10 Reasons To Throw A Party

The most impactful political action you can take right now

Even though I have lived in Grand Junction for nine months, no one has invited me into their homes. No parties. No dinners. No game nights. (Enter the world’s smallest violin)

It’s not for lack of friends. We ride bikes here and there and plan a few bikepacking trips throughout the year. It’s just that no one seems to want to host anymore. No one wants to throw a party. The labor to create an intentional space where people can gather is just too much effort.

“Everyone wants to attend parties, but no one wants to throw them. We just expect them to appear when we need them, like fire trucks,” said Ellen Cushing in a recent article for The Atlantic.

Despite my relative social newness in Grand Junction, I have already hosted birthday parties, Thanksgiving, and New Year’s gatherings in addition to my partner regularly inviting people into our home to play tabletop games (despite seemingly never being invited into anyone else’s home to do the same).

To be clear, this is not because we live in an epic home perfect for hosting (we live in a rental townhouse with a tiny living space that requires us to move the kitchen table into the middle of the living room if we want to seat more than four).

Nor is it because people don’t actually want to spend time with us. They do, they just don’t want to initiate.

New Year’s was perhaps the precipitating event that made me say, Hey wait a minute…

The day before New Year’s eve, I last-minute invited a handful of friends to the house and cooked up a dinner of pierogies. I knew I had waited too long to make plans and expected most folks to decline for the other New Year’s Eve parties they obviously had committed to already.

Much to my surprise, EVERYONE accepted the invitation and responded with some version of, “I’ll be there! I was just going to sit at home.”

It was then that I realized I am the fire truck. I make parties appear when we need them. However, it seems I have become a one-woman fire truck and I sometimes get the feeling that without my constant effort, the thin social fabric I work so hard to weave together would immediately go up in flames.

And it’s not just me feeling this way. In the last 50 years, the average amount of time that Americans spent hosting or attending social events declined 77 percent. More worrying, while Americans are reporting less loneliness than in previous years, they’re simultaneously reporting staggering levels of solitude. Which is to say Americans aren’t spending more time with one another to combat their loneliness, they’re just accepting the fact that they’re lonely and covering up the feeling with near-constant digital distraction.

Giving up on the social aspects of life because it’s too messy and requires too much risk is one of my major turn offs in just about any relationship. Creating community is my superpower, which might give me an unfair advantage, but I don’t think I was magically born this way. I work hard to build connections and I never walk into an unfamiliar crowd and leave a stranger.

I don’t mean to brag (just kidding, I totally do, since anyone with half an ounce of social wherewithal could achieve this), but on a recent dive trip to Cozumel, by day three I couldn’t walk through the resort without getting stopped by half a dozen or so people who I’d met on my dives, or met standing at the pier waiting for the boat, met in the dining hall at breakfast, or met just passing through the lobby, drumming up conversation. We laughed over wild connections like a couple who lived in Pittsburgh (not far from where I grew up), a woman who was good friends with the head of my grad school program, and a couple from Anchorage who exchanged numbers with me, who I very much plan to grab a beer with when I am in Alaska for work next month.

My usually awful T-Mobile phone service had magical reception in Mexico and I lent my phone out to several people who urgently needed to make calls, which led to conversations and connection. The guy working the dive shop took to calling me “smiley” after I came back from my first dive with the biggest grin on my face and spent the rest of the week connecting me with other divers and strategically putting me on dive boats where he thought I would have the most fun.

In fact, I talked so much with these new people and made so many little connections in my orbit that by the last day of the trip, I had completely lost my voice ( only then did I begin to feel the tiniest hint of loneliness, no longer able to connect).

I doubt many (if any) of these people will become deep friends. But I do know that in just five days in another country, I already felt like I had a community of people watching out for me, giving me recommendations, and wanting to connect beyond small talk.

If I’d been renting a house and not a tiny hotel room, well, I probably would have thrown a party.

“My point is that we are obligated to create the social world we want. Intimacy, togetherness—the opposite of the crushing loneliness so many people seem to feel—are what parties alchemize,” says Cushing. “Warm rooms on cold nights, so many people you love thumbtacked down in the same place, the musical clank of bottles in the recycling, someone staying late to help with the dishes—these are things anyone can have, but like everything worth having, they require effort. Fire trucks, after all, don’t come from nowhere—they come because we pay taxes.”

The Political Danger of Isolation

Not throwing parties is a bummer. Limiting social interactions to only digital landscapes is flat-out dangerous.

“Too many progressives were mainlining left-wing media in the privacy of their home, oblivious that families down the street were drifting right,” says Derek Thompson in (another) recent Atlantic article. “Even in the highly progressive borough of Brooklyn, New York, three in 10 voters chose Trump. If progressives still consider MAGA an alien movement, it is in part because they have made themselves strangers in their own land.”

I’m not going to try and blame a Trump re-election entirely on our collective isolation (or our collective inability to throw a damn party), but I agree with Thompson that isolation definitely didn’t help. I am seven months social media sober (only my Facebook account remains solely to run ads for my job) and the voracity and speed at which I take in information and opinions has dramatically slowed. The drama of these microcosms of human existence—humans I often didn’t know personally—was immediately erased when that little rainbow app was no longer available to me. My own isolation—which under the relentless pressure of social media scarily didn’t feel much like isolation at all—became apparent and solvable.

It was as though I was looking up at an empty room for the first time and realizing, oh, I’m completely alone.

Within a few weeks of quitting social media, I signed up for horseback riding lessons, a scuba certification class, and joined a local gym. Seven months later:

• I’m planning to half lease a horse from my instructor to get more time out of the house at the barn.

• My instructor joined my gym and I see her there all the time.

• Scuba led me to two major international trips this year, helped convince my mom to get certified so we could dive together, I’m now an aid for the beginner open water certification course to help more people get certified, and I’m moving forward with my advanced certification course. (Which means I’m out of the house interacting with real people 1-2 nights a week).

• I go to the gym five days a week, have made several friends there, and am now helping the owner expand the brand via freelance marketing.

It’s highly possible I would have done all these things while continuing to have social media accounts. But in the absence of feeling like I had connection via social media, I had to actually create connection in the real world or succumb to the depression of isolation. I needed the nudge. I think most of us need the nudge.

The Best Thing You Can do Under Trump is Throw a Party

In the wake of Trump’s inauguration, so many of my peers are asking what they can do. They say they want to “organize their communities” but I don’t think many of them know what that means (hell, I barely know what it means and this is my job).

Unless you’re a big wig in D.C. with some actual power to change the Democratic coalition, I think the best thing anyone can do right now is throw a party. Seriously.

Invite more than 10 people (per Cushing’s recommendation). Don’t worry if no one knows each other. Make yummy snacks and let the night be deliciously social. Then, sign up for something, ANYTHING, that gets you out of your house and interacting with your local community. Art classes, running clubs, birding meetups, ANYTHING.

And just…see what happens.