The Random Travel Club

And the joys of engineered socializing

I am tempted to call this “Brandenburger Tourists.” Photo: Gregory Garretson

Engineered Socializing

How does one manage to spend enough time with friends?

This question, which is asked not only by expats like me but by plenty of people living in their home culture, came up in different forms during my trip to Sweden this past week.

Behind this question, however, lie at least three others: What counts as a friend? How much time together is enough? And how should such time be spent? I believe that some people—let’s call them extroverts—are fairly happy socializing with a broad and changing slate of people, as long as it happens fairly frequently. Meanwhile, other people—the introverts—are happy to spend much less time with others, but want those people to come from a small group of good friends.

I would describe myself as a “mesovert”, in that I am neither particularly extroverted (though my very introverted friends may see me that way) nor particularly introverted (though my very extroverted friends may see me that way). I don’t really like the term “ambivert”, which suggests some sort of ambivalence or swinging back and forth, when in fact I am rather consistent in what I want. My ideal lifestyle is to spend workdays entirely alone, up until about 6 pm, and then spend the evening with one or more other people, preferably drawn from a pool of my fifteen or so closest friends. On weekends and holidays, I am happy to spend more time with other people, though I am perfectly content spending weekends alone, too.

The reason this came up several times during my visit to Sweden is that there was a lot of talk about social isolation and loneliness (I was actually there to facilitate a workshop on intercultural communication), which, besides being a widespread problem, was one of the factors that led me to decide to leave the country two years ago, as I have already recounted in another post. I believe that in many contexts—Scandinavia being one of them—it is dangerous to expect that a pleasing social life will emerge “organically” if you just wait long enough. This may work if you were born in the country (though it can still take thirty years), but it is much more difficult for foreigners. Instead, as I argued in Sweden over a number of five-euro lattes and fifteen-euro glasses of wine, to get the social life you want often requires a bit of “engineered socializing.”

Photo: Gregory Garretson

What do I mean by engineered socializing? Essentially, this: being intentional about spending time with friends. Or, to go into a bit more detail, asking yourself these questions:

• How many friends do I really want?

• How much time do I want to spend with them?

• What sorts of activities count as quality time with my friends?

• Am I willing to do the work required to make these activities happen, if necessary?

I find that once you have thought about these things, you are in a good position to start making things happen, if you choose to. The last question is the hard one, though. It has long been my experience that while most people enjoy a party, most people don’t want to throw a party. Instead, they wait around for someone else to do it. Sometimes, if you really want a party to happen, you need to throw it yourself.

And it’s not just about parties, either. Lunches and dinners and meetups for coffee all need to be initiated by somebody, not to mention things like group vacations. And yet most people are incredibly reluctant to take the responsibility of initiating. Therefore, if you are someone like me, who knows what he wants and understands that others aren’t necessarily going to make it happen, you realize that you just have to take charge and make it happen yourself.

A good example of how this can pay off is the story of the Random Travel Club, which I have told a couple of times recently, and which almost always elicits the same set of responses: fascination, envy, glee, and enthusiasm. Let me tell the story to you, too.

Photo: Gregory Garretson

The Birth of the Random Travel Club

It was 2015, about one year before my trip to Gotska sandön, and I was in the process of climbing out of a depression. I had recently started to socialize more, and I had met some people I quite liked. One evening, talking to my girlfriend T, I said, “You know what I would love to do? I would love to go on short trips to random places near here that I would never otherwise visit.” She prompted me to tell her more, so I continued: “You could write a computer program that would pick a town randomly from a list of towns in the region, and you could get a group of people together to go there and just have fun doing whatever there is to do there.” She said it sounded like fun, and then said, “So why don’t you do it?” I objected, “Come on, who else would want to do that?” To which she replied, smiling, “Why don’t we have some people over to dinner and ask them if they think it sounds like fun?” So we did.

We threw a dinner party with Spanish tapas and loads of red wine, and invited six other people to attend. During the dinner, I described my idea for a club centered on taking trips to randomly selected locations of little obvious interest. To my surprise, not only did they think it was a captivating idea, they wanted to do it. And so, that evening, the Random Travel Club was born.

Photo: Gregory Garretson

The eventual success of the RTC, as we called it, was thanks to its design, which minimized the imposition on any one person and maximized the fun had by all. Here is how it worked:

We, a group of eight people, decided that we would take two trips per year, each one from a Friday afternoon until Sunday evening. In addition, we would meet for dinner twice per year in the intervals, meaning that we would see each other every three months. This was infrequent enough that everybody could commit to it.

For each iteration, we would start with a dinner, which was essentially just a social event, except that at the end, we would choose a date for our next trip (finding a weekend that worked for everyone was the hardest part of the process), and then have two “trip organizers” volunteer. These were two people from different households who would plan all the details of the upcoming trip together. And then we would run the program. That was the most exciting moment.

I had written a program that would randomly select a town in the region. The program took as its input a list of towns in Sweden (actually not “town” but tätort, which is a charmingly Swedish concept, defined in a wonderfully elegant way: a collection of dwellings with at least 200 inhabitants and no more than 200 meters between buildings). The program also used the public API of Google Maps (you don’t need to know what that means) and could look up the transit times between each town and Uppsala, which was the origin from which the RTC departed on its trips.

The program also had parameters which could be tweaked: how big the town should be, the maximum distance from the origin, the minimum distance from the origin, etc. We discussed these until we were satisfied with what we called “the doughnut”: a region centered on Uppsala, at least 75 minutes away (nobody wants to go next door), but not more than three hours away, by public transportation. We also decided that the town should have at least 10,000 inhabitants, so as to guarantee that there would be a hotel and several things to do. Defined thus, the doughnut (one member of the group, a German speaker, kept calling it “the bagel,” which I found hilarious) included a few dozen towns in central Sweden.

So, gathered around my laptop, we would do a drumroll and run the program, which, for the sake of suspense, was designed to wait a few seconds longer than the twenty milliseconds it actually took. The result was fairly uninspired from a design perspective, but filled us with glee.

Photo: Gregory Garretson

Once we knew where we were going, there were only two people who had to do any work for the next three months. These were the trip organizers, who would book seats on a train, make hotel reservations, find interesting-looking restaurants and book them (taking into account the allergies and pickinesses of all of the members), and look into what sorts of activities could occupy a group of jolly travelers for two days in this random place. That was the most challenging and interesting part of planning the trip.

There were two rules for how to plan the trip:

• Nobody is forced to do anything; individuals may opt out of any activity.

• The point is simply to have as much fun as possible in this particular place on this particular weekend.

And then, after three months of growing anticipation, on the appointed day we would meet at the train station and set off for about two days of zany, hilarious, and carefree fellowship.

Photo: Gregory Garretson

The Life and Death of the Random Travel Club

What was it like? It was amazing. I was lucky in that I had found a great group of people to do this with. But the design of the experience itself was incredibly conducive to enjoyment: We had no goals other than to have fun. We had to make no decisions more difficult than what to order for dinner. We were operating at maximum curiosity, eager to see this town, which we had generally never been to before, in as positive a light as possible. And we were all in a good mood and spent the weekend laughing and laughing.

It was also nicely varied. Over the course of the years that the club was active, we did all of the following activities:

• went to a Christmas market

• toured a castle

• went dancing in a club

• went to a historical museum

• visited a bizarre local museum collecting old technologies

• attended a classical concert

• toured a copper mine

• went bowling

• walked on a frozen lake

• competed in an axe-throwing contest

There was even a trip during which the other members organized a surprise birthday party for me, complete with cake (no doughnuts, though) and balloons.

But of course, all things come to an end. After a couple of years, one member left Sweden, another couple had a child, and various other factors led to the Random Travel Club being put on ice. There exists, theoretically, the possibility of a reunion trip, but the fact that the members now live in four different countries would make the trip logistically challenging and would make for the world’s biggest doughnut.

Photo: Gregory Garretson

I hope that the story of the Random Travel Club helps to illustrate the possibilities of engineered socializing (which, in a way, is already very popular in some countries, as I will discuss in future posts). I also hope that it shows how things that may seem inorganic and “nerdy” can actually lead to tremendous amounts of fun.

I have considered creating a website that would help other people form their own Random Travel Clubs and provide them with the software to do it, but with the advent of AI, I think that people could now probably manage it on their own. I am happy to talk to anyone who is interested about how to do it, though.

What is your perspective? Would you enjoy activities like this? Do you have any examples of similar things you have done? What ideas for engineered socializing do you have that others might benefit from? Please leave a comment if you have something to share.

And please help yourself to a doughnut.