The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Mind saying more about this? What's this type of person like? And how do those "meetups for the purpose of meeting people" actually play out? I haven't tried them, but I started considering it lately.
In my experience when someone struggles with socializing people often suggests that person should try meetup. So, the bias is that people that go to meetup often struggle with social skills. Generally, I notice it more with groups that are for a specific age demographic, or that mostly do happy hour type events. When the meetup is around some niche hobby that requires commitment and effort the people tend to have better social skills.
To put it more plainly the meetup pattern I noticed is something like this: meetup tends to attract the possibly on the autism spectrum types that need practice at socializing because they didn't fully learn social skills at an earlier stage in life. Then the people with the worst social skills drive away the people with better social skills by doing things like hitting on multiple girls, or saying some really cringe things. There isn't really a polite/viable way to keep the people with underdeveloped social skills out of the Meetups so people with better social skills avoid them in favor of invite only friend groups. If the social skills level of a meetup drops too low then you end up with a bunch of people that are trying to learn social skills, but the other people in the meetup have the same deficit so it is hard for anyone to help each other. It is kind of a tragedy because you've got a bunch of people who recognized their social flaws and are making an effort to fix that, but are in a setting that often reinforces their social anxiety. They need something more structured with a role model/leader to help them develop social skills and give them feedback - but society doesn't really have a free version of that if you don't already have a social network.
Okay, that's VERY interesting because in my area meetups are skewed enough to the social skilled, extroverted people that's there's specifically a group advertising itself as the "introvert's" meetup group. To be fully honest though I haven't attended many. My limited experience suggested that the other social anxious people like myself were more likely to stay home.
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Are you referring to Meetup.com in specific, or to the concept of "meetups" in general?
I was referring to Meetup.com specifically.
I have attended at least 100 meetups over the course of 10 years and the pattern I observed was that the 'cool' socially adjusted people would usually stop attending after a few meetups due to their frustration with other people being socially awkward (but this doesn't happen as often in groups dedicated to niche hobbies).
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