A Fort Minor Solution to a Major Problem

TL;DR – Shared spaces and shared interests are the best places to meet new people. When it comes to meeting people online, Meetup.com and BumbleBFF are great resources for people to make new connections.

        Loneliness is becoming a serious problem in the United States. According to the May 2021 American Perspectives Survey, 12% of Americans reported having zero close friends in 2021 (skyrocketing from just 3% in 1990). The pandemic is cited as an important accelerating factor of this problem, causing many people to lose contact with existing friends and making it even harder to make new friends. While the pandemic has been “over” for about two years at this point it has left a lasting impact on the connections people had and their ability to create new ones.
        Towards the end of last year I was in a bit of a rut. I had moved across the country to a new state for the third time and it felt like starting over again. While I wasn’t starting completely from scratch this time (I had family nearby) I still felt isolated, mostly because I wasn’t putting myself out there. I had been living in my new apartment for 6 months and made a few new connections but still didn’t feel like I had a strong sense of community. I had forgotten how to spell “grass” and hadn’t made it a priority to visit it in a while. 
        While it would be nice to jump into deep and meaningful friendships, I knew that things would need to start somewhere. Therefore, one of my goals for the new year would be to try and build a community for myself by meeting 100 new people by the end of 2023. As long as I introduced myself to them and got their name in return I would count that as a new person I met. As I met people I would come up with a nickname to help me remember their real name and how I met them (a great piece of advice I picked up from Charisma on Command), then write it down in my notebook along with what day we met and (potentially) which contact introduced me to them. Thus began operation Fort Minor, a deliberate effort to make new connections with an explicit goal to remember the name.

        Introducing myself to new people was a relatively low bar to clear for me but still ambitious enough due to the scale of people. If I wanted to, I could choose to knock this goal out in a day by going into the city and shaking everybody’s hand. However, I wasn’t quite ready for that approach and wanted to ease into things. The harder question to solve then was where to meet new people. I had already exhausted a couple of different options. While I didn’t count many of these pre-existing connections towards my Fort Minor project (I had met these people before my project started in 2023) I figured I would mention them here because they did help give me a strong social foundation to start.

Pre-Project

Neighbors

        The first place I was able to organically meet people when I first moved in was my neighborhood. The fact that I lived in the same area as people was enough of an excuse to meet them. I would say hello to neighbors as they went on their way to work. If it was the first time I met them I would introduce myself as their neighbor. Their responses were always friendly and welcoming. Once I saw that one of the garage doors in my neighborhood was left open, knocked on their door to let them know, and used it as an excuse to strike up a conversation. They had no idea that they left it open and were elated that one of their neighbors was looking out for them. I quickly began to meet all the neighbors around me. Some were happy to say hello and keep moving on with their day, others were interested enough to stop and chat. Overall, meeting my neighbors greatly improved my sense of community. Knowing the names of the people who live around you, having them greet you when you get home or back from the store, and offering to help water their plants when they’re on vacation or go for a bike ride with them when they get back from traveling changed the entire atmosphere of the place I live. Meeting your neighbors is the first place I would recommend you start introducing yourself when you move to a new area. It's even worth it to make the explicit effort of knocking on their doors to say hello and introducing yourself as the neighbor that just moved in (a strategy I used in Virginia with great success). 

Gym

        At the same time, I figured I would start to introduce myself to people that shared the other public spaces I did. In my case, that meant saying hello to different people in the gym. I go to the gym about 4 times a week early in the morning and generally see the same people each time. Finding a spotter for the bench press became a great excuse to strike up a conversation with somebody new. On the days I did chest I would ask somebody new for a spot, thank them, and introduce myself. More often than not they would say “You’re welcome” and be open and interested in a quick conversation about training and how they got to where they were. The people I met were more than willing to share helpful tips on form, diet, safety, and eventually even things like business and general life advice. After doing this for a couple of weeks, I got more comfortable with the space and just started introducing myself to people by asking what they were training or complementing their beards. I eventually even made friends with a few people in my gym, would wave to them as I entered, and chat with them between sets. Now they’re just as determined as I am for me to hit a 200 lb bench press.

Pre-Project Summary

        Establishing connections in these two places helped develop a strong social foundation that gave me the confidence to start exploring new avenues and options for meeting people. When the year began, I was ready to be more deliberate about finding friends with shared interests and began to move online.

Project!

Meetup

        I was slow to make new connections, meeting two people by chance encounters across the first two weeks. It was becoming clear that I would need to make a more deliberate effort to meet my goal this year so I decided to take initiative by going on a site called Meetup.com. What I like about this site is that it emphasizes meeting over a shared activity or interest instead of just showing you different people you could meet. Of course, many people joining these groups are just as interested in making new connections as they are in the group activities. When I first moved to Virginia I tried a couple of different meetups to find friends and it worked out well for me. I hadn’t realized just how similar people were to me when I joined them based on a shared interest or discussion point (also the people in minimalism groups tend to be particularly laid-back if you're looking for a starting point). Therefore in my third week I decided to bite the bullet and sign up for a hiking meetup. I’m not necessarily a hiking fanatic, but it’s an environment where I feel like I can really get to know people by walking and talking with them. Heading to the meetup with the intention of meeting new people, I pushed myself to bounce around the different sub-groups that splintered off as the hike began. I met 6 new people on that hike, got the numbers of people I felt like I connected with most, and ended up spending time with them more consistently as the year progressed.

Bumble BFF

        Meetup is great and it has a lot of diversity when it comes to the ages of people you meet. If you’re a little bit younger (in your 20s) and want to meet people around the same age as you Bumble BFF is a great option. While it’s not the primary use-case for a dating app, many have introduced a feature for making new friends. It’s a bit bizarre to use the image-heavy format of a dating app to choose a potential friend (and a bit awkward to admit you met them on a dating app) but the mechanics of it still work the same - you swipe right on profiles of people you might be interested in meeting and swipe left on people that you hate with the passion of a thousand suns and never want to talk to ever under any circumstance ever. It’s way more effective than online dating and a lot less pressure. However, you can get a huge leg-up if you pick out a few spots in town you want to check out and guide the conversation towards wanting to check out those spots with other people. 
        In my case I wanted to try out a place in Las Vegas called the Wreck Room. At the Wreck Room you can pay money to break a bunch of old keyboards, monitors, and glass bottles in a room. The bio in my profile was “Looking for people to break shit with for $70”. After a few days my now-friend Noah sent me the exact opening line I was looking for “I want to break shit for $70.”. We’ve stayed friends and are planning on heading to a bar together with another friend later this week.

Introductions

        Speaking of new friends, I definitely underestimated the snowball effect of meeting people from this project. As I began to meet new people the effort required for me to meet additional people reduced exponentially. You only need to hang out with a hiking buddy for so long before they invite another friend to the group to play board games. As momentum began to build, I started to get invited to hangouts, parties, sports games, and other events that minimized the effort I was required to put in to start meeting new people. At a certain point all I had to do was show up when I was invited out (it's pretty important to keep showing up if you want to maintain these relationships). 
        One thing I’ve noticed from tracking introductions is that occasionally I will run into a social butterfly. These social butterflies are incredibly extroverted and always seem to be meeting new people. Once you make one of these connections (and you’re likely going to come across one sooner rather than later) meeting new people becomes much easier. You can become a social butterfly by being willing to pay the high up-front cost of making a ton of new connections and then bringing these connections together. I never truly appreciated the explicit effort that these kinds of people put in to hosting events like throwing parties or starting clubs, but I have started to respect and appreciate the fact that they are willing to pay that higher up-front cost to make it easier for the people around them to make new friends.

Cold Approach

        This is by far the most difficult way to meet new people. However if you can master this method then the entire world opens up with possibilities for new connections. This is typically what you think of when you think of somebody who is incredibly outgoing / extraverted. It’s the person who strikes up a conversation at a bookstore, makes small-talk with the cashier, and seems innately tuned-in to subtle social cues. 
        I decided to heavily employ this technique when I visited the Philippines this year and started to meet so many people that it became overwhelming to keep track of them for this project. This is by far the scariest way to make new connections, but after doing this about 10 times striking up conversations with new people became more natural. 

Pre-Existing Connections

        Finally, this one might feel like a bit of a cop-out but I wanted to include it here for transparency. I decided to count anybody I met before the start of my project as a pre-existing connection. This includes all of the neighbors, friends, and family I’ve met from before 2023. 

Analysis

Preparing the Data

        I completed this project at the end of April of this year, much earlier than I anticipated. Once the results were in I plugged the data from my journal into Excel and created a few charts to show the overall trends of this project (you know I couldn’t resist making my charts). Overall, the data table ended up looking like this:

        I marked the date that I met the person, the reason/situation I met them in, some additional context, and a Reference column for the ID of the person that introduced me to them. 

Visualizations

        This line chart shows the number of new people I met per week. This started slow, then picked up when I started making a deliberate effort to go out and meet people online via meetup and BumbleBFF. Interestingly, the number of new people I met started to dip lower and lower after February 19th . This is because I started to spend more time with people I had already met and connected with. This translated into momentum for building deeper friendships by playing board games, going for hikes, or grabbing drinks at a bar with the people I resonated with most (which I wasn’t upset about). As I learned who I connected with, it took less and less effort to join people for plans or know who to invite out when I wanted to try something new. There were also people that I just couldn’t find common ground or interest with. However, after meeting so many people I started to realize that it wasn’t a personal flaw on my behalf (or something wrong with the other person either) and we just weren’t on the same wavelength which was also OK.

        Next, I grouped the new connections by the context where I met them (called “Reason” in my dataset). The top three were Introductions, Cold Approaches, and Employees / Staff which accounted for more than half of all the new connections I made during this project. I always enjoyed chatting with Employees and Staff and actually ended up getting unintended deals and extras just by getting to know them and asking about their day!

        Then I made a bar chart to highlight the social butterflies I met. These were people who introduced me to others in their immediate friend groups. You’ll notice that the top “social butterfly” was from pre-existing connections. This is likely because my pre-existing connections accounted for everybody I knew prior to 2023, so it’s accounting for multiple different people.

        Finally, I decided to create a network graph that displayed all of my new connections. Each node represents a person I met, each edge represents an introduction from another person, and the color of each node represents the context in which I met that person. This network is interactive, so feel free to zoom in, click around, and explore the network.

Conclusion

        Moving to a new place and starting to make friends from scratch is scary, difficult, and takes a great deal of effort. However, it is important to keep in mind that if you’re feeling lonely you’re not alone! You’d be surprised by the number of people who happen to be in a similar situation. Their eyes would light up when I started a conversation with them or wanted to make plans to spend time with them. These kinds of new connections are more in demand than ever before and you have the power and capability to be the one that helps create them. As I started meeting new people through events, shared interests, and shared spaces I felt the post-COVID anxiety of being in crowds and meeting new people slowly fade away. If you’re willing to make the effort it gets easier over time. I am just starting to feel like I am really a part of my community here and nothing has been more worth the effort.