Unconventional Life Hack: Initiate Group Chats Prematurely

Moving to New York at 26 was great for my professional life and temporarily nightmarish for my social life. There were months, maybe years, when a mini panic about my social brokenness seemed one reminder away. A weekend without plans (grim). A cancelled hangout (disappointing). A touching piece of writing about the unique importance of female friendship (a personal attack). Each one was a reminder that my circle didn’t look how I imagined it should, and how that was probably my fault. Today I can scoff at that logic from a comedic distance, but at the time it felt horrible! I felt like the human incarnation of the cigarette cockroach! Ready to party but all alone.

Tired: pizza rat
Wired: cigarette cockroach pic.twitter.com/HPxBLkWstX

— Tom Kretchmar (@tkretchmar) October 18, 2019

I credit a few different things with finally transforming me into the post-spiral pizza rat I am today. One of them is pretty obvious, the second is less obvious than it should be, and the third is a wild card, so don’t touch that dial.

The first thing I did was commit to expanding my network. I know this advice has reached truism status, but it was as much a mental exercise as a practical one for me. It didn’t just mean facilitating hangouts with basically-strangers, it meant being honest with myself and others about my desire to grow my connections in New York (even when it made me feel deeply uncool). The second thing I did was even more important than that: I let time pass. I wish someone had told me how important patience was in the process of making friends. It just takes a while to meet people and build friendships, but it does happen eventually, and usually through random means versus more forced avenues like clubs and mixers, at least in my experience. Given time is a [heretofore] unstoppable force, I think I’d have appreciated knowing it was on my side.

But after those two, I credit one small habit with the solidification of many of my New York friendships: the premature group chat.

This is where things get literal. “Premature group chat” is not a metaphor. I’m talking about a text thread with multiple people, brought together by a vaguely common interest before it may feel logically warranted. When I think about my social network in New York, which has now grown larger than the one I had in San Francisco, I can trace almost all of them back to texting. Isn’t that stupid? I don’t even like to text that much!

Here’s an example: A couple years ago, Harling and I followed these girls Zoe and Paige on Instagram. They worked for Marc Jacobs and they made these weird spoof videos that made us laugh. Like this:

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We had three professional photographers and two videographers there the night before but @evachen212 told me iphone authenticity is key so happy #NYFW y'all.