Why Meeting Strangers Got Interesting Again

We spent about fifteen years making it radically easier to find people and, somewhere in the middle of that, made it quietly much harder to actually meet one. Both things are true at once, which is why the situation is confusing rather than simply bad.

THE PART NOBODY OPTIMISED

Enormous amounts of intelligence went into discovery. Filters, distance, preferences, ranking, the endless grid. Almost none went into the fifteen minutes where two people stand near each other and find out whether they can talk. That part was left exactly as it was in 1970, except now it happens after four weeks of messaging, in a bar, under the weight of everything you have both already typed.

WHAT CHANGED

What changed is that the cost of the first meeting got enormous. When finding somebody was hard, meeting them was the easy part. Now finding somebody takes nine seconds and meeting them takes a fortnight of scheduling, a carefully neutral venue and two people performing the version of themselves they have already established in writing. The scarce resource stopped being options and became occasions.

You can see the correction everywhere, and it is not sophisticated. Run clubs. Supper clubs. Reading groups that read nothing. People are paying money to be put in rooms with strangers and given something to do, which is a very old idea wearing a new expression.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE BIT

Meeting strangers in person is harder. It is also faster, and much more honest, and it does not let either of you be a better-written version of yourself for a month first. An hour in a room tells you more than the fortnight of messaging that would have preceded it.

What a format can do is remove the specific frictions that make it worse than it needs to be. So: no swiping, because nobody here is a photograph. No rotation, because a good conversation should not end on a schedule. No matchmaker, because you are an adult with legs. Good food, so that nobody has to invent an opening line. A watched door, so that the room is one you can relax in. Then get out of the way.