How To!: The Art of Gathering

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Arts

3.8 • 546 Ratings

🗓️ 6 December 2022

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

‘Tis the season of gathering with friends and family. It’s also a time where some of us yearn for a closer community, like this week’s listener. Morgan is looking for a way to hang out with friends in a consistent, meaningful manner. On this episode of How To!, Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering, explains how to transform a lackluster hang-out where people just sit around drinking beer into a party with a purpose where guests want to come back. She tells us how to create an event that meets a need with the right rules and the right guest list. She even has tips for sprucing up your next holiday party. If you liked this episode, check out: “How To Cook One Perfect Meal.” Do you have a question without an answer? Send us a note at howto@slate.com or leave us a voicemail at 646-495-4001 and we might have you on the show. Subscribe for free on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen. Podcast production by Derek John, Rosemary Belson, and Kevin Bendis. If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and exclusive content on many shows—you’ll also be supporting the work we do here on How To!. Sign up now at slate.com/howtoplus to help support our work. Want a behind-the-scenes look at how we create the show? Check out Slate's Pocket Collections for research and reading lists, as well as additional insights into how we think about the stories behind the episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Like I was thinking in my head, welcome to modern life, and I'm sorry.
0:09.7	Welcome to how to. I'm Amanda Ripley.
0:13.4	Tis the season of gatherings, dinners with friends, holiday parties at the office, and of course, family get-togethers.
0:20.7	It's a time to reconnect, at least in theory.
0:24.9	It can also be a time when we realize how disconnected we've become,
0:29.9	when many of us yearn for a stronger sense of community than we have,
0:35.3	which is why Morgan reached out to us.
0:38.3	I'm 28 now, so I've always had a group of people around me, whether it be through my swim team
0:44.7	growing up or through college and my master's program.
0:48.8	And being just an adult with a normal job has kind of made it difficult for me to figure out how I build my community again.
1:00.0	Morgan's a public health researcher who lives in Atlanta with her husband, and they recently moved to a new neighborhood.
1:06.8	We didn't move very far. We just moved neighborhoods in Georgia, but it's been hard to find people our age and figure out how to create community in this new place.
1:22.4	It is amazing how you can move like five blocks and it's a totally different vibe. And do you have much
1:28.6	community through your work these days? How's that going? Well, so I also recently moved jobs
1:34.1	and my, I no longer have co-workers and I work from home a lot. So I feel like I've also lost
1:43.6	that connection to my former co-workers,
1:46.6	and we've all gone separate ways, so I don't really have that. As my husband and I were talking
1:53.3	about struggles we've been having, we were thinking about the ways that our parents have found community.
2:00.3	We grew up going to church with our parents,
2:02.0	and they continue going to church now. And that's where a lot of their friends and community are.
2:08.0	Let me just ask if I can interrupt. There's going to church and there's going to church. Was it
2:12.6	once a month, once a day? What are we talking? Twice a week. So Wednesday night, Bible study, I think, and Sunday church. And I think once I got into high school, I didn't love being in a group of people listening to one person, tell me how I should behave. I think that's what I didn't, I'm trying not to be offensive,
	...

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