At the EA Hotel we eat dinner together as a house every evening. Sometimes we play board games after. I think this has worked really well for providing social support/‘regularly being together’, and I highly recommend experimenting with shared meals if you live in a group house/work at the same organization and don’t already do it. The key prerequisites are: a system for figuring out who’s cooking, and a way to notify everyone when the food is ready (we ring a bell and put a message in the house Facebook chat).
The following is presented as an example of how organizing social support is hard, not that this is a bad idea: I find shared meals really stressful, and I know other people do as well. The fact that the default bonding activity is shared meals seems really bad to me. Between eating disorders, medical food restrictions, and simple preferences, just choosing a restaurant or menu can be really fraught.
At the EA Hotel we eat dinner together as a house every evening. Sometimes we play board games after. I think this has worked really well for providing social support/‘regularly being together’, and I highly recommend experimenting with shared meals if you live in a group house/work at the same organization and don’t already do it. The key prerequisites are: a system for figuring out who’s cooking, and a way to notify everyone when the food is ready (we ring a bell and put a message in the house Facebook chat).
The following is presented as an example of how organizing social support is hard, not that this is a bad idea: I find shared meals really stressful, and I know other people do as well. The fact that the default bonding activity is shared meals seems really bad to me. Between eating disorders, medical food restrictions, and simple preferences, just choosing a restaurant or menu can be really fraught.