FB: Activity Communities

Communities Post #2

Activity Communities

I want to talk about relationships built around doing things, because doing things is awesome and its one of the main ways that I like to spend my time. I'm talking about sports teams, hiking groups, chess clubs. I'm talking about inviting your pals over to play board games. It can be productive too, and friends at work might fall under this category. I want to do a lot of this in Calgary - they're fun and not too complicated.

Activities do fine in terms of breadth and depth. Most activities have a diversity problem (please don't just think about skin colour here!), because by definition your selecting for people interested in that activity. A chess club is wildly over-indexed on 15-50 year old, highly-educated men who know what the acronym ASD stands for. ...And that's fine. You can easily meet different types of people by having different interests and joining different groups. Activities usually don't do too well on depth either, but your mileage may vary. I want to do a lot of hiking and backpacking with friends in Calgary (hit me up), and that's a great way to know people better.

You might think activity communities would be bad on my usefulness/satisfaction criteria, but you're only half right. At least on the satisfaction side most of these activities are tailor-made to hack into the satisfaction centre of my brain. And the reason I really like building relationships around activities is that it's so effortless. You know what you're supposed to do for board-game night, you're supposed to win the board game. The only challenging part can be finding the other people with the right schedules and interests to play with you. But I might join a curling league or do volunteer activities that are already set up.

One sentence on truth: I like activities because they usually don't make me compromise on anything I believe in.