The case for not meeting anyone

Every event in London is trying to introduce you to someone. That might be the problem.

There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from being sold connection. You feel it at the singles night where everyone has paid to want something. You feel it at the networking thing with the lanyards. You feel it on the group trip where sixteen strangers are quietly deciding whether the others are worth the effort. The promise is always the same. Come here, and you will meet someone. A partner, a friend, a contact, a plus-one for weddings. The pressure is baked into the ticket.

And the pressure is exactly what ruins it.

Why does trying to meet people make it harder?

Because the moment connection becomes the goal, everyone in the room turns into a means to it. You stop talking to people and start auditioning them. Are you the one. Are you useful. Are you worth my Saturday. Everyone can feel themselves being assessed, because everyone is doing the assessing, and the whole thing curdles into something that feels a little like a job interview and a little like a market. Nobody is at their best. The people worth knowing are the ones who can tell what's happening and leave early.

The irony is that the people who are genuinely good company are almost never trying. They are the ones telling a story at the end of the table because the story is good, not because it is working. They are relaxed, because nothing is riding on it. You like them precisely because they don't need you to.

So what actually works?

Take the pressure out. Put a small group of people who would get on into a place worth being, hand them a weekend with nothing to organise and nowhere to be, and then leave the meeting-people part entirely alone. Don't mention it. Don't engineer it. Let people swim, eat, drink, sit by the fire and be a bit bored together for five minutes. Connection is what happens in the gaps, not in the activity designed to produce it.

This is the thing modern socialising got wrong. We built apps and events that optimise for the introduction and forget the part that matters, which is the unhurried, low-stakes, slightly aimless time that lets people actually like each other. You cannot speed-run that. You can only make room for it.

The case for not meeting anyone

So here is the quiet argument behind everything we do. The best way to meet someone is to go somewhere good with no intention of meeting anyone at all. Go for the weekend. Go for the food, the place, the long lunch, the fact that someone else has handled every detail. Go because you are tired and the company is the kind you have been missing.

If you spend the whole time talking to one person, that is the weekend doing its job. If you spend it talking to everyone, that is the weekend doing its job too. If you spend Sunday morning reading on your own and saying about forty words, also fine. Nobody is keeping score. Nobody needs you to leave with a number.

The pressure that makes these things unbearable simply isn't there, and in its absence the thing everyone actually wanted tends to turn up on its own.

That is the whole idea. You don't have to meet anyone. Which turns out to be the only condition under which you reliably do.