Friendships & Forums
Building rituals, Interesting People dinners, Camp Dad, and why I think community is the only asset that compounds the way money is supposed to.
A few years ago I realized I had a lot of acquaintances and almost no friends. I was in my late thirties, recently divorced, three companies deep, and the only people I talked to regularly outside of work were my mom and my brother. So I did what I do with most problems, which is overcorrect aggressively in the other direction. I joined a peer forum. Then another one. Then I started one. Then I rented an island.
I'm in six peer forums now. I host an annual gathering called Interesting People that I described, accurately, in the island essay. I run a weekend called Camp Dad once a year for fathers who, like me, suspect their friendships have quietly atrophied and don't quite know how to say so out loud. None of this would have happened if I hadn't gotten honest with myself about how lonely I was, which is the worst thing a successful man in his late thirties is allowed to admit in public.
The pieces in this section are the operating manual for building real friendships in adult life. They cover ritual design, the math of small groups, the unreasonable effectiveness of recurring dinners, and the post that got me more hate mail than anything else — about why I publish opinions that cost me followers on purpose.
If this resonates, the marriage-and-family writing is the one-degree-closer version of the same project.
More on friendships & forums
Start a group thread
Why I stopped trying to make friends by accident and started building deliberate rituals — forum, pickleball, lunch club, Camp Dad, and the group text that started it all.
Do you want people to like you?
After two hours of monologue at lunch, I was reminded why the Harvard research is so simple: ask follow-up questions, and watch people light up.
The tail end
Tim Urban's tail-end essay haunted me for years. The realization it triggered: I hadn't danced in over a decade. So I found a sober Sunday-morning rave and started again.
How business made me twenty best friends
I joined a forum fifteen years ago to swap business advice. I ended up with twenty of my deepest friendships—and a model for how to build real community as an adult.