A Way Towards A Better Social Life
How our social lives can always be as great as they were in college
I made most of my closest friends during my college years and I believe that’s the case for very many people. Campuses are great places for forming close relationships with other people since everyone lives in close proximity to each other and everyone is involved in a lot of different organizations that meet often. My closest friends to this day are the people who were on my cross country team. We had a unique culture complete with inside jokes, nicknames, and traditions that helped create a sense of unity and a deep connection that will last the rest of our lives.
A lot of people look at their time in college as the best time of their life, and I think it’s clear why. Despite all the anxiety and stress of exams, grades, and debt, and the uncertainty about what the future will bring, college is a time when you form some of your deepest connections with your friends and have a great time doing it. It’s a shame that as soon as we get our diploma and move away for jobs we no longer have access to an environment where it’s easy to have a social life that forges meaningful relationships and fun times. I’m founding Krewe because I believe that people should continue to make really close friends throughout their lives, as if there were still living on campus.
Millions of people spend their weeknights at home watching TV or wasting time on the internet alone because their friends live just a bit too far away for them to hang out with all the time, and that’s pretty much the case for me. Living in downtown New York now, I often dream of what it would be like to have 20, 50, or even 100 good friends within a few blocks of me. That would make it really easy to hang out with people and have great experiences on a regular basis, even when I’m busy. That would make living in New York more like living in a small college town, where I could walk down to a local bar on a whim and expect to bump into a handful of close friends. That would be undeniably amazing, but it certainly seems a bit far fetched in this day and age, doesn’t it?
Most Americans live within a square mile of 5,000 other people, so there are plenty of people of all shapes and sizes living near each other to build up the type of social network that I’m talking about. So what’s stopping us? Introductions, clearly.
We rarely have the types of organizations that we had on campus that made it possible to meet other people in our neighborhood and see them often enough to really get to know them and where a relationship becomes self-sustaining. My neighborhood doesn’t have it’s own athletic department to organize a cross country team for me to join, or any fraternities to pledge, or really anything that’s meant to help neighbors socialize. Sure, there are Meetups, but I don’t want to awkwardly meet people from all over the city who I have no hope to see again — I want to comfortably meet people who live close enough that I can actually see them often.
The goal of Krewe is to fill that void and make it possible to get to know a lot of people in your neighborhood and open the door to an incredible social life. It mimics what’s so great about the organizations that exist on college campuses — it places people into small groups of their peers who all live close to each other, and it keeps them together long enough for them to become close. The dream is to give anyone anywhere the ability to build a tight-knit community that they can use to live life the way it was meant to be lived — doing fun stuff with they people we enjoy spending time with.
