Networking is hard.

Here’s the challenge.

A structured event (say, a workshop, a lecture, a concert) is not great for networking. Good networking happens when the participants can “choose their own adventure” and connect to each other in creative ways, and spend quality time doing so—without too many guidelines or distractions. Structured events impose both on participants.

Networking works best in unstructured social contexts. Meanwhile, an old fact is that I loathe unstructured social contexts. I had a working theory that I loathed them because they trigger social anxiety and/or over-stimulation. This theory was invalidated after therapy and coaching helped me overcome social anxiety and over-stimulation, and I still loathed them. This begged the question: what is wrong with me?

After some reflection, I have a new theory: what I loathe is spending time in a context that freely allows careless and mindless social brutality.

It’s a mouthful, so let us pay attention to each word:

• “social brutality” - people doing things to assert dominance through (small and big) acts of psychological violence. For example, “oh, you don’t know about X yet?” with unsaid “look how smarter saying that makes me look compared to you.”
• “mindless” - they do it not really intending to do it, or do it without trying to achieve something specific. (I also do not like people who purposefully perform social brutality as a means to an end, but at least in that case I can predict and/or strategize around it.)
• “careless” - when you point it to them, they do not seem to care.

This concept is also sometimes designated under the weaker term “social clumsiness” (clumsy, as in, someone who breaks things through their strength without really meaning it). I do not like the word “clumsiness” because it makes it sound like something that cannot be helped. It definitely can.

In my experience so far, most unstructured gatherings I have attended were set up as wild arenas for careless and more-or-less mindless social brutality. Which I do not like. This includes, for example:

• gatherings where alcohol is consumed.
• gatherings hosted by inexperienced hosts.
• gatherings with two populations, one elite who benefits from the fee from participants but does not aim to connect with them; and a participant class who vie against each other to become part of the elite.

The first category sadly includes environments like music concerts, festivals, weddings which would otherwise offer a lot of optionality. Alcohol is a poison.

The second category includes most industry meet-ups, or “team build-up” events that are cargo-culted by socially inexperienced managers.

The third category includes most conferences or company meet-up events, with their astoundly toxic dynamic between folk with tenure (or more shares) and those without; it also unsurprisingly includes most dating events.

What remains?

❦❦❦

One avenue forward is to learn how to fight. In a violent world, the best course of action is to train for strength superiority and display it. From experience, this creates an aura of calm.

One could, for example, nurture a personality of an entrepreneur ruthless in business deals and social links—someone who is known to share generously with trusted peers and economically ostracize untrustable social brutes.

(My opinions on these topics are hardly unique. For more depth, I would refer anyone to the earlier books from Robert Greene, starting with the 48 laws of power.)

While I am still considering my options in this regard, I find this avenue distasteful because it does not foster large-scale collaboration. We have serious things to address (housing, loneliness, inequality, etc) and people keeping each other in social silos each led by a local social dictator is just so… unproductive.

There are other avenues to consider. In fact, Robert Greene also noticed later in his career that readers were over-using his earlier work to justify anti-social and unproductive leadership styles. From Mastery onwards, he points readers to more balanced value systems. I am still studying this.