Adults Are Going to Sleep-Away Camp to Make Friends. It Seems to Work | Hacker News Reader

Adults Are Going to Sleep-Away Camp to Make Friends. It Seems to Work

wsj.com

54 pointsimpish920810 comments

I couldn't be more for this. Maybe one day people will realize that school still works for adults, too, and make it easy for adults to dabble in attending for fun or to refresh stuff that they forgot since college.

Going to sleepaway camp remains fun when you're an adult. Learning things remains fun when you're an adult. Adulthood doesn't have to be isolation and atomic family units, it just means you have a job.

Only issue remains putting bread on the table… otherwise I imagine I'd be living a much different—and much more social—life.

There's a subset of sleepaway camps for adults that are quite popular for musicians - they typically consist of sleeping in cabins at night and attending lessons and workshops throughout the day. I went to one a few years ago, and even though I was a full standard deviation off from the mean in terms of age I still had a good time. This seems like a cool idea too.

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/style/adult-sleepaway-camp-social-getawa...

I feel like I have done a somewhat decent job of trying to keep some of that childlike wonder in my own life, even just not abandoning things that I love like video games, watching anime, the occasional cartoon.

I do wonder in practice how this really works for making friends, once you leave camp there is now a distance limitation.

But I have long wondered about the idea of recreating some of the experiences from childhood as adults. Things like camp, maybe going to a "day care", or other things to just not think about all of the stress of life for a little bit.

Sure we have things like going to Disney, amusement parks, adult oriented arcades like Dave and Busters. But as fun as those are they are not really replicating the childhood experience like this seems to do and other things that could be made similar.

My partner and I talk about that occasionally - that we both have the same ‘joy’ over activities that we always have, and we’re not shy about sharing it with the people around us. I think it definitely helps to cultivate a community of likeminded / compatible friends. We give people permission to openly enjoy themselves, and I haven’t really found a down side to that as of yet.

> Things like camp, maybe going to a "day care",

Adult day care would be fun. If I had a partner that told me "I'm too busy to do anything this weekend; I signed you up for adult day care though..." ... I would absolutely go. At the very least for the novelty of it.

Not sure where you are; in Texas there are quite a few dude ranches (family/couple/solo friendly despite what the name may imply) that I highly recommend finding one with the level of activity you're in to. Some really get into the rancher thing, others will have light trail horse riding and get more into the social sitting around a campfire communal thing before, during, and after chow time.

This is why music festivals are so popular.

Yeah turns out proximity results in friendships who would have thought…

Surprised there was no mention of vibecamp.

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