since people got here to work out, not have conversations with strangers.

Sorry to hear that’s your experience.

I’m staying with my parents this week and I visited the local bouldering gym alone on Wednesday and last night.

On Wednesday I met someone called Nelly, and hung out with them for the session.

Yesterday I bumped into Nelly with their friends Maddie and Kate and climbed with them.

I’m leaving on Sunday so I gave one of them my number and they messaged me to say it was great fun climbing together.

Now we might be climbing again this weekend.

Granted, I approached them, but all it took was asking Nelly, “How did you find that route?” and asking them for tips.

The bouldering gym is what you make it, just hang out and don’t assume people will reject you (which can be a difficult headspace to get out of, but exposure therapy will fix that, and the bouldering gym can be that exposure therapy)

You don't need to go to the bouldering gym to make small talk hoping it becomes more than that. You can make small talk everywhere like libraries, cafes, bars, meet-ups, concerts, stand-ups, etc. places where the main activity is talking, not exercising.

And if sports is your jam, team sports are better for socializing than solitary sports like bouldering, because you are forced to work together and build connections even without talking too much.

From my experience here, bouldering gym are the worst if socializing is your main goal because local people go there to exercise not hang around to talk to strangers and build connections, even if you're the one initiation the conversations. Socializing with strangers at the bouldering gym seems to be a mostly anglosphere thing or a big international city young urbanite thing as people mostly go there to hang out and meet new people instead of exercise. But again, bouldering is not a very easy sport for everyone to pick-up and master.

I suppose it’s very different here in the UK then

I think it's kind of a German thing.

Even as a German, I sometimes struggle to connect with others for many of the reasons FirmwareBurner mentioned.

I made some good friends through a sports group I attend, which also organizes regular social events outside of training.

But aside from that, many so-called 'low-key social spaces' tend to feel like they're 'only for groups' Not because of any official rules, of course, although some places do advertise things like 'bring your friends', but in practice, you usually see people there in pre-formed groups. These aren’t necessarily close friends either, sometimes it's coworkers or people who already know each other through other contexts.

Those groups tend to stick together, and it's rare for outsiders to be included unless you already know someone who can introduce you.

>I think it's kind of a German thing.

Nordic, Scandinavian, German, Austrian, Swiss, etc any culture where personal space is valued and talking to random strangers/outsiders in public not the norm.

>but in practice, you usually see people there in pre-formed groups.

Because most people by the age of 25+, or whenever they graduate college/university already have their core social circle solidified and don't have the time, space and energy to seek or even let newcomers in. If you move into town after that age, you're gonna have un uphill battle to squeeze yourself into groups no matter how sociable you are or how good your bouldering skills are unless you run into other similar loners looking for friends, then you're in luck.

It's just the way it is, it's not your fault and not other peoples' fault , hence why I dislike such broad stroke one size fits all advices like "just do bouldering bro" as that's missing a lot of the context and variables that relationships are built on. You should choose activities based on what you most enjoy to do, not based on which others tell you leads to make relationships.

UK has people much more sociable and open compared to Germanic/Nordic cultures.

Small-talk is dying people on their iPhones constantly scrolling every spare moment

It has a built-in gating function. People who are out-of-shape or with injuries will opt-out. Bouldering favors slim people. On the other hand, I think gating functions are necessary to build community. Often gating-functions are accomplished with wealth (gated community, country club), but its more interesting when its some other function.

Maybe good idea for a meetup might be to solve some tech challenge, idk. Solve X get invited to some hacker house/space maybe? (i'm saying this as a person who probably wouldn't solve it)

>On the other hand, I think gating functions are necessary to build community.

Of course, obviously, 100% agree. But then why is there so much debate in this topic that "men's only social/recreational spaces" are somehow discriminatory? We humans segregate ourselves based on a lot of shared things all the time since childhood.

>Bouldering favors slim people.

You're missing my point. The point I was making is that where I live, what I noticed, is that people who go to perform solitary sports like bouldering, tend to do said activity for the workout itself, not to meet new people or socialize with strangers.

They go there alone or with their group, they boulder alone or together, then they go home, not reciprocate much to chit-chat of others since that's not what they came for. You can pick any other such sport, likes fitness studios/gym, the result will be the same, people go there to lift weights, then go home, any addition chit-chat is more of an annoying interruption from their workout. Sure, people here are polite and they'll answer your questions on technique or to spot you, but they won't open up to strangers and start to befriend you just because you engaged them in some conversation. Social etiquette differs heavily between cultures. Some are more isolationist towards strangers and value personal space, some are more open.

You have better chances in meeting people in socializing at teams sports like football, volleyball, martial arts, etc because the sport itself demands it. Or just to events where socializing is the main activity like concerts, pub quizzes, etc. but solitary sports like bouldering are pretty bad for that unless the bouldering gym is full of posers who only go there seeking to socialize instead of work out (there are some of those in every gym, you see them spend most of the time scrolling on their phone or taking selfies for Instagram stories instead of working out).

It brings automatically like-minded folks together into same place, I have to agree. I wouldnt expect spontaneous conversations automatically, at least where I go in Europe thats not the case. But maybe it takes just a polite few words, people in Switzerland are very shy and overly respectful of other's private sphere.

Headphones for any sort of climbing - please dont do that and politely advise others to refrain from use while climbing, thats 1) frowned upon massively in whole community; 2) increases risk of something bad happening; 3) just a bit too arrogant, one doesnt do that in ie restaurant neither

Pickleball is another great option. I find open-play pickelball to be even more social than bouldering! It's also cheaper. There are courts everywhere these days!

I like the idea in general principle - but if I lived in the right city/country, and didn't already have something similar, my first thought based on the landing page pictures would be;

"This is only for white guys in their twenties."

I don't know if that's intentional, but if I was in the location target market, I'd close the tab at that point.

This comment inadvertently reveals why clubs like this can't exist: there's always someone counting races and genders in photos. High functioning male social clubs generally have implicit rules, like "straight-acting gay guys are fine but don't make it weird" or "no weird lefties". But you can't have those rules anymore. So "male social clubs" get overrun with board game types who are OK with accepting everyone. Which means high status guys, the kind of guys who are trend setters, tend to stay away.

> High functioning male social clubs generally have implicit rules, like "straight acting gay guys are fine but don't make it weird" or "no weird lefties".

I think that whole conformation thing is why they don't work. Nobody wants to hang out with people pretending to be someone else so they fit in. Any social connection you make is then fake too.

> Which means high status guys, the kind of guys who are trend setters, tend to stay away.

The board games types can also be high status trend setters, just not in your circle. That's fine though. Nothing wrong with seeking out people that are like yourself.

But there's plenty of places where you can find what it sounds like you're looking for. Like sports bars. Won't find the board games types there and not many women either.

Huh? "Conformist" is the most common type of person on Earth and conformists prefer hanging out with conformists. Social clubs are entirely a conformist phenomena, almost by definition. All those Elk clubs and bowling clubs and so on were chock full of conformists.

I don't agree. If you choose the right club you don't have to conform and you can just be yourself. Especially in the cities there's a scene for everyone. In the countryside it's slim pickings of course so you do have to conform.

Maybe that's one of the reason people in small towns are so different, the social dynamic is stricter because there's just not enough people around to form groups of people that are different. City people like me, if we don't fit in we'll just find another place to go so we're more aligned. We can choose our community because a city isn't a community, it's a big box of lots of different ones. If you live in a small town you don't get to do that (not as much anyway)

But the idea that there's no community there at all is not correct. I live in a big city but I keep running into the same people :)

Ps I don't think one is better than the other, just more suitable to some people than others. I'm a city guy and I moved to the town of my girlfriend for a decade but I couldn't stick it. She couldn't stick the city with me, not for more than a holiday. That's ok too. Just meant we had to go our separate ways.

Edit: But yes when I said "Nobody wants to conform" I was just talking about myself. I guess there are people that want that. Thanks for the correction.

> I don't agree. If you choose the right club you don't have to conform and you can just be yourself

There is absolutely no such club for many people who are even slightly out of the normal expected range of behavior

Really? Back in my day, there were all sorts of nerd groups, which were often plagued with horrible social dysfunction.[0] People just muddled through.

[0] https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/

In my experience people do not just muddle through anymore. I don't want to speculate about why that might be, but I have seen so many weird behaviour explosions at these sorts of events myself that leads to people being ostracized

I could speculate, it was partially because of that blog post. The more social nerds are encouraged to cast out the antisocial stinky ones. Instead of a whisper campaign, there's a social media ejection.

(Nerds in particular have been lured into fake socializing with fake friends on a discord or something. I've seen this where someone disappears and it's like "i dunno, maybe he got busy with life". None of their 'friends' really care if he's dead or not, because if he really did get "get busy", that is an indictment on them.)

At the groups I'm part of the vast majority is neurodivergent but things go really smoothly. We rarely have incidents.

They're not neurodivergent-focused groups but there's just a (much) larger percentage of us attracted to events that stray a bit further from the mainstream.

That's not too geek-specific. I've seen that at almost all kinds of volunteer-driven organisations. Like a local radio station, student fraternity, backpacker houses. Disorganisation, feuding, usually because several people put more effort than the rest but feel like they also are more important than the rest. Coupled with usually not very strictly defined roles and responsibilities this is a recipe for discord and fighting.

I've seen it at typical geek places too like makerspaces but it's certainly not limited to the geek communities.

It's a subtle matter. Seeking acceptance and validation subconsciously and being willing to conform to get those is probably a much more common pattern compared to a conscious desire to compromise and to conform.

> there's just not enough people around to form groups of people that are different.

That's certainly part of it, although I think the bigger factor is that people who are different just leave. Small towns are conformist because of survivorship bias.

Good insight. I didn't think of that.

But high status guys by definition wouldn't be seen dead in clubs like these to begin with. They are socially successful ladder climbers already, that's part and parcel of being high status.

I think a gracious reading here is a "boardgame type" is the sort of person you would only encounter at your friendly local game store etc. GP has a point, but I know plenty of 'high(er) status' groups include 'non-straight-acting' and 'weird lefty' guys, but they are cool guys to hang out with, and not like weirdos who slithered out of their mother's basement.

Popular people like other popular people, because that's how you throw a party.

Anyway I wish OP the best. But in the grand tradition of internet meetups, "these people are really fucking weird."

> But high status guys by definition wouldn't be seen dead in clubs like these to begin with.

The problem with joining a club is not that it’s a club but that it’s a club governed by Title IX legislation and the Damoclesian threat of getting cancelled for telling the “It’s too white in here” college liberal that he’s no longer welcome to attend.

I guess it depends if you are after a club with men to help you climb some status ladder, or if you are after a club that helps you make male friends, regardless of where they come from.

« board game types » ??

My mother, somewhere around 1976, told me that basically when men get married, they lose all their friends. But they get all their wife’s friends. Which seems prescient to me. Including their husbands, obviously.

I think most men do not maintain friendships unless there is some outside circumstances that keeps them in touch. School, work, church, clubs, or even just being neighbors.

Without exception the people who were my closest friends in high school didn't really keep in touch when we all went off to college. The friendships I made in college did not persist after graduation. There's a guy at work I had lunch with almost every day for years, he retired and that was the last time I saw him. There was a group of fathers I was friendly with because our kids were playing ball together on the same team. The kids got older and went their separate ways, and we really don't see each other anymore.

Maintaining friendships takes work if circumstances don't assist.

Might be largely the same for women, but it seems to me they tend to make more of an effort to keep in touch and keep getting together.

This is all just my experience so I could be way off I guess.

You just wrote my biography. Incredible. My experience is nearly identical.

I read somewhere long ago that the biggest factor in building friendships is shared experience - like the “circumstances” you described. More important than anything else. Ones those experiences go away so does the common ground.

You specifically mention building friendships. What it takes to build and maintain friendships can be different. Once friendships are built on the back of a shared experience, they can survive the loss of that shared experience, if the parties recognize that things have changed, continue to value the friendship, and understand that maintaining the friendship will require a different kind of commitment and different levels and styles of interaction.

I'm not saying this is always easy, and sometimes one or more people in the friend group just decide that the friendships aren't that important to them to maintain. But it's absolutely possible, and can be very rewarding.

I agree with this. Without the shared experience maintaining any relationship probably requires a lot more effort and desire to maintain it.

I agree and relate to this. Friend take work to maintain.

The friends that persist beyond what you describe are because we invent some shared project to work on together. Really doesn’t matter what it is.

    > Friend take work to maintain.

At all stages of my life, I have put in much more effort than the other side to maintain friendships. Eventually, they all fade away with distance. It is brutal. I am convinced: It is me, not them.

    > we invent some shared project to work on together

Can you give some examples?

My experience is a bit different from yours, and I wonder what happened with you vs. me that made it that way. (Granted, while I'm a man, the friend groups I'm about to describe are mixed-gender groups, so it's a little different from the overall discussion.)

I have three friends from high school that I still keep in touch with. We have a Whatsapp group that isn't super active, but we chat once or twice a month there. Even though we all live in different places now, we meet up roughly once per year, for a few days, to see each other and hang out, and our chat traffic jumps in frequency for a couple months after that meetup.

I have three friends from college that I still keep in touch with. We have a Signal group that's a bit more active than my high school friend group, with weekly activity. In-person meetings are rare; two of the friends have larger than average family obligations. In college we originally bonded over scifi TV shows, and when new episodes of some shows we all enjoy come out, we'll try to do group watches of them on Zoom (usually with a general chat/hangout before we start watching).

I have three friends from a previous job that I still keep in touch with (I have other friends from this same job that I still keep in touch with and see often enough, but this particular group struck me as a true "friend group" and not just a random collection of people who sometimes see each other in various combinations). We have a Slack workspace that was originally created for one of the guys' bachelor parties in 2018 (this is the only all-male group out of the three). Two of us still live within a ~30 minute drive of each other, but the other two have moved away. The Slack is very active, with near-daily activity, even though one of the four of us lives in a drastically different time zone now. In-person meetups are a bit more informal (and rare for the one of us who lives across the world); often it will just be two or three of the four, depending on who is visiting someone else's city at the time.

While I'm not involved in the day-to-day lives of these friends, they are still dear to me, and maintaining these connections is important to me. I guess it's important to all of us; in the past I've been a member of group chats where there are one or two people who never participate, even though the others do regularly, and it always feels like a bummer to see their name in the list but never hear from them (the former co-worker group I described is like this). It's a tough thing, though, when you think about it: to make these sorts of things successful, the friendships need to be of roughly the same importance to everyone in the group, and I expect that's a difficult bar to meet sometimes.

> My mother, somewhere around 1976, told me that basically when men get married, they lose all their friends.

In my experience, she lied to you.

"Lied" is kinda unnecessarily harsh there. Her experience taught her something that she thought generalized, but was wrong about that.

In my experience, it's not the marriage that makes you lose the friends, it's the having children, unless you have kids of your own.

The split isn't married vs non-married, it's with kids vs without kids.

Being a retired psychotherapist I realise how valuable places like this are for men.

In therapy, For every 10 female clients, you get 1 male client, but most of the time that ratio is much worse.

Here in the UK we have Andy's mans club.

https://andysmanclub.co.uk/

Its a male peer support group.

Its a great place to go.

Groups of men talking about stuff that impacts all men in their daily lives.

A safe, supportive space to talk about problems: Relationships, employment, divorce, debt, family, violence, anger, grief, loss and everything men are not that forthcoming to share.

Setup by the family of a young man who took his own life at 21 years old.

The one I went to had about 60 men turn up every week, they were split into smaller groups.

Men supporting men who have experienced the same shit life throw at you.

Congrats on your launch, that’s a truly nice issue to address.

For what I feel, boy friends doing whisky and poker night in seemingly high end places, that sounds like a boring cliché. That’s not how I would make friends so this don’t look appealing to me at all. It doesn’t feel like a setting to be natural for me. It feels cold. It’s exactly how I imagine American superficial "friendships" (I know it’s a cliché but it feels reinforced here). I understand it may be more than that but that’s what is advertised.

But maybe that’s just a cultural gap on my side and since the service is US cities only, maybe it’s fitting well there.

It also feels like you exclude half your potential market by being male only. Nowadays, women also have hard time creating relationships.

As a recent grad in upstate New York, this exact problem of college friendships atrophying has been on my mind nonstop. My girlfriend and I host monthly cocktail parties in an attempt to stem the tide and even make new friends, but I’ve definitely been looking for male-focused groups. I’m interested!

I'm not far from you, and also trying to find a solution to a similar problem, albeit long time from college. Started a local meetup here, but it hasn't quite taken off. My area has very few people doing what I do, and I work remotely. School friends are all over the country at this point, and connections have been fading. Maybe it's something about upstate NY. Either way, added you on LinkedIn.

I didn't stick around the Capital Region too long after college but I actually found the Troy community to be incredibly engaging. Maybe it was a function of time and place, but I got into cycling groups, community arts orgs, and volunteerism. It helped that I made friends in college who were already plugged into the local community.

I do love Troy and it is indeed surprisingly lively. I think shifting from a “I’m here temporarily for school” to “I’m now an average local” has been difficult to navigate and kept me from thinking about those sorts of local communities. Your comment is a good reminder.

As Groucho said, I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.

Here's the thing -- by making it a 'club', and making prospective 'members' pass muster, you're just replicating HR at a big corporation. Friendship isn't so much about matching activities and interests as it is about finding someone whose sense of humor matches yours, or going through the same experience together. No matter how lonely I was, I would never audition for a 'club'. I'd much rather meet someone by just doing the activities I like, and noticing who else is around.

Interesting! All of my best friends came from going through the same experience together. Totally agree on that. But that experience was high school or college. What experience can adult men (25+) go through that is enough to build a lasting friendship?

That consistent, shared experience what I'm trying to build. But I can appreciate the feedback that it comes across as "auditioning" as that's not the point. The goal is to get people in the same place on a consistent basis. I also believe that consistently hanging out with people who are generally interesting / agreeable is a lot more important than matching humor or hobbies.

How would you position this with that goal in mind, especially considering that some filtering needs to take place since many people won't necessarily click like you say. I'm not going to find someone whose humor matches mine by dumb luck.

Gym, BJJ, pick up soccer, tabletop game clubs, RPG events, book clubs. There’s a billion options out there.

BJJ is really amazing for this. Trust is built into the activity, it draws a wide range of people, and is practiced all over the world at this point. I moved countries, found a BJJ gym, and instantly met some great people to hang out with.

I would second the "filtering" really rubs me the wrong way. You just need to setup the events and friendships will continue outside of them, that's how if works. You can't know who will hit it off. The key is just creating opportunities. Half the people don't really know if they will be into something or not anyway.

Very fair point, thanks.

Absolutely - it read to me like a grown up fraternity. Rush our social event and we’ll call you if you’re cool enough (or similar enough to us) to join the club and attend our invite-only poker night.

Maybe I just have a weird outcast complex, but I stay away from clubs that make you get “sponsorship” by shmoozing with existing members first (country clubs, yacht clubs). That really triggers some repulsion in me for some reason.

Instead, I’ve found a few friends from shared experiences and hobbies like my local cycling club, book club, and every now and again, car meets. (Even, weirdly enough, parents of people I grew up with and connected with later on in life.)

Even when I play golf, I do it at a public club rather than a private one.

== What experience can adult men (25+) go through that is enough to build a lasting friendship?==

Maybe fatherhood. I’ve had some of that experience with friends I’ve made through my kid’s preschool.

This week I read an article about a local club for new fathers in Chicago. Kinda of a similar concept, friendship through shared experience.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment-culture/2025/05/2...

I think you are right - I am a total fucking weirdo, irredeemably strange, but as soon as I had children suddenly I could talk to other dads. Unfortunately, men cannot yet reproduce clonally.

I host a meetup for telecommuters for the same reasons you're starting this up.

Given it's Meetup, there's no "auditioning". The hardest part of that is that the demographic is so enormously wide wrt age, gender, cultural and educational background, profession... it's tough for real connections to grow for people just expecting to drop in just once. But come/host consistently, and eventually clumps of people do start to gel. So you're right, consistency is key.

Also - the more simple we keep it, happy hour, dinner, the more people seem to enjoy it. Honestly, it's just an excuse to leave the house and booze at this point.

I'm thinking "auditioning" may not be a bad thing if you want to avoid some of the dragnet effects of just being open like Meetup. Explicitly going for the yuppie crowd is just a hard thing to advertise on an open platform. ie. nobody's going to show up at the "26 to 38 creatives and dev adjacent telecommuters that live in the cool neighborhood, doctors allowed if they leave their attitudes at home"-Meetup, although that was I was originally hoping for. But on closed platform you'll be able to curate better.

Good luck dude!

counterpoint:

back in the long-long ago when i was online dating, the biggest boon it provided was that it gave you a space where you knew that it was okay flirt and that your intentions would not be misunderstood. you never had to guess if it would be a creepy time/place to flirt. you never had to worry about your intentions being misunderstood as "just being friendly". if somebody was on this app/website, they were looking to flirt and if you approached them everybody was clear that you were flirting.

doing something similar with friendship could be great.

I guess this is less of an issue for male-to-male communication.

Theres plenty of awkwardness if you approach a bunch of guys that are all friends with each other. Can I join in this conversation, or is it a “closed” private clique?

In my experience, what sometimes work, is saying something, even just an "Oh? Really?". Although no deep connections emerged from that one, i've had a few good conversations with strange people going.

I'm torn on whether this has any potential for success but I strongly believe you chose the wrong launch cities. These are all crowded, "destination" cities with tons of people to meet and places to go, with a large urban core. I imagine people in growing cities without much of a central core and far less "personality" would desire something like this a lot more. Think Phoenix, Charlotte, Minneapolis, etc.

Can we say that male loneliness is one of those issues that's quietly massive but rarely talked about seriously...

One big challenge I see with this is that it will attract people who struggle to make friends. A club of lonely men seems like a place I would be embarrassed to go to and hesitant to make friends at. Usually friends have more to recommend them than loneliness.

In economics, this is known as the problem of adverse selection.

That's exactly how meetups always felt to me.

In Queensland Australia there are men’s sheds which are great. The local pub. If you’re near a good church they often have lots of social stuff too, even basketball and soccer clubs.

https://mensshed.org/ for anyone who needs a specific link.

Each shed has its own policy and opening hours, best to look up your own local shed.

To be honest, I don't want another social media platform. I just want a group of people that I can talk computers, old tech and projects with and zero risk of politics, religion, or any of the various -isms entering the fray.

It's funny because I want sort of the opposite. I have quite a few tech and tech-adjacent friends, and while I value those friendships a great deal, I want to make new friendships with people who aren't in tech and can talk about other topics. Both because I'm interested in other topics, and because I want to learn about and be involved in other things that are not tech.

That's also perfectly valid.

Maybe it's a saturation thing. The people I call my friends are plenty ready to chat about philosophy, psychology, politics, money, television or books they like, maybe play some games...but they kinda just glaze over when I want to talk about computers or some silly electronics project I'm futzing with. I could see the opposite being true, as well.

Balance in all things, I suppose.

Finding a third place helps a lot. For me, it's church. That's my community that's outside of work and family. But I also have hobbies (karting, gun range, etc.) and through that, I meet new people.

Church works for me because I tried to pursue one based on the quality of its small/home groups and not just off Sunday service. Most people are going to find a Sunday service they like and find themselves stuck trying to actually find community. I think it's fair to say churches are failing to facilitate small groups better. It's not just having them, it's spawning new ones regularly, making sure to reach all the demographics. It takes a lot of resources to do that, which means maybe pastor needs a slightly smaller trendy shoe budget.

These were a huge part of the American social fabric in the past. Most of the organizations are still active, although smaller than before. There's Freemasons, The Elks, Rotary International, American Legion, VFW, Knights of Columbus, Loyal order of Moose, Shriners, Lions Club, Kiwanis ...

Also, as compared to before, the amount of solitary activities one can do have increased a lot. This has also led to these asspciations becoming smaller.

I do wonder what percentage of people (men, in particular, I guess) are members of such organizations. I'm pretty sure I don't even know one person who is a member. I certainly have my own bubble, though, so I assume they're still decently active, but my general impression is that it's likely, say, under 5% of the US population that belongs to one of those.

I think this is a good idea but I think to get it really going good you need to have a social club. The old ethnic, religious an society social clubs all had a common factor of a club house. You could go to the American Legion, or Elks, or Masons, or Knights of columbus or Polish club or whatever at any time when you were a member you had old timers hanging out and doing things regularly. Youe event schedule will also need to be at least weekly to keep up close contact to build up connections.

That is the goal, for sure. Soho House almost gets it right.

No, you need regular events, same place twice a month. That's the killer for social clubs like this. Just have a regular date in the diary and if people are free they can drop in.

Then do the more unique events on a different day (and let members suggest/ organise events too).

Friendship is repetition with the same group. Make it easy on people by meeting at the same time, maybe changing venue within a small area.

A group chat can be the clubhouse these days provided everyone meets regularly. I'd revoke membership from frequent no-shows. You want to limit groups to around 70 people too. Some research says above that cliques form.

Its funny because you described liberal Freemasonry: mandatory attendance twice a month. Forcing yourself to go and feeling the honor of being part of a group has been great for me.

I'm sure other groups have that kind of rule too, but the mandatory part is what makes it special.

Well I wasn't suggesting mandatory attendance to every event, but I think if someone doesn't show up for say 2 months their space should be freed up for someone else.

> American Legion, or Elks, or Masons, or Knights of columbus ...

Those all still exist, right? Or did they die off with the WWII generation?

They still exist where I am, and are desperate for members, because their memberships tend to have an average age probably over 60. Some new blood could really invigorate them, but they have trouble finding any.

I sometimes wonder how my grandparents' generation, who were generally hard-working farmers and tradesmen, and who raised large families relative to today, found the time to maintain all those groups along with their churches. Different priorities, I guess, and that was not only before the Internet, but before TV really took over.

I've looked into all of these orgs and every single one of them requires the belief in a "God". That has to be a huge turn off to a lot of younger people who might have been interested in joining for the social parts of the group. All of them lost any interest from me because I'm not going to take an initiation oath claiming to believe in a God that I don't believe in.

If they really want new members, they need to self-reflect on antiquated requirements that might turn off younger people from joining their organization.

Most dudes are too busy looking to hook up with women (maybe because dating is harder than before, not sure but at meetups you can see the desperation sometimes) or they feel hanging around guys is “gay” or that’s the stigma that started in the 90s

In my 30s I found myself slipping into the chasm of loneliness.

It was particularly difficult for me because I had been in the Army for 10 years and was used to having many male friends I was extremely close with.

All I was doing on the weekends was sitting on the couch and I hate sitting on the couch.

I decided to fight it by focusing on three aspects of my personality and finding activities that suited them.

First was my nerdy side and for that I joined my local amateur radio and astronomy clubs. The amateur radio club is all old guys, but there's nothing wrong with that-- I'm on my way there too. But there is field day, volunteer opportunities, and monthly talks. Same for the astronomy club but slightly younger. You don't even need an expensive radio or telescope, or radio telescope. A pair of binoculars and a cheap handheld radio will get you started. My astronomy club is focused on astrophotography. I will never dive into that nightmare of cost but I have purchased a star tracker and learned to take deep sky photos with a DSLR. Also, if you want 20 different opinions on how to do something, tell an amateur radio club about your plan to do something-- sometimes their input is useful. Sometimes.

Time commitment: one day per month per club and the occasional volunteer event. Financial commitment: if you have self control, minimal.

Next was my desire for mental and physical fitness and for that I, a hairy sweaty middle-aged man who couldn't touch his toes, joined a yoga studio and started going regularly. There aren't a lot of men who go to yoga but they do exist and after a couple of months we started to get to know each other. Now every single Sunday after Yin we go get coffee. We are all into scuba so we go on an annual retreat each year to somewhere with yoga and good diving sites. The teachers think it's adorable, our little yoga men's club. Now I can touch my toes. And do a headstand. edit: and I don't know if it is a quirk of my area but every dude who is in to yoga is also, apparently, in to clay pigeon shooting as well so we do that too.

Time commitment: six hours per week, plus retreats. Financial commitment: large.

Finally was my desire to serve my community. This led me to joining my local volunteer fire company, going through EMT training, and going through the firefighter training pipeline, doing driver and pump operator training, and this fall I'm starting the officer pipeline. Now I staff the ambulance, do CPR training for the community, do a shift on the engine a couple of times per month, am on the board, and MOST IMPORTANTLY drive the engine in every single parade I can. The only reason I am up so late on a Thursday is that this evening was forcible entry training so I'm still amped up a little from hammering on the door training prop for three hours.

Time commitment: don't ask, it's practically a second job. Financial commitment: none, volunteers in my area get property and income tax credits and all training and gear is free.

I don't need to do all three, any single one of these would be fulfilling enough to make me happy-- but my kids are grown and gone and I've decided that working myself to death isn't worth it so I have the time.

Now instead of sitting on the couch all weekend doing nothing I have to specifically schedule weekends and tell people to leave me alone so I can sit on the couch all weekend and relax.

And if I need help moving that couch there is no shortage of volunteers.

Your personality is different but I guarantee, no matter where you live or what you're in to, there is some group somewhere that is looking for you.

Can you share any of your star photos?

> a hairy sweaty middle-aged man who couldn't touch his toes

I just love it when someone makes a description that is supposed to be off-putting but it's actually very sexy

Thank you for sharing, best comment in this thread.

This is how I am able to make friends in a new city in my 40s. You actually have to seek out in person clubs/get togethers. Run clubs, book clubs, dog clubs, board game clubs, trivia nights, whatever. Put yourself out there at events where socializing is part of the event. You will meet people, you’ll have additional overlapping interests with some of them, those will lead to other interactions and meeting other people.

If you started a blog or at least wrote an article about it a lot of people would be interested. This is amazing.

Also I would KILL (well not really, but maybe seriously injure) for a yoga club (or even class) for middle-aged/older out of shape males _only_.

Hmm. Not sure if discovery and connection will solve the root cause of the problem that you highlighted. I think it’s more to do with dopamine rush from social media and decreasing ability for people to people IRL connection.

Honestly I think you might be grappling with getting older and the change that naturally comes with it.

>I've let many of my most meaningful friendships fade.

At least you acknowledge that part and aren't bitter at your friends that it is somehow their fault.

>but it doesn't feel like when I was in college and hung out with a crew of 10+ people on a weekly basis

And it won't, ever again. They'll get married, move away, have kids, whatever. Just like if you played a sport in high school, or were in the band, that same group of people will never be together doing that same activity again after the last time.

>curated events and meaningful connections for men who don’t want their friendships to atrophy post-college

Except you acknowledge above your role in the "atrophying" and while you can say you didn't/don't want that to happen, you still allowed it to didn't you?

>The goal is to get people in the same place on a consistent basis.

Isn't that called the gym, the range, the golf course, softball/kickball/pickle ball team, bar, etc? I've struggled (still?) with exactly this thing as well and don't have any good advice. I will say it feels related to the notion of wanting to have a significant other but never leaving the house, you gotta put the effort in. On the bright side I read an article about a couple that missed neighborhood connections so started having coffee on their porch on Saturday mornings (or some consistent day of the week) and eventually neighbors walking by started saying hello, then stopping to chat, then bringing their own coffee, and then it became this whole neighborhood thing. So I guess I'm saying don't lose hope that you can't change things in your situation.

You're definitely on to something. Although early 30s doesn't seem so old, the intense nostalgia of college has definitely waned. I would say I'm more grappling with the reality that it really won't ever again feel like that. I know it's true from a time perspective... I'm married and have a full-time job. But I figured I couldn't let the dream die that easily :)

Do you really develop lasting friendships on the course or in rec league sports? I just haven't had that experience and the popularity of those activities is sky rocketing (see: running clubs) while the problem doesn't seem to be getting any better.

> Do you really develop lasting friendships on the course or in rec league sports? I just haven't had that experience and the popularity of those activities is sky rocketing (see: running clubs) while the problem doesn't seem to be getting any better.

When I did rec league sports most of the guys were there to meet women

There wasn't a men's only league

That’s what I notice with a lot of meetups, etc. guys don’t even want to talk to other guys, they gotta talk to women only, personally I’ll talk to whoever

I think you can develop lasting friendships doing pretty much any group activity. But it can require a lot more effort (perhaps on your part) to get the ball rolling. Depending on the activity, you probably won't be having deep (or any) conversations while doing the activity, so you need to actively engage with people before or after the activity. That might be very small at first, but over many weeks or months might grow into grabbing a drink or meal after the activity, and being open to starting deeper conversations.

I'm terrible at this. I struggle to push myself to ask deeper questions of new friends, feeling like I'm being intrusive or prying, but I think it's necessary to do this in order to move forward. When we were in college, making friends was easy, because there was a shared experience right in front of us to talk about, and that could naturally lead to deeper conversations. As we get older, that isn't really there, and it takes active, deliberate effort to get there.

I find it ironic that the site is missing information about its creators and their background given the mission/goals. Presume OP is the Nick in the contact at the bottom. If OP is reading I’d definitely suggest adding something about yourself and anyone else involved and why doing this matters to you.

Thanks for this comment - I created the site quite quickly to gauge interest in this cause that's really important to me... the response has been overwhelming. I am adding some real pictures of myself and friends, along with more info about me both on the page and in the eventual instagram page.

Little about me just for kicks - I'm early 30s, married, recently moved to Boston with a great tech job and a really solid group of friends from college that I unfortunately don't live close to anymore. I've made some good friends since moving here but it has all been through someone taking a herculean level of initiative to plan things and invite people to stuff. I want to lower that friction to have consistent IRL interactions with interesting people - whoever those people might be for a given person.

Makes sense. A lot of guys feel this.. respect for actually doing something about it.

It would be really cool to see more Mastodon instances that’s solely focused on people within a certain geographical area. It would be this but without the trendy startup energy.

Also if I don’t hear a single MTG Commander game come out of this project we have all failed as a species.

Isn't there already a "social" site that instances itself by neighborhood? I think I remember having a login there that I never use.

"but it doesn't feel like when I was in college and hung out with a crew of 10+ people on a weekly basis. "

I'm in my 40s and in my 20s (shortly after college), I created a meetup group and regularly met with a group of 10-12 people weekly (parties, hangouts, dinner, activities).

We are all married now (some with kids) and now meet once/month and the meetup group disbanded before covid. As I've gotten older, I realized that some friends don't make it to a new phase of life. Sometimes because it was a friendship of proximity (like a neighbor or co-worker) and other times because you are doing something different with your life.

I think the main difference is that when you and your friends live near each other (and/or work together) and enjoy the same sorts of activities, maintaining those friendships (even at a deeper level than "hey let's go to the club and hang out without much real social interaction") isn't too difficult.

When people get married, change jobs, start families, move away... then it actually requires a solid amount of effort to maintain those friendships. For some people they really value the friendships enough to put in that work, and for others they don't (and when they do, it has to be mutual for it to work out). The sad part is when people value the friendships, but don't understand that shift, and what's required, and those friendships fizzle out.

I still maintain friendships with a 10-15 people who no longer live near me, and who are doing different things with their lives, and are in very different circumstances than I am. The oldest of these friendships are pushing 30 years now. It's doable, but everyone needs to be on the same page as to what they expect from and what effort they're willing to put into the friendships.

I chef a monthly breakfast for the fellas.

We're working through R. Kent Hughes "Disciplines of a Godly Man". https://a.co/d/7jeAATr

Neat. There may be an issue in the sign-up flow. I said I was in Other city, wasn’t asked where specifically. After I made an account, I RSVPed for an event which details will be revealed a couple days before. Is it just mixing all the other city people together or is that going to be in one of the cities where you’re established?

Male friendships are valuable. I either walk and get coffee, or we make breakfast every week. It started as three guys and averages 6-8 now, and some of our kids have become best friends. We also do a book club and some less frequent full family events.

I very much appreciate these efforts. I don't think they, like I don't think men's sheds, have to be everything to all people.

I DO think social isolation, white boys and men in the US (and elsewhere? I have no idea), and voluntarism have confronted challenges for years. Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone that came out in 2000, the Do Good Institute report on voluntarism (https://dogood.umd.edu/sites/default/files/2019-07/Where%20A...) and the recent work of Scott Galloway and friends on boys are examples of investigations of problems, challenges, and solutions.

Having been in the public policy world for 20+ years, government may be part of the solution (okay, not in this climate). But more often, it is part of the problem. Government is fickle about consistent and long term funding and evaluation and nonprofit organizations may not actually do work in a way that helps (meaning, is effective).

Individuals and communities often step up to do something, often anything, that may address a need. Participation and reach may wax and wain and I think that's ok. It really is the nature of the beast. Best case, an effort fades away and there is already another underway or standing in the wings.

The bottom line for me is that efforts are made. As a policy wonk and social worker, I'd very much like for efforts to be grounded in some sort of theory of change or best practice or something. But since I'm not a funder or a wielder of power, I don't get to make this decision.

I would argue that the fatal flaw of this idea is that it is an online app. If this was solvable with technology, Meetup.com has a 15 year head start on you and they didn't solve it.

I think technology is antithetical to the goal you are working toward. Instead, start a local group and have a "all cellphones go here" basket when members enter so that when they are there, they are fully engaged and not doom scrolling the entire time.

Meetup also raised many millions of dollars, so they had to enshittify fast.

I'd be interested, but it's not in my city (Houston) so tough beans I guess, unless someone else wants to start it here.

I very much agree with this being its own thing independent of Big Social Media. We need more of that. Too many of these types of things have the flaw that their only online presence is a Facebook group, which implicitly excludes me and anyone else who doesn't have nor want a FB account.

I think we (hacker news community) can make a difference in dating industry by creating an open-source free to use dating app. Same quality as Hinge/Bumble but free of cost and free of algorithm manipulation. I have been thinking about it for a while. I am a software engineer but doing this requires a massive group effort. Maybe let's chat about it. amirhesamyan [at] gmail.com

What is missing for you in Alovoa? Can you maybe contribute it?

Women don't care about open-source or free software. They want an app that's popular and easy to use on their phones. Bumble, Hinge, and Tinder have concerned that market.

On the one hand, it's helpful to join a new friendship club if we truely admit that most of friendship is going to disappear as we are getting old.

On the other hand, some people are shamed to admit this point, as a result, joining this kind of club will make them look more shamed. It's just nature of humanity.

I think there should be a better idea for the second type of people.

I think the failing point with all(?) of the attempts in this space is that, to phrase it in a very handwavy pseudo graph way, “real world” social groups depend on people who are “hubs” with a disproportionately large number of links to individuals, the majority of whom have far fewer links comparatively. Communities are anchored by these “super friends”. Those are exactly the least likely people to ever consider using a site/app like the above, but the most important to have as they are the ones with the requisite initiative and/or social clout to actually "herd the cats".

Basically, the Friendship Paradox https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Friendship_paradox

Is this really a problem? I get the feeling that the male loneliness epidemic is more described by people about others than themselves. For my part, the world doesn't seem that way at all. I have many friends who live close by and who are a part of my life. We play basketball and poker and board games together. We go to nearby bars occasionally and to each others' homes regularly. We lift together though I haven't been good about keeping up with that.

And my apartment building is home to some 500 people, all of whom are quite normal. People borrow a spoon of yogurt or a USB cable, or ask for a jump start, or help with plumbing. It all feels very normal and about the right scale of human interaction. Considering all that, and that people generally report happiness, and that these things come and go without success we must conclude the whole thing is illusory like so many other Complaints About The Modern World.

You can't extrapolate from your own experience in that way. There are billions of people having a different experience to you in a multitude of different ways.

It's great that you have a good social life, but calling this problem illusory based on just your anecdotal experience is just denying reality when you look at statistics:

> 52% of Americans report feeling lonely while 47% report their relationships with others are not meaningful

> 55% of London residents say they feel lonely

> Social isolation is a problem in Europe: 18% of its citizens, the equivalent of 75 million people, are socially isolated

> 43% of those aged 17-25 feel lonely and less than half of them feel loved

> The suicide rate for persons aged 10–14 [..] nearly tripled from 2007 to 2017

https://www.rootsofloneliness.com/loneliness-statistics

> Thirty years ago, a majority of men (55 percent) reported having at least six close friends. Today, that number has been cut in half. Slightly more than one in four (27 percent) men have six or more close friends today. Fifteen percent of men have no close friendships at all, a fivefold increase since 1990

https://www.americansurveycenter.org/why-mens-social-circles...

These all have the smell of “50% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck” type nonsense and there are sufficient counter findings that I don’t think there’s any good evidence here https://news.gallup.com/poll/470888/americans-largely-satisf...

I think I’m likely correct. This is a manufactured crisis like seed oils, or ADHD and autism diagnoses. Nothing is actually getting worse.

One can be largely satisfied with their situation but still be lonely or just not particularly happy & fulfilled. Higher satisfaction with one's income can mean more loneliness because of work hours etc.

The number of births per woman has been declining for decades worldwide, in cases like South Korea it's collapsing massively. That has many reasons, but it's obviously linked to loneliness and relationships.

> This is a manufactured crisis like seed oils, or ADHD and autism diagnoses

More ADHD and autism diagnoses aren't a crisis, they're an improvement in detection and diagnosis and overall life quality of the affected people.

There's improved diagnosis but much of it is test fraud because students with accommodations score higher than the general population on most competitive tests like the LSATs. It's also why diagnoses are higher in states with more accommodations.

ADHD is caused by a defective gene involving the DAT1 transporter causing it to be overactive. This causes a deficit of dopamine that predominantly impacts the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (there are other parts impacted too, but this one is the most apparent). The brain compromises with novelty seeking behavior to rebalance the neurochemistry as a depression response, and this outwardly manifests as distractibility.

Don’t talk of things you have no clue about. Saying ADHD is “manufactured” is downright harmful. And yes, stimulants do treat it, and do so very effectively. I encourage you to learn more about it from Dr. Russell Barkley, the leading authority on the subject. He does well to dismantle the myths and stipulations and is very knowledgeable. He even has a youtube channel where he elaborately breaks down the studies in a way the common man can understand.

Nah, at the point where people with accommodations average better than people without on the LSATs I can tell what’s going on. It’s unsurprising that people on a high-grade stimulant do well on tests.

Besides I know better because I did the natural thing. I read the DSM V guidelines for diagnosing ADHD, provided the appropriate information, and got myself a diagnosis for it and a prescription for Adderall.

I’m sure you guys have all the theory-crafting but I did the thing. So if you guys think there’s suddenly a huge burst of people getting this illness in states that reward it, boy do I have a bridge to sell you.

There are problems in the DSM-5 for ADHD diagnosis. Dr Russell Barkley breaks it down in his lecture here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JLKCzEDqGa0

Hmm, I have used sites like this in past to some effect to make real world connections.

Signed up, but despite asking if I lived in one of three cities and selecting "other", it seemed to stick me in some event without a location?

There could be room for another app, e.g. Meetup has gotten particularly money hungry. If this is just a prototype I guess good luck!

Thanks, I've fixed that now! I added the "other city" option as a way to let people express interest and if there is enough people + someone willing to show up then I'm happy to expand. Just want to focus on creating a good experience first.

Weird survey questions. How about "none of the above", "yeah maybe it depends", etc.

I don't know what you hope to achieve with such a limited set of answers.

The problem to solve is that these clubs exist already with low membership. Join a local Masonic lodge, or other local social org if you want to meet men you will learn from.

Boy Scouts, DeMolay and other boys youth orgs got their start in the 1910’s, joined by young men without fathers who were lonely due to their life situations. Many just need someone to take their hand and show them how to break the ice.

Masons and the Scottish Rite (and even the Boy Scouts and DeMolay to some extent) have religious components that exclude people like me.

All Masonic and similar type clubs in my area openly accept women.

I joined the Lions about three years ago. Our local chapter was defunct, so I got it going again.

Now we have about 40 members (for a town of 500, that's pretty damn good).

We get together to do volunteer and fund raising events. But mostly we meet twice a month to eat supper and bullshit/play cards/pool/darts.

It's awesome.

I think we're going to bring back the formal dances they used to have in the 40's-60's. I think that would be fun.

I’m not the target audience but I wonder if I’m the type of individual it wishes would attend. (There is a caveat)

I’m in my mid-30s, relatively successful, educated, friendly, outgoing, and so on. When I think of many men in my life, I am there for them emotionally and mentally. I’ve been there when times were good and bad.

But, I have no interest in this even a little. If I wanted more male friends, it’d be trivial. I workout all the time and there’s tons of dudes from my gym who want to go out practically every night (currently live in nyc). There’s an extreme amount of men in my hobbies who are looking for new close friends. I’ve been invited to numerous outings and so on.

Yet, this is where I wouldn’t be a good fit, I cannot be bothered because I just want a family and I’ve been deeply single for four years without any hope of a relationship. For me, the loneliness epidemic is more to do with how deeply single I am and how little women want to love me. That’s my whole concern. I moved to nyc just to be able to run into women because I had no ability to do that back in SF. My friends in nyc try to invite me to shit all the time but I refuse because it’s just gonna be men hanging out and I don’t care. I’ve even gone as far as not working for three years and I just turned down an offer to work at Meta today because I don’t want to become an incel like half of the men in the tech world back in SF are. I’ve given up so much money over these last few years all just so that I could focus on my own startup - having a family. Failed miserably at it too like most founders but still trying.

No women at the gym? OK it sounds obvious but you just need to get involved with things where there is female participation and not just dudes. Pottery, book clubs, hiking/biking groups, cooking groups, dance lessons, various volunteer groups, even church, etc. But it has to be stuff you're genuinely interested in regardless. Nothing will come off worse than a new guy who's clearly there just to meet women (although, women sometimes join groups to meet men also).

Let me also add, I'm a good 20 years older than you. Don't get too wired into a vision of "family" because if and when it does happen, it might not work out the way you imagine. It sure didn't for me.

Focus on being content and happy with yourself, and then worry about meeting someone.

The times have changed. Meeting your spouse in person is pretty uncommon for educated white collar workers in nyc like myself. Almost everyone I know has met their partner off a dating app in the last few years. It’s exhausting.

I’m also uniquely ugly and that’s my main issue. So, again, times are different. Huge emphasis on looks above all other features. Attraction precedes curiosity.

> I’m also uniquely ugly

All the more reason to avoid dating apps and do it the old way. Dating apps are entirely superficial at least for the initial matching.

I agree but I’d say dating app mentality has infiltrated all aspects of dating life. So many women I know have complained about apps and not wanting to use them but then they only end up meeting their serious long term partners through them. The women I run into today are extremely specific about what they will find attractive.

End of the day, women do want to be physically attracted to their partner and that’s what the apps offer immediately. It’s just something I’m going to be unable to provide and the type of woman who doesn’t emphasize appearance is hyper-rare and in extreme demand.

>I’m also uniquely ugly

I need to see this. For science

> I wonder if I’m the type of individual it wishes would attend

You are! A more complete person than myself... and people won't leave me alone! When I hear "Loneliness Epidemic" I can't help but feel it's projection. They're lonely [or not making enough money] and want to convince me, too.

Your relationship search is a good example. People take self-exclusion personally. Why?

A bit of a tangent, but I'm disgusted with the prevalence of Alcohol. I've smoked with homeless people outside of concerts. I don't drink with my coworkers. You might be surprised which has been more of a problem.

Have you tried going to partner dancing events? That’s where I met my wife. Contra dance, swing dance, etc. There’s usual more women than men in my experience, and you get to be a hero for saving the wallflowers from being wallflowers.

I did it for fifteen years and am quite accomplished. Traveled the world for it and done everything you can imagine.

It was pretty damn useless cause I’m just not physically attractive even after multiple surgeries, spending time lifting, wearing nice tailored clothes, etc. Dancing is also nowhere near as mainstream or popular as it was 10+ years ago in the US. I gave up on it overall because the communities are no longer full of fun people. More men than women in most communities I’ve been in as well.

I think loneliness is a consequence of choice, people had less choice about their inclusion into the social networks, so they were more social, but now interaction is more voluntary. This is a much higher threshold (opt out vs opt in) and less and less interactions meet it, which further degrades future social interactions.

These ideas pop up once in a while, but they fail to address the core issue. We don't have friends because having friends actually negatively affects our ability to amass resources. In 2025 the only reason why we want friends is because our caveman instincts tell us to do so. Having friends feels nice, but it's an impractical luxury, like getting a big mansion or an expensive car. This is a fundamental shift to what friendships used to be, that is basic mechanism of survival. I think that the loneliness epidemic isn't a problem to solve, but rather an evolutionary filter. A bigger force we cannot combat. People who cannot function without social bonds will go crazy and die out. People who thrive in loneliness will live. That's it.

Simply imagine a species of animals that are social, but then apply evolutionary pressure to convert them into solitary ones. This is what we're experiencing now as a humanity.

Another comparison is the obesity epidemic. It just filters out people who are unable to control their appetite.

Male loneliness talk aside, why wouldn’t you start a Facebook group to get a gauge for actual interest? I know you mentioned deliberately not using Facebook and Meetup, but spinning up a whole new site just to connect with people seems like a lot of work for something that is largely a solved problem on those platforms. Facebook groups are very popular because so many people are already connected into it. Getting people onto and engaged with your club, regardless of topic, is one of the hardest parts of something like this, not the actual website part. A Facebook group would allow you to get people connected ASAP.

That would exclude me and others who refuse on principle to use Facebook (or really any social media owned by Meta).

Right.

Excluding, let’s be honest, a couple of weirdos who don’t use FB as ideological stance is a problem.

Excluding huge swaths of “normies”(who are majority of people) by setting up third party website with zero reputation is not.

Yes.

Well, take me. I joined facebook two years ago after avoiding it for years not (just) because of the reasons you mentioned but also because i was very privacy focused.

The only thing i found out, after connecting with a few people i know around me and scrolling through their history on facebook...the big party is over and i am too late.

Facebook isn't what it was anymore and people don't use it that much to connect with others.

I'm the guy that talks to lonely bus drivers. I don't know how it happens, but it does.

I'm also the person a lot of old - and not-that-old - ladies will suddenly speak to at the bus stop. The weather, the waiting time, or whatever other subject that comes up. Again, I don't know why me.

There's also other situations lone strangers -shopping, the park, whatever- will start talking to me. I do try to pet dogs sometimes and that sometimes leads to people talking to me but I'd say that's less surprising so it doesn't count. Once, years ago, a guy just greeted me when coming out from the subway and I was a bit confused because I didn't recognise him. So I asked and he told me that no, we hadn't met; we just passed each other sometimes when going in/out of the subway so he thought it would be nice to greet me. I smiled and appreciated the gesture. After that sometimes we would greet or at least nod. It didn't go further than that and after a while our schedules probably shifted a bit but it was a nice thing. Strangers you see routinely. It seems polite to greet them. And nice, a gentle gesture.

My impression is that there are many, and many of them crave just being able to talk to someone for a little while. Sometimes, particularly older ones, mainly ramble almost uncontrollably. They need to talk. In a way it used to break my heart seeing that. Now I don't think much about it, it's ok; I just talk for a few minutes and smile, because smiling is nice and they smile back and it's warm.

I don't initiate such conversations but I reckon I may somehow propitiate them by looking or nodding/greeting politely or something. Maybe it's that. But I've never been an extrovert and often I'm wearing headphones and have to take them off when they start because I didn't hear them at first. So, it's not like I'm particularly approachable, I'd say. Not handsome but neither ugly -I hope-. For a while I was a bit overweight. Now I'm clearly underweight but I don't think it shows so much that anyone would think I'm sick or dying or anything. I dress quite normal, have an about 1-1.5 inch beard, and in general I'd say nothing in my appearance particularly says "talk to me". But people often do. shrug

In any case it feels nice seeing those people smile for a while. Particularly those older people that tell you about some mundane stuff that means a bit to them. Sometimes their stories carry the implications of some children or grandchildren they don't see too often and miss. Sometimes it's much more personal, health issues or other problems; and it still surprises me a bit how candid people can be with personal stuff. Other times it's just literally whatever, small things in their lives like the groceries they just bought or are going for or really anything. There was this nice old lady I used to see catch the bus to avoid a sloping street. She repeated often the same story about how she was going for bread and "if I see the bus approaching I take it" because the slope often left her quite tired. Once I noticed she'd fallen and bruised her face. She was fine, she said, but it feels nice that someone notices when something happens to you. I rarely go to that bus stop any more, since I now try to walk as much as possible, so I haven't seen her in more than a year. But she was from the neighbourhood so I may pass by her one of these days. Maybe.

I know this may not mean much in their lives but I think it's a nice thing. It may brighten their day even just for a few minutes. Or maybe I'm one of the few people at all they talk to that day. Who knows. It may make a difference. Most probably not, but anyway...

Timely, relevant piece: https://psyche.co/ideas/is-being-single-a-happier-experience...

Hey! We are building something in this space but connected with sports (starting from combat sports right now). We are Europe-based and we have some 60k users at the moment.

I've sent you an email to have a chat and share some ideas!

These clubs are created . Then some social air superiority hag has fomo as part of her social circle takes part. So she comes crashing in driving the more shy members away. Repeat at infinitum.

Please share an example of this happening in real life.

I feel like the biggest problem with my attempts to make friends is that I don't have hobbies, interesting opinions, or "personality", put it a little blunt, can a club fix that?

No. The first step is finding a hobby that doesn't put you in front of a screen all day, then finding like-minded people who meet offline to discuss or do that hobby.

The idea of needing to impress an in-crowd enough to get an invite to join reminds me of fraternities in college (which I withdrew from half way through the process) and well-heeled yacht clubs or country clubs.

I’d much rather make friends where I can just show up and have a nice time with someone based on a shared interest (like my local cycling club, where I’ve met a few folks I hang out with regularly… or even social dance clubs for those into ballroom or Latin dance). Meetups are obviously too transient, so I join clubs with consistent regular attendees.

But maybe there are people this program will resonate with. Obviously, exclusive invite-only clubs like fraternities and country clubs are popular and I know many who joined, and even met life long friends there.

…I guess, just not me. I probably have some weird outsider-exclusion-from-popular-kid-club complex that is well beyond the scope of this comment :)

The same reason I won’t show up with a navy blazer to a yacht club social event to beg sponsorship from some commercial real estate agent with a chip on his shoulder because he has a quarter-zip polo from the club store and a member number like S29 he can use at the bar.

That being said, good luck with the company, I hope it is successful and you meet a lot of great people.

Totally get your perspective and appreciate the thoughts. In full transparency, this idea comes directly from my experience joining a fraternity and making a group of ~10 lifelong friends that I still get together with a few times a year.

We have so little in common interest wise, but we bonded over just being in the same place repeatedly. I'm not in contact with anyone from my engineering program. That says a lot to me about shared interests as a (non-)driver of lasting friendships compared to shared EXPERIENCE, but I'm just one person.

Obviously "frat culture" has an extreme negative connotation, but I will just say that not every fraternity is full of gym bros... they exist for every type of guy and I truly think the socially awkward guys I know who joined fraternities made significantly more meaningful relationship than the cool, good-looking guys who didn't.

I think it is a great idea, but the images on your page and lack of pricing details make me think it is expensive and focused on "manly" interests (gambling, whiskey, etc.).

adding one datapoint, maybe it will help the founders deal with an issue. On dating apps that have a friends component I've found a good percentage of the "friends" who connected with me were actually homosexual people hoping I was bi / curious. Could simply be a factor that the feature was grossly underused except by that segment, but addressing the non-negotiability of my preference. Yes they could have potentially been good friends, until they broke that boundary.

Bring a postbox? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg5599l2vqo

Maybe an hour at the gym followed by some social event. You would have a spotter for your benchpress and some shared purpose.

Some schools have alumni clubs. Harvard has a whole chain of them. Here's the New York City branch.[1] It's modeled after classic English clubs. It's still thriving. But the Princeton Club went broke and the Yale Club is in trouble.

Stanford never got into this. Stanford's alumni association is mostly a front for the "development office", the alumni donation extraction operation.

Silicon Valley had the Capital Club in San Jose (closed). There's something called the Alexandria in San Carlos, which has a restaurant and a gym.[2] Cafe Borrone in Menlo Park is a hangout of sorts, and it's next to the British Bankers Club, which used to be a pub but upgraded to a fancy restaurant.

There's happy hour at the Sand Hill Sundeck, at 3000 Sand Hill Road.[3]

There's Hacker Dojo [4] But after two moves and COVID, it's a shadow of what it once was.

Those are places you go to make deals, or at least talk to people who do deals.

[1] https://www.hcny.com/

[2] https://www.invitedclubs.com/clubs/the-alexandria-san-carlos...

[3] https://www.sandhillsundeck.com/

[4] https://hackerdojo.org/

There's also the Olympic club in Sf proper

car centric urban design caused all of this. you don't see this level of male loneliness epidemic in south america or europe.

I tend to disagree as European male. We are very lonely too in our walkable cities.

Would love for poker nights to be spun up in LA.

I like the idea, on principle, any attempt to build community should be supported.

I'm may not be the target audience if this is recently post-college, but the thing that strikes me is these activities feel a bit performatively male.

I guess my hot-take is there are certain things that people genuinely love (e.g. improv, dnd, video games, rock-climbing) perception be damned, and there are certain things that people do because they are socially acceptable stereotypes for males: drink craft beer, whiskey, poker, grilling, sports? And that it's about 20x easier to make real friends from the former than the latter.

My experience has always been if somebody says "Come over for poker night," it's gonna be much more awkward than if somebody says "Come over because I'm gonna play video games on the couch and smoke a joint and it'd be fun to have somebody to chat with while I do that." [I'd be curious to hear where other people fall on that topic]

Anyways, not to discourage your current tack, nor even say you should do a blunts and video-games event, but I just think some of the activities on the website seem branded to a very narrow type of guy (business majors? for lack of a better stereotype)

> I guess my hot-take is there are certain things that people genuinely love (e.g. improv, dnd, video games, rock-climbing) perception be damned, and there are certain things that people do because they are socially acceptable stereotypes for males: drink craft beer, whiskey, poker, grilling, sports? And that it's about 20x easier to make real friends from the former than the latter.

Brah that's just your experience. The activities that you described as `socially acceptable stereotypes for males` haven't been popular for longer than any ancestor you've spoken to has been alive as a conspiracy theory.

Some people legitimately like these activities and have the same reaction to `improv, dnd, video games, rock-climbing` as you do to the stereotypically male activities

> conspiracy theory

We all live in this interconnected thing called a "culture." Maybe you've heard of it. It affects what we all do it at all times, the clothes we wear, what we value, who we strive to be, and where we spend most of our money.

In fact, some people would even give up their lives if the cultural pressure told them to. I bet most people are so heavily subjected to the pressures of cultures that they wouldn't violate harmless cultural norms for $1,000 a day (e.g. crossdressing).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture

Do you legitimately believe people only pretend to enjoy those activities because of peer pressure?

I assure you that people really do love these things. The idea that men truly love video games but are actually just experiencing shared psychosis when playing or watching sports is wild to me.

No playing sports for sure is fun and normally authentic behavior. Especially if it's not a particularly "cool" sport (e.g. pickleball). Though of course you definitely do find those people who make "Playing a sport" their personality and spend a ton of money on all the clothes and equipment and never seem to actually be out there doing it, especially if it's a "status" sport like polo/golf.

I don't mean to present this as entirely black-and-white. But also if you think that the interest in poker in college-aged-boys spiking after Casino Royale is a coincidence I think you're kidding yourself.

Maybe I am kidding myself. But I think that these are all things that you just don’t like.

Generally, I'm a fan of the idea of creating social groups that meet in person and are accessible to people who are a little more offline. I will say that you've run into a rather awkward name collision. The Third Wave (when not referencing feminist theory, or surfer lingo) usually refers to a specific social experiment where a teacher created mini-fascism (okay, that's a tldr, but it was an interesting educational thing). Generally it's a great idea though, might be worth a rebrand tho!

I associate 3rd wave with coffee, fwiw

How is it not obvious to just start a hobby or activity where people do something together, heck you even might find some women.

Man here. Female friends key to my not feeling lonely. Couldn't identify less with men who only see hanging out with men as key to not feeling lonely, which is what this app seems to offer. Seems like the target market for this is lonely lads, when lad culture is driving male loneliness. But hey, I guess some men, even in the West where this app is targeted, really just feel uncomfortable making friends who are women. Open yourself up, lads.

> Female friends key to my not feeling lonely.

Your girlfriend/wife would like a word.

“Solve the straight male loneliness epidemic.”

FTFY. Gay men have many more community options. Not sure why, but we just do togetherness inherently.

Glad to see this though. It can only be solved by the people in the epidemic but it only takes the effort of a handful of organizers in the community/town/city to jumpstart events and hit critical mass. I’ve organized things on meetup and it takes persistence. Good luck!

> Gay men have many more community options. Not sure why, but we just do togetherness inherently.

How much of that is motivated by dating and hooking up?

I would guess its more like if you want to meet any other gay men you have to work at it because you are a minority. Being in a minority does engender some comradery all by itself.

the awkwardness moments when lonely person meet each other. :D.

i ll just go to a sauna

> Male loneliness epidemic

You are solving a non-existent problem.

There is no "male loneliness epidemic". If anything, there might be a "human loneliness epidemic". This is not a DEI angle on the problem.

Times have changed, societies have changed. But our expectations have not.

It is literally time to grow up to the new reality.

I think Professor Galloway, whom I am generally a fan of, is spreading a narrative based on selective statistics.

Nah, there IS a male loneliness epidemic, but it's entirely self-inflicted.

If men feel like they can't open up to their friends because they're afraid they'll be ridiculed, that's on them. Get better friends.

Homepage leaves me asking why this website wasn't a Meetup group for AI-generated stock photos. What's to resonate?

I hate to have to be the one to say it, but speaking from my mid-forties, what you are experiencing is called "entering your 30s." If you try to sell "fix loneliness" to a "not committed yet to growing TF up" market you're cooked.

Ironically, I'm probably pretty close to who you think you want to hear from and speak to. But you can't justify my time and wouldn't hear me in any case. Find something else to sell and someone else to sell to.

15 years ago it wasn't the norm to spend all day at a desk in your home. Especially after a rapid induction to isolated living over a ~2year period; during the midst of cultural revolutions that pitted most young men in these forums in the bottom of the social barrel.

15 years ago is 2010, socially inept men were absolutely spending time alone at home. They had videogames, internet and MMA/wrestling back then too.

I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t think it’s just a “you’re in your 30s, deal with it” thing. A lot of guys lose connection over time.. not because they’re flaky, but because work, family, and life get in the way.

To me this doesn't feel like some cheesy attempt to fix loneliness with tech. It’s just creating a space for something that’s clearly missing for a lot of people. Writing it off feels like part of the problem..

Where does the time come from to spend in that space?

It isn't that I lack sympathy for the problem, for goodness' sake. Indeed to a reasonable first approximation the only reason I bothered to comment is that "male loneliness" is of interest to me, enough so that a solution aimed at an irrelevant epiphenomenon of a different problem strikes me as worth objecting to on that basis.

That said, the formulation deserves some obloquy of its own, in that I think it likewise hits the nail squarely on the side by misattributing a problem of general social atomization. It isn't a "men problem" per se, so much as that - for various reasons related largely to social roles and experiences, and varying interests and approaches to same - men tend to make a good bellwether for some aspects of what I maintain is a broader social problem. Think "bedrotting" versus "gooncaving" - different codings, especially as respects men being defined as the sexually assertive gender, but the same basic social behavior. (Or asocial behavior, which is of course the crux of the problem.)

Note too that that isn't the "early 30s in Park Slope" problem. (I guess Boston has different trendoid neighborhoods. I don't care.) That, to reiterate, is the very natural shift of focus as young careers and young families both demand time and interest, as described in the OP. That's normal for this stage of life, and while it is very much worthwhile to try to maintain a broad circle, that really will not be effectively fostered by college-style social events no one is going to have the time to attend anyway - not when the same time could be spent more productively on social events that also build and reinforce bonds in the spheres which do and should absorb your interest at this time.

> A lot of guys lose connection over time.. not because they’re flaky, but because work, family, and life get in the way.

I don't think that's really it. Well, it's a reason, but not the cause. I think people (not strictly men, but maybe this hits men harder for some reason) lose touch because they fail to understand that it requires different skills, mindset, and effort to maintain friendships when work, family, and life "get in the way".

If your friend group is centered around hanging out in the college dorms or doing coursework together, or going out for drinks after work, or just the ease of scheduling things because no one yet has kids, then when those things change, the friendship maintenance changes too. I think some people don't get that, or just aren't good at figuring out what they need to do to keep the friendship going. It's often more work, too, which can be difficult to adapt to.

There are different ways to cope with loneliness, some find ways to fix it, others post assholes comments on people's projects trying to fix it

I think it'd be a shame to see someone make what looks to me like a mistake with a potentially severe opportunity cost. I'm an asshole for not keeping my mouth shut? It's just a website. Nobody has to listen.

Don’t let haters shut you up, keep grinding, king.

I think the concept clearly resonates with people. There is an article every week NYT, etc about how like most men have at most one friend. It seems you think the execution is off, which I wouldn't disagree on.

Happy to hear what you have to say - email is in my bio - although I doubt we'd have a meaningful conversation if you write me off as trying to sell something instead of taking the more gracious interpretation that I want to help other guys build strong friendships (and build them for myself).

It isn't a question of grace, or of motivation. If you understood the problem you purport to seek to solve, you wouldn't need telling that a doomed attempt to recreate an unrecreateable social and personal milieu isn't going to do that, and it will probably fail pretty quickly absent an unsustainable burn rate, as people discover that what's bringing them apart - as their family and professional responsibilities multiply - is not a simple lack of incidental, interpersonal physical proximity. Depending on how much you spend giving people reasons to show up anyway that outcome may take more or less time to happen, but it will happen.

Don't get me wrong; I think you'll probably pivot to something more successful if you abandon the sunk cost soon enough. Just that I am extremely confident you will need to make that pivot. Of course you shouldn't take my word for it, though.

Lol. I'm sure they'll be gutted you won't be joining.

I know plenty of single guys who'd like this sort of club.

This definitely emphasises the importance of the filter event...

Oh, I have better ways to spend my time than hanging out with men in their early 30s. It isn't an easy time and I was glad to see the back of it.

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