For My Friends 🫂️

I'm envisioning a project, which shall support me in the mission to see more of my friends. The issue is that currently, in order to meet my friends, I have to coordinate with them a time and place, often weeks in advance. We are all adults with busy lives and many of my friends are parents, too. Meeting impulsively in a life that is made up of appointments and errands seems to become more and more difficult.

The other issue is that I don't have a homogenous group of friends. For instance: I have one UX friend, who I have met at a meetup, another who I have studied with and a third, who is my old flat mate (and the list goes on). For the most part, my friends don't know one another.

The solution is simple: organise regular meetings where I invite all of my friends! Whoever shows up, shows up, we get to spend a couple of hours together, and who knows, my heterogenous group of friends might become a little more homogenous. For my project, I'll call these happenings "Zusammenkommen", which is German for "gathering", but it can also be used as a verb "to gather".

This was inspired by my friend Michelle. Last year, she started off her own series of I-want-to-see-more-of-my-friends, called "ObenHouse", a play on words—"open house" combined with the German word for upstairs, since she has this awesome upstairs flat with a magnificent view of Vienna. Unlike Michelle, I won't be able to host these events in my home. I don't have enough room (and let alone a terrace). So instead, I'm planning to hold these gatherings either in restaurants/bars or while it's still warm out, in a park. Going forward, I can imagine Zusammenkommen for little excursions or we might just rent the local cinema.

Supporting me in this quest, will be a dedicated website—in the end, a (Bear) blog, where I announce gatherings and my friends can stay in the loop. I'll urge them to sign up to my Buttondown newsletter—this way, I won't even have to distribute the news on upcoming gatherings via Signal or WhatsApp.

I'm happy to finally kickoff "Zusammenkommen", a project that's been on my mind for the past year. It's high time to see more of my friends!