Hanging out
Literally, this is all I had to work with
Why don’t we hang out at each other’s houses anymore?
Do you remember when you were young and you had no money? Maybe you had a bike or parents who didn’t mind dropping you off at a friend’s place. There was no plan, no coordination to friendship. You’d watch tv or play video games or board games. You’d chat about random things. You’d raid the kitchen cupboard. You’d hang out and that was enough.
I’ve been wondering where all my money goes. It’s so expensive to live in Melbourne. Yes, the rent is insane and gas and electricity prices are a rort. More than that though, our entire lifestyle is designed to spend.
Skip forward to the present day and we organise weeks in advance to go somewhere with friends. We check out a new bar or café. We drop $20 on breakfast, $30 on lunch or $20-$40 for drinks and another $30 for dinner. EACH. If we see a movie or a show, that’s $25-70 on top of that. Do that once or twice a week and it quickly gets expensive to be social. We’re forever filling up our diaries to catch up in two hour turnover timeslots.
I invited a friend over to play scrabble recently. She brought cheese and we drank wine and we laughed about words. Geeky, I know, but fun and cheap and surprisingly relaxing.
It’s my birthday soon. I feel like I should pick a venue somewhere on Chapel St, but I cringe to think how loud, expensive and wanky it’s going to be. We’ll hug everyone but only talk to the one or two people we can hear over the music. We’ll bring out our phone calculators because the place doesn’t split bills and someone gets awkward because they never carry cash (spoiler alert: I am almost always that person). Between us, we’ll drop $400-500, purely because birthday.
I want do things differently.
Let’s sit out in the back yard under fairy lights, listen to our own music and drink our own wine. Let’s go over to each other’s houses to watch a movie or Netflix. Let’s dust off the board games. Let’s share dinner. Let’s go on road trips. Let’s sit on the beach and read next to each other. Let’s have bored conversations and get to know each other over time instead of pieced together from stories during catch ups.
Let’s be less busy. Let’s be less fancy. Let’s hang out?
“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
Mark Twain
Muchness 
People don’t hang out like they used to because times aren’t the same as they were. You need to hold onto the simple things to offset the loud and annoying things.
You like to go to a noisy chow-hall to spend time with friends… we get on the bikes and will ride either day or night (usually Friday night) to go to a friend’s place about 160km north of Brisbane to sit around a fire and look at the night sky 🙂