Right. Which makes it even more absurd that a Brazilian would make a singular classification to the whole lot.
Parties are communal and informal partly because of income: everyone realizes bankrolling a large party by themselves is pretty expensive so everyone pitches in. Even if you can afford it you don't want your guests to think you're too rich as that's not as cool.
We're only exposed to formal dinner parties and large orchestrated events through fiction. Even the Brazilian fiction that features it carries a more aristocratic view of parties like that, reserved for the ultra rich who want to feel European.
So that single classification is pretty correct.
Imagine being in the playground as a kid. You just are there. And if its fun, its not fun because of you, its fun because of the group which is there. So are parties, they just "are".
All these rules you guys have appear to me like watching a movie about a psychopath lining up pens in the living room.
Dong think of it as rules, think of it as someone explaining etiquette. That is hard to write down without sounding weird.
I bet you are oversimplifying how good parties are created in your own culture. If you tried to write down the actual etiquette it would come out sounding weird to us all.
Humans create odd rituals and expectations about everything social. You only really notice it when polling at other cultures - ie is hard to see in your own culture because you implicitly understand the "rules".
#1 is amazingly insightful:
1) Prioritize your ease of being over any other consideration: parties are like babies, if you’re stressed while holding them they’ll get stressed too. Every other decision is downstream of your serenity
Like imagine if during sex you think your partner is just meta-thinking about giving you a good experience - they should just be enjoying and so should you. To me this example makes it more visceral but upon reflection I'm just making a basic "live in the moment" cliche.
From an outside perspective, even fairly casual German gatherings feel like they are orchestrated with a level of precision that would do a military campaign proud - but the Germans I was with don't really seem to notice this (likely because they all already know their roles, and to them it's just part of their culture)
In the US successful gatherings tend to require a fair bit of wrangling - I've been to more than one potluck where everyone showed up with roughly the same dish...
It was interesting to read in part because different people do things so differently: I'm sure we could find successful party creators that have "rules" that are completely incompatible! An example, the writer clearly very carefully curates their invite list; however an opposite technique can be to have zero curation (which can definitely be great). The network of social ties leads to certain outcomes without forcing.
> For me it just "is", and that's a good part of why it works.
Naturalness is great for those that are smart. The implied rule is to "be natural": that rule makes sense to write yet it is simultaneously nonsense.
Overthinking anything is silly. But sometimes it can lead to insight. I think that "Let your irrational mind run the show" is also a good rule for life yet somewhere we need to fit in rationality even though that is a contradiction.
I think their #1 rule is strangely unobvious to some people. I'm a social idiot yet I can think of more than one case where I have tried to encourage a hostess to let go of their hostessing anxiety (when I've felt I could do so tactfully and hurtlessly). It isn't a sexist thing, it is just a personal observation that it is a common issue (I would try and help a guy out too if I saw the problem and I thought I could help rather than harm).
It seems maybe I've pondered the above, yet writing it down is just freaky weird. Perhaps writing is the issue!? Talking of course has its own failures.
Ideally we intuitively soak up good ways to do things. If we are fortunate then our friends help us to learn when we've been misled by our intuitions.
Going too meta is another fail!
It's the conclusions of someone whose understanding of America is formed entirely from television.