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this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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That is a big part of it.
When the first question you are asked for decades when meeting someone is "What do you do?" it gets ingrained that your only value is what you do.
Add in the fact that men hitting that age now have basically never received any positive reaction for expressing any emotions or vulnerability and usually outright been mocked for doing so and it is no wonder they are are hard group to reach...
And they're all totally socially isolated to boot. How the hell do you make friends as an adult?
And where do you even go? Civic centers, bowling alleys etc are dead. Moderate churches are disappearing. Car centric everything means if you have a disability or not much money you're screwed.
As with most things, the hardest part is the first step: you have to find a community to join. It can be anything, but senior centers are greater resources for older people that they unfortunately don't take enough advantage of. My parents found a seniors' program at a local college and started taking classes with people their age, which created an entirely new friend group for them. You just have to find a group of people doing something you enjoy and the relationships will likely form without much effort after that, provided you don't have crippling social anxiety or something else that makes social interaction difficult. Point is, once you get the ball rolling, momentum takes over; the hardest part is getting it (i.e. yourself) moving.
Left my country and the coldness (not just the weather) was such a huge part of it.
You need a group that’s small enough to allow for personal interaction, but large enough that there’s enough people that you’re more likely to find ones you click with. It’s easy enough to do online - a lot of people meet in games like MMOs and on social media sites. You already share a common interest, and if you click you can expand your friendship outside of that immediate context. Even within the context, you get friends and community.
Real world kinds of places can include things like a men’s choir or a community theater group if that’s your demographic. Those can lead to Saturday brunches and such. There’s also places like dog parks where you can hang out with other dog owners, and sports groups like bowling and ultimate that have various levels of serious vs fun. There’s also a lot of volunteering opportunities.
Some groups can be cliques that can make it harder to get into at first, and just like in dating you can’t let a negative experience turn you off from the whole scene.
I've seen a few people complain about the question "what do you do?" over the years, and I think it's pretty telling that most people seem to interpret that as "what is your job?"
For me, my job is a footnote to my life, it's not something I'm overly proud of, if I woke up rich tomorrow I'd never go back to work, it's just how I fund the rest of my lifestyle.
I tend to answer that question with my hobbies, things I'm working on, trips I'm planning, etc
Sort of a double-edged sword is that I do actually work a pretty interesting job that people really want to hear about when they find out what I do, and I'd really rather talk about the other things I do. Probably the one thing I miss about when I was a random schmuck working a shitty warehouse job, I didn't have to talk about work outside of work as much
How people make money is often the most boring thing about them. A whole lot of the prestigious jobs that make big bucks that people like to brag about boil down to a whole lot of paperwork, emails, and phone calls, I don't want to hear about that, that's the kind of stuff I make any excuse I can to avoid thinking about.
If they're making big bucks though, hopefully they're doing something cool with it, they can tell me about their ski trips, or yacht trips to private islands or whatever rich people do these days, that's what I want to hear about it. If the only thing they can come up with to say that they "do" is a job doing the boring shit I try to avoid, that's their own fault. They're free to judge me, I'm judging them right back, they're wasting their lives.
And most of the time my current job is far more interesting than theirs anyway even if it's not as prestigious.
It sounds like you're hanging out with the wrong kind of people if they are asking that question to judge you. I find most people ask that question as its a baseline question on getting to know someone, so hobbies would be a perfectly acceptable response
Yeah but what do you do for work doe?
911 dispatch
That is pretty interesting!
Right? Don't get me wrong, I have some cool stories, and I don't blame people for being more interested in those than tales from my hiking trips or D&D game or hearing about my latest attempt at woodworking or whatever, but I'd rather talk about those.
Mix it up sometimes!
"HELP I'm being robbed!"
"Roll for initiative."
Insight check!
Well, I'll take a D&D story too if you don't mind.
My current group is playing Schedules & Conflicts so, got an itch u noe?
Oof, I feel that, my group hasn't been able to get our shit together to have a proper session in months.
A while back I played in my friend's home-brew setting as Lotor the All-Beard, a raccoon pirate, known as the All-beard because he was covered in fur, so he was all beard.
Lotor was a dirty, chaotic, moron, and throughout the entire campaign the dice gods smiled upon him, and nearly every harebrained scheme he came up with somehow managed to work out somehow.
He did not speak the common tongue, and was also illiterate (but a master of forgery somehow, he couldn't read the documents he forged, but with a handwriting sample and someone else to put the words together for him he made it work) so the main way he communicated with the rest of the world was with the aid of his talking parrot, Polly, acting as a translator (and also his accountant, secretary, and numerous other roles that Lotor lacked the smarts to do himself.) Polly was a very intelligent bird who didn't much care for his idiot master, and although it was brought up numerous times, it never stuck Lotor as strange that polly could actually talk and not just mimic speech, he always just shrugged it off as "parrots can talk." Many hints were dropped over the course of the game that there was more to Polly than met the eye, like a magic lantern that made Polly cast a human-shaped shadow, and every last hint went straight over Lotor's head. At the end of the campaign it was revealed that Polly was a long-missing archmage who's absence was fairly central to the overarching lore of the world, he'd had his memories erased and transformed into a parrot by the big bad, and through a series of unlikely events had eventually found his way to a curio shop where Lotor purchased him because he thought it was neat.
Fantastic. That had to be so painful for the rest of the party to watch.
May I also have a D&D story and/or perhaps a picture of some woodworking about which you are proud? Or one which you have at least failed at hard enough to be funny?
I love listening to people talk about their hobbies. I may not understand a third of it, but the passionate energy someone gets when they're all excited is contagious
Here's 2 thing im particularly proud of, even if they're a bit simple. My wife took up book binding during the pandemic (who didn't pick up some new hobbies then?) And she needed a book press and sewing frame, so I made them for her
https://ibb.co/3WqKJw2 https://ibb.co/Sy9fBrZ
I apologize for the janky image host, imgur didn't want to work for me today and this was my first Google result for free image hosting.
Ignore the trash and such scattered around on the desk in the background.
I learned a lot making the sewing frame in particular, mostly how much I suck at using a router, and after botching it a couple times I actually ended up chiseling out that slot in the front by hand.
I'd do some things differently if I were remaking them today, I'd probably make the press shorter, it doesn't really need to be as tall as it is, and I had some big ideas for the sewing frame like some moveable fences to make sure the book is square that I ended up abandoning
That's awesome! Did Polly ever get unpolymorphed and his memories restored?
He did, and I believe he ended up gifting Lotor some magic doodad to translate for him in the future
That's been one of the culture shifts I've noticed moving to the EU. People are a lot less likely to lead with that question here than in the US.
Exactly. I stopped asking that question because I don't wanna be asked that anymore. I ask other guys what their hobby(ies) is(are).
I've been saying "it's private" for years.
I've always taken that question as a form of trying to find common interests. If you answered it with your hobbies, it would fulfill the same purpose which is getting conversation started.
If you asked me "well, how much do you make?" that would be way more pointed towards "productivity".