I’ve been pulling together a social circle of chief technology officers (CTOs) in the Seattle area, with the intent of building a similarly-minded community of people to share triumphs, failures, and general camaraderie. It’s not a huge lift, beyond setting a calendar event and adding contacts as I meet them, and hoping that people make the time to come out on the prescribed date at the designated location; however, even this effort is perceived as a community-building accomplishment. To be honest, it’s pretty selfish on my part, because whether I’m giving advice to help someone avoid my own past failures, or I’m receiving advice from someone else’s triumphs, anything that helps the overall startup community in Seattle succeed is a “rising tide lifting all boats” and ultimately helps me look better.
There’s a thing here called the “Seattle Freeze”. It’s supposed to be a particularly region-specific thing where people just don’t want to make new friends, so we all just hole up on our own. There’s additional specific layers to it, like saying to someone “Oh yeah we should meet up again sometime” but then totally ghosting them forevermore, and the “Seattle Freeze” is about building the long-term, regular-frequency connection to other people to build a new relationship.
I’m not sure if it’s really a region-specific thing. Having been a military brat growing up, moving hundreds if not thousands of miles away every 2-3 years, I got pretty accustomed to being a transplant and needing to reform a social circle regularly. It helped me out a lot when I went to college, and of course when I moved again internationally to South Korea (language barrier and all), and I’m not sure there was anything uniquely regionally specific to Seattle when I moved here for graduate school.
I would ascribe it more to the “transplant”-heavy nature of Seattle. Many residents aren’t natively Seattle-ites, but rather moved here for job or otherwise economic opportunity. So with many people not growing up here, with the inherent benefits of making friends through shared childhood experiences like being classmates in school, there’s not that regular, forced intersectionality, sharing the same space with similar goals on a predefined, regular schedule to see each other. That’s pretty common across all “middle-aged” relationship-building. Without the shared space (physical and mental) on a regular schedule, it’s hard to meet new people and build a relationship regardless of the geographic region. Any time there’s a bifurcation in life, it gets harder to maintain an easy relationship without committing dedicated effort. For example, pairing up with a significant other or having children pretty drastically changes the day to day routine for an individual, and that makes it harder to maintain a previously-established status quo like going out for happy hour beers after work or going to shows or concerts on the weekends. Similarly, less positive life changes cause a shift in status quo, like losing a job or having significant health issues. All of those changes can lead to altered relationships, and make it hard to “make” or “keep” friends.
So all of that said, I don’t think it’s unusual to make new friends for Seattle specifically, it’s maybe more a specific demographic that happens to move to and live in Seattle that has more of those changes in status quo without the easy historical relationships of growing up and going to school together as native Seattleites.
Instead of depending on those easy relationships, you have to build your own community. Being the perpetual “new girl” in school growing up, I built some positive and negative responses to community building. The maybe more negative side was retreating into escapism, mostly in devouring fantasy and sci-fi books; the more positive side being having some resilience to loneliness and enjoying my own company enough to put myself out there when I wanted more of a connection.
At least here, where I am, building community has not been much of a challenge. I have fortunately found that most people want to build community themselves, and will respond pretty favorably if you give them a seed to nucleate their socialization around. Sometimes this is as simple as dropping a suggested time and place to meet and then disseminating that to people; other times it’s more devoted efforts to invite specific individuals and incentivize them to attend a more elaborately planned event. Either way, in my experience, the response has been overwhelmingly positive when I put in some effort to organize something for people to gather.
That effort doesn’t even have to be something huge. It can be as simple as throwing up an event URL – sites like Luma make it super easy to plug in a time and place, and then just disseminate the link for people to register themselves – or it can be as involved as essentially planning a wedding, with all the associated catering, invites, and venue logistics to fund and secure. Either way, the intent is the same: giving people a central “seed” to nucleate around. The level of effort put into setting that seed might differ, but it’s a nucleation point either way.
In the end, I think there’s something to be said about the quote from Jim Rohn going “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with,” or something like that. It’s not absolute – you obviously are also influenced by people in your past, and people you’re yet to meet in the future – but there’s a lot of value in intentionally building out the type of community you want to be involved in, curating who those people are and deliberately setting time and place to connecting with them regularly. Sometimes you don’t have to do that yourself, there’s already communities built up, like run clubs or gym classes or woodworking studios, but sometimes there’s still value in starting something new, especially starting small with a niche but dedicated group that has shared values or motivation.
Building a community isn’t particularly easy, and requires a lot of rejection, whether people just are not interested in actually showing up or people flaking out at the last minute because there’s not enough incentive to be there or life just gets in the way, but maintaining some empathy and focusing on the people who do show up leads to a core relationship you can rely on and build a network of community around.
Lindsay K. Pino 