A Fool's Errand
By Nathan Branson
September 2023
20 Minute Read
Volume 2. Issue 8.
The Case for Parties After High School
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When I was 17 years old I wanted to be cool.
I lived in a small town in North Carolina that I thought was devoid of culture and each weekend, my two friends and I embarked on a quest to free ourselves from our perceived prison.
Our destination was a cultural epicenter, a place where the early 2000’s MTV culture flowed like water, a place where all our youthful dreams and ambitions could come true, a place where we could truly be admired.
I’m talking about Chili’s.
The restaurant was 30 minutes outside our town and most weekends we went with high hopes that we’d meet some girls, bring excitement into our boring lives, and in doing so, ascend the hierarchy of high school.
One Friday night after failing to meet any girls, we were driving back to my friend Mike’s house, convoy style. I was in my 1987 GMC Jimmy; my friend John was in a 1998 Ford Mustang and Mike had a blue 1998 Jeep Wrangler. At some point during the long drive Mike had an epiphany, a way to redeem the night and erase our post-Chili’s teenage self-loathing. I was thankful when Mike flipped on his signal and turned into a corner store because my SUV was struggling to keep up with my two compadres.
Mike got out of his Jeep and said “Alright Nate, I’m gonna go in and buy some beer and put it in your car, then we’ll go back to my house.” I nodded and didn’t ask questions. Mike’s parents were out of town that weekend which meant we had the freedom to do whatever we wanted.
To be honest, I was nervous about putting the beer in my car. I didn’t want to drink beer, but I also didn’t want to be seen as afraid, so I went along with the plan. I sat in my vehicle, motor idling, and tried to act calm while Lil Wayne’s “Big Tymers” played on my CD player. The fluorescent lights glowed, lighting up the entire side of the building, and I anxiously hoped that our plan would fail.
Mike came out of the store looking frustrated, John by his side, no beer in hand. Instead, he held up a pack of Black and Mild cigars. I pretended to be disappointed.
We pulled out of the parking lot, and continued down Tower Road toward Mike’s house. It was dark, an evening where mist had settled over the route making it hard to see. The road was narrow and worn and I was trying to keep pace with Mike and John who zoomed ahead in their newer cars. I turned up the volume to “Everybody Get Your Roll On” which thumped my two 12-inch subwoofers — making me feel immortal and free.
Suddenly, Mike and John took a sharp curve and I scrambled to adjust. My tires lost traction and the car careened off the road. I had no control and a flash of white came before my face as the car spun while I slammed the brakes. Then it stopped.
I was in the middle of a pasture and the bass was bumping as I sat in the dark, uninjured, but somehow not on the road anymore.
Dazed, I sat in my car with small pieces of jagged windshield glass all over my lap, my headlights completely off, but Lil Wayne still rapping. I put the car in park and turned the music down.
I never asked Mike why he wanted to put the beer in my car.
Eventually, Mike's house did end up fulfilling our need for a party location.
The house was down a gravel driveway, two miles away from where I wrecked my SUV. The entrance led through some thick woods and then into 20 acres of land. It had a hot tub and a backyard with five to six acres cleared off, and on good nights you had a great view of the sky. As high schoolers, we of course didn’t appreciate the sky or admire natural landscape. We were more interested in creating our own party utopia.
The inside of the house was perfect. It had an open kitchen, dining room, and a loft with a big-screen TV along with large windows and vaulted ceilings like something off HGTV. Everything looked new, and each time I stepped into the house my mind filled with hair-brained ideas of how we might maximize the location to our advantage.
Mike’s parents were out of town at least one weekend a month, which gave us the privacy and freedom to throw routine parties.
We didn’t exactly know how to plan a party. We had no way of communicating to the masses about the party, and we had no idea what we’d do at the party outside of hanging out on the back deck with whoever showed up. Our manual for throwing a party was the movie “Dazed and Confused,” which we watched regularly.
One weekend our junior year Mike found out his parents were leaving town, and we launched a desperate campaign to get the word out before the end of the week. We approached our targets like spies, subtly drawing near and whispering, “party at Mike’s house tonight.”
This only caused us more anxiety, as we feared that people might actually show up, see there was no beer, and then think it wasn’t a “true party.” Somehow at around 6pm, someone got a hold of a bottle of liquor and our party ended up being five football players and one cheerleader sitting around smoking cigars, trying to stomach liquor for the first time.
We sat around from 8 to 10pm, disappointed, but hoping that somehow more attendees would arrive. Rather than fulfill our fantasies, the alcohol only made people moody until someone puked all over the bathroom. The night became emblematic of a recurring pattern of pre-party grand hope at 5pm that magically lots of unexpected new people would show up, followed by self-loathing at 9pm when we ended the night with the same five or six friends sitting around a table on the back deck next to the hot tub staring at one another.
But each time we “failed,” it only fueled our dreams of success.
By the time our senior year arrived, we’d learned some lessons and things started to change. John, Mike and I were seniors on the football team, and while the team was terrible (2-7), we got to wear our football jerseys on Fridays, which brought us enough respect in the hallways to rally enough people for a decent party.
Soon, word spread about Mike’s house. People started showing up. Then lots of people started showing up. Then people from other high schools started showing up. Then we became so successful that even people who had come home from college and graduated before us were showing up. Mike even figured out how to get a keg two different times, just like we’d seen in the movies.
Amidst this new party environment, my social skills began to bloom. In many ways I had become what I set out to be, popular.
What I wasn't, however, was mature.
In reality, we were at the fringes of the popular crowd and needed to keep our distance from the dorks. I distinctly remember being selective over who I would and would not tell about Mike’s parties.
Despite those vain, self-serving attitudes, I look back at this time impressed at our ability to gather people together. Our frustration and attempts to have “the perfect party” were admirable because we were all just a bunch of lonely teenagers. We had mixed motives and fragile egos, but deep down we had a unanimous devotion that might be summed up in one sentence “I want to be around other people on Friday and Saturday nights.”
Amidst this, there was something pure. But we may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater when we all entered adulthood.
It’s July 2023 and I get a notification on my LinkedIn account that states “The way we live and work is making Americans lonely.” I click on it. The title of the post says “Loneliness Lingers” and a reporter who works for LinkedIn has integrated some stats about how 29% of Americans are living alone according to a recent study by the U.S. Census Bureau. The post includes a hyperlink to a statement from Surgeon General Vivek Murthy for a strategic plan about how to decrease social isolation.
Below that is a LinkedIn post by a lawyer named Gavin Alexander who writes a sincere confession about living alone during the pandemic. He says: “So many of us are absolutely still recovering from the unprecedented, life-interrupting trauma of the pandemic. It will take time. Things will be different. Some will be better. Some will be worse. It’s a new world, as much as it is the same.”
I roll my eyes and sigh.
I’m a little jaded with “true confessions about mental health on social media.” Does Gavin the Lawyer have any insight into “the new world?” Am I a mean person for demanding concrete solutions over vague proclamations? I skim over the post again and notice that Surgeon General Murphy’s conclusion that America has a severe loneliness problem can be traced back to April 2020. Murphy saw the signs before the pandemic started. I stop judging Gavin the Lawyer and start reading more carefully.
The post is mostly bleak aside from a link to an article published in May 2023 where Murphy outlined a National Strategy to Advance Social Connection consisting of the six “foundational pillars” to combat loneliness. The sixth pillar reads:
“Cultivate a Culture of Connection: The informal practices of everyday life (the norms and culture of how we engage one another) significantly influence the relationships we have in our lives. We cannot be successful in the other pillars without a culture of connection.”
It dawns on me that back in 2001, when we were trying to throw parties at Mike McGhee’s house, we were cultivating a culture of connection. I don’t know about the other guys, but I know that I was experiencing loneliness. And I was proud to be a part of something that sought to fulfill our need for community.
We did it then, but can we do it now as adults? Can people in their thirties simultaneously work to establish their careers and cultivate a culture of connection?
LinkedIn is a Weird Place of Anxiety
In July 2015 I was hired at Carteret Community College in Morehead City, NC, to be a part of the English faculty. The college campus is on the beautiful Bogue Sound overlooking the intracoastal waterway. I knew no one in the city, and I needed to find a place to live as soon as possible.
After searching for 48 hours, my hopes of finding a house or apartment were bleak. Despite my excitement about the new job, I remember sitting at an IHOP with my mom eating blueberry pancakes thinking “this might be a very lonely experience.”
Morehead City had a population of 10,000 people and I had decided to risk having a good social life in my early 30’s for the sake of having a stable future in my career in higher education. There in my stomach, I could feel a deep dread as I imagined sitting at home alone on weeknights in a town of strangers. I stared out the window and said a silent prayer.
Later that night, while scrolling through rental listings at the Holiday Inn Express, I saw it.
The next morning, I walked into a white house on Evans Street and immediately noticed how high the ceilings were, just like Mike’s old place. There were plaster walls, 8.5 feet high, chipping paint, a brick fireplace exterior painted white, with built-in bookshelves on the right and the left. The front porch was 20 feet long and it wrapped around the side of the house. 25 windows provided excellent natural light and right across the street was the Bogue Sound, which meant I only lived one mile from my community college and three miles from downtown Morehead City where all the seafood restaurants were located along the waterfront. It looked like the kind of place where a writer would live or the kind of house you would rent in grad school in a cool urban area.
With my first hurdle cleared, my brain marked the next challenge before me. I was single and 31 in a town with less than 15,000 people. It was daunting. How was I going to meet others? On top of that, I didn’t have a legal North Carolina driver’s license.
In early 2015, the state of NC revoked my license because of seizures. To make it even more difficult, the town had no public transportation and I had to develop my own, personal transportation network by being blatantly transparent about my situation with everyone I met. I not only needed to meet people for friendship but also for the simple task of getting around town. I didn’t just want to know people. I needed to know people.
It wasn’t all bad news. Being on Evans Street meant I could ride my bike to work, the hardware store, to church and also the grocery store. My life became limited by geography and the people I knew, which meant I had to take social risks. I had to explicitly ask people for a ride from point A to point B while trying to avoid guilt-tripping them. I developed my own script for obtaining these rides:
Posture: Smile, make eye contact, and firmly shake hand.
"Hello, [insert person's name], my name is Nate! That's a nice shirt you're wearing [or alternative compliment]. I noticed that nice [insert car model and make] you're driving. I too am a fan of vehicles, however, due to my medical condition I can't currently drive. Would you be willing to give me a ride home after [insert social event] is over? I live on Evans street."
One coworker who gave me a ride after I explained my condition remarked, "Oh. You have epilepsy. I always assumed you couldn't drive because you got a DUI and were too proud to walk home." It dawned on me that in being vulnerable I gained a deeper connection with those I met.
The most generous people during this time were the people I met through my church. I was connected to a group of single people in their 20s and 30s who often hung out, which was the jackpot to getting rides but more importantly to developing a foundational community for my new life.
I was professionally thriving as an English professor at the community college and gaining more freedom, but I was still lonely. Rather than binge Netflix, I found myself coping by putting in 10-12 hours of work on the weekend to get ahead in my job.
Still, I knew I would quickly crumble inside if my weekends devolved into workaholism. So I made a choice: I began to brainstorm creative ideas for how I might gather people on the weekends. I started a Word document where I brainstormed party concepts and bought a planner to strategize how best to use my free time for the sake of documenting new party ideas and strategies.
It felt as if my previous partying had all built to this moment.
My goal was simple, but not easy: establish my home on Evans Street as the party epicenter of Morehead City. Through my ride sharing initiative and church, I’d met numerous people and felt it was time I leveraged my new social capital. I started to host gatherings.
In March 2017 I had a theme party for “Rednecks vs. Hipsters” where I asked people to dress as one or the other and made a corresponding playlist for each category. In August 2018 I had a watermelon party where we sat on my front porch enjoying the refreshing fruit in the summer heat. In January 2019 I threw a “Listening Party” where I asked people to email or text me three songs: their favorite song, the song they hated the most, and the song that they liked to dance to. Momentum grew.
My house became known as a place of gathering. Just like Mike's house from high school, people began to come from various walks of life. It didn't matter that I didn't own the house. What mattered was that people found that same feeling we were chasing as high schoolers. Except now we were all adults chasing our professional dreams and handling the demands of adult life. I knew I couldn’t wait around for someone else to execute my idea. I had to be the person to initiate the fight against loneliness.
As for me, hosting gatherings was the antidote to working myself to death.
Workaholic Prevention Parties at the Evans Street House
One morning in December 2019, I was brainstorming ideas for my next gathering. I sat at my kitchen table, planner open, chewing Cheerios with blueberries. Light from the morning sun beamed into my kitchen and illuminated a poster of Eddie Vedder on the wall. He bends over the crowd manically grunting out his lyrics at a Pinkpop Festival in 1993 while a mob of rabid fans screams in euphoria to his music. In that moment, I knew what I had to do. It was time to throw a 90s party.
I’d previously tried to throw parties in January and February because there were no holidays and nobody could go to the beach. So I targeted late January 2020 for maximum impact, created a Facebook event, and invited about 40 friends.
Despite my conviction and recent string of party successes, I still had those same lingering feelings of doubt I’d experienced as a teenager. One night I laid in bed thinking:
“You’re 36 years old and you’re still having theme parties. There’s something off here.”
“Shouldn’t you be doing something else with your time instead of having a 90’s party? Shouldn’t you be establishing a side hustle to make more money?”
My doubt grew.
But I reflected on my previous successes. Stranger ideas had worked in the past. Yes, it was a risk to have a 90’s party at 36 years old. Maybe I would be perceived as silly and juvenile. But the potential costs were worth it. The reason I rented the house was to host people, not just to be a place where I slept for the sake of my job. I had to go to battle with loneliness, push back against my workaholic tendencies, and instead, root my weekends in shared experiences.
On the night of my 90’s party, 20 plus people packed into my living room. It was 7:30pm and then suddenly my friends PJ and Katy showed up fully decked out in 90’s clothes — two people who didn’t even RSVP — and it sent a buzz through the room as the crowd reacted to their appearance. Relief flooded through me.
In a way, a party is about the preservation of dreams in the face of the harsh realities of the adult world. We use our houses to eat, cook, work, and solve the problems of life on the weekdays. But a home can be so much more. What if we used a weekend party to be the pause button where we can rest and catch our breath? Where we fulfill another basic need we all have? The need for community.
There were petty obstacles that got in the way of social connections when we were 17 years old. And sadly in our 20s and 30s, not much has changed.
We think about throwing a Halloween party but then our insecurities show up. We don’t want to look silly by wearing a costume and there’s a big presentation we’re giving in mid-November.
We get a dinner invite for a Wednesday night at the neighbor’s house. Work is crazy and we need that time to grind out the real estate project we’re working on.
We consider hosting a small reunion for college friends in September but then hope that someone else will lead the charge. Also, our rental house is modest and our friends might judge us. We may not have enough room.
The excuses are endless, but they’re really no different than our insecurities at 17. We just choose instead to justify our excuses with work since our 20s, 30s, and 40s become viewed as the prime “earning years.” But really they’re the prime living years.
Along with that, we are in our prime in terms of leadership skills for thriving professionally, but we seem to forget we could use those same skills for social goals.
What’s most important is that we aggressively make time in our schedules for moments of connection to push against the problem of loneliness and isolation.
If we fail to connect with other people in adulthood, it may be our own faults for taking ourselves and our careers far too seriously.
Nathan Branson is a professor of English at Carteret Community College in Morehead City, North Carolina. He blogs in his free time and recently started surfing.
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