If you build it, they will come: the case for organizing your own events

Organizing events is the fastest way into almost any social group, and most people never do it. That is the argument of “If You Build It, They Will Come,” an essay published by Ben Landau-Taylor on July 18 that drew more than 300 likes and 39 comments on Substack.

Ice cream at the beach

Landau-Taylor writes from experience: several times he has tried to break into a new social group — a community he wanted to join, a new city where he wanted friends — and the lesson was the same each time. The quickest route is to organize events built around the group's core activity. “In every group I've ever encountered, there is far more demand for social events and things to do than there is supply,” he writes. “Getting people to come is like giving away ice cream at the beach.”

Showing up consistently at other people's events works, he adds, but it is slower than organizing your own and inviting the people you hope to know better, or helping someone else with theirs. He says the pattern holds from niche online fanfiction discussion groups to “vanguard intellectual movements directing hundreds of millions of dollars annually.”

The consumer attitude

Many people treat a community as something to consume. Landau-Taylor says he saw it that way when he was young — as though a social scene were a wild blueberry bush that sprouts parties, dinners, conferences and reading groups on its own. Events actually happen because someone does the legwork, and one of the most reliable laws he knows is that if something takes a little legwork, most people will not do it. The leaders of a scene, in his account, are largely the people who bothered.

Free riders and social fabric

Organizing work is underappreciated, he writes, but other organizers are closely attuned to who else is carrying the burdens. He argues that part of today's problem of social alienation is a shortage of producers: many people want to consume social fabric, while the scripts that told people to make it have faded. He does not claim to know how to fix that at the scale of a society. Your own community is another matter, he writes — there the undersupply is something you can simply solve by supplying it.