Do Talk To Strangers; Join The Mami Chulas; And More…
This is ‘Links on Links,’ a roundup of interesting new thinking, writing and data about relationships
Why We Should Talk To Strangers (And The Evolutionary Reason We Really Don’t Want To Talk to Strangers)
Chris Bourn tackles the unthinkable — starting a conversation, cold, with a perfect stranger — in this approachable and non-threatening MEL story, Why Talking To Strangers Is The Best Thing You Can Do For Your Mental Health. You’ll take your hat off to Bourn, for accepting such a terrifying challenge, and for his opening gambit aimed at the perplexed guy stacking bread in a bakery (it opens the piece).
Bourn commenced his mission armed with advice from social psychologist Gillian Sandstrom and multiple studies that have concluded that interacting with strangers, and “trying to create connections where one might otherwise choose isolation,” positively affects our sense of well-being.
If even reading about someone initiating a conversational volley with a stranger makes you panic, there’s good reason: we’re hard-wired to avoid rejection. Our forebears had to be accepted by the group to survive and “evolutionarily speaking, rejection was basically a death sentence,” says Sandstrom in the piece. “If you’re booted out of the group, you’re dead…So that could explain why social rejection feels so bad.”
Read how Bourn fares, try his methods, and let us know how it went.
The Difference Between Co-Living And Co-housing
Millennial-targeted, robustly funded “co-living” companies tend to couch their dorm-ish models in communal utopia cant (from the web site of WeLive: “The new way of living is inhabiting time, space, and place that stirs inspiration inside of us.” Um. Yes.). As The Guardian notes in this exploration of co-living and other alternative housing models, “what from one angle looks like a revolutionary proposition can just as easily be seen from another as a cynical ploy by property developers to cash in on a generation living in the ‘age of loneliness,’ locked in a perpetual struggle to find a place they can call home.”
But there ARE alternative housing programs that promise something more authentically communal. The piece points to Marmalade Lane in Cambridge, a 42-home community with a central common house, created with design input from its future residents. “It’s the latest in a type of collective living that has its roots in the family-oriented housing coops of 1960s Denmark, an arrangement that has come to be known by a slightly different moniker: ‘co-housing,’ rather than co-living,” writes Will Coldwell. “The idea is to structure and organize housing in such a way as to put communities, rather than developers, in the driving seat.
‘Co-living is purely a new way for developers to squeeze profit from an already broken housing market,” says Hannah Wheatley, researcher on housing and land at the New Economics Foundation. ‘Co-housing in its purest form is about communities being control of their housing.’”
The Not-An-Instagram-Influencer Social Club
Claudia Mendoza loved the Dominican social clubs of her childhood neighborhood, places her mother described as “an engine for (the) community.” But those clubs were mainly men’s spaces. So, as chronicled in the NYT, Mendoza started her own club, the Mami Chula Social Club. A year later, the New York club boasted 700 members, known as chulas. What started as a sports club for young women grew to include mother-daughter lunch events, and now, the club hosts a range of activities, all designed to be accessible to immigrant and working class women. “In lieu of typical networking happy hours or professional development panels, the chulas’ monthly programming is quirkier and more adventurous,” writes Isabelia Herrera. “Mendoza has hosted cigar and whiskey pairing lessons, women’s history month cosplay dinners and a ‘twerkshop’ choreographed by one of Cardi B’s backup dancers. As Mendoza put it: ‘We’re not trying to cater to the perfect cookie-cutter girl or the Instagram girl. That’s not what we want to do.’”
XKCD Takes On Friendship
Even if you move somewhere with a high “average collision interval,” it doesn’t guarantee you’ll make new friends. There’s only one way to do that…
“The Most Binge-able Show On TV” Is About Loneliness
This Way Up, created by Irish comic Aisling Bea, is a new dark comedy streamer, and, as GQ opines, “almost impossible to not consume in one sitting.”
“I was reading something interesting about how loneliness is this disease now which genuinely affects society and how we deal with each other, but also everyone is afraid to say they have it in case they may catch it too,” Bea tells The Hollywood Reporter. “So what I wanted to do was make a comedy about loneliness.” The six-episode series, also starring Catastrophe’s Sharon Horgan, is now on Hulu.
