The Mid-twenties Loneliness Realization

What happens when the invites to house parties and pregames dry up

The single most common story I hear in membership interviews is some version of the following.

“When I graduated college and moved into the city I had a ton of friends! I was invited to pregames and house parties every weekend and we had a crew of girls/guys, a group chat, and a regular cadence of hangouts. But by the time I was 25 that group started fragmenting. One friend got married, another had kids, another was promoted and was working 80-hour weeks, another just moved to Brooklyn. Now we get together maybe once every few months if we’re lucky and it’s really a struggle to do even that.”

We draft off of the college experience for years but we’re becoming more and more aware that our society is not built for consistent social interaction.

In fact one of the biggest lessons you learn leaving college is just how much work college was doing for you behind the scenes — you didn’t have to sort through tons of schedules because you were likely to run into people on campus or at parties. You didn’t have to figure out if you were likely to have something in common with these people because you both got past the admissions committee (an over simplification as I didn’t love everyone who went to my Uni but still).

Our communal institutions used to do similar work for us — if you were part of a Church, Synagogue or Mosque you had regular rituals built in every week. If you were part of an Italian American club you had an instant thing in common, your ethnicity, with everyone who walked in the room.

The difference between the communal life of luxury that we lived in college becomes all the more stark when we start anonymous city life.

We’ve written about how these institutions are no longer around for obvious reasons — the organizing principal of them all was either race, sex or religion, and our generations care about that less and less. We won’t signup for a community if the catch is that it’s only for people of your same ethnicity — we’ve evolved past that.

But we need new structures and institutions, and that’s what Maxwell is building — the group of friends that invites you to the house parties and pregames every weekend again. If that sounds intriguing to you . . .

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David, Kyle & Joelle