Inside the parties created to help people in Perth make friends

When Aeson McKay returned to Perth after living in Bali for several years, there was one big change he couldn’t help but notice from the last time he was in town: no one was talking to each other.

Okay, so that’s not entirely true. People were chatting with people they knew. But the joyful atmosphere he saw abroad had disappeared when he went to bars, restaurants and clubs. People remained glued to their friends or phones.

“When I came back to Perth, I was going to bars and clubs and no one was talking to each other. Even in venues where people traditionally communicate,” McKay recalled.

Having built a career in hospitality, curating club nights where people connect IRL, to use online parlance, McKay realized something fundamental was changing in the way people socialized.

“When social media really explodes, people say, we don’t know what impact that might have in the long run on communities and people’s social skills and things like that,” he said. “And I think we’re in the final stretch of seeing how this plays out.”

This wasn’t just in clubs. On social media platform Reddit, McKay noticed the same post repeatedly appearing on the site’s Perth page: “Where can I make friends in Perth?” “I just moved to Perth and I’m having a hard time making friends.” “Anyone want to be friends? I’m lonely.”

McKay wasn’t imagining this. Actually, we are a little lonely. The latest Household Income and Labor Dynamics survey in Australia, published in August, revealed a marked decline in the number of friends people have.

The survey, based on interviews with 16,000 Australians who met with researchers occasionally since 2001, found people had fewer friends than before and were socializing less overall. The number of people who meet with friends or relatives several times a week has fallen from 32 percent in 2001 to 20 percent today.

It seems like a perfect storm of working from home, distance learning and, of course, social media platforms (which we are discovering are far from social), and of course, the social divide of the COVID years has led to an epidemic of loneliness. And this is especially felt by young people.

“The research is now really clear,” said Sam Teague, sociologist and Deputy Dean of Inclusion (local) at Murdoch University. “We experience chronic levels of anxiety, isolation and loneliness, especially among young people.

“We spend time online chronically. Sometimes I meet with young students and survey them about how much time a day they spend online, and sometimes we talk about eight to 10 hours a day connected to devices.”

Dr Teague said several factors were contributing to the loneliness epidemic. COVID has played a role in normalizing isolation. Rising cost of living pressures mean young people have to work harder to make ends meet, and the increase in everything from studying to working being done remotely is isolating many people from others.

Dr Teague said flexible learning was hugely beneficial in many ways, but it also had a downside, as “students can take a second shift at work and watch their lectures online at 10pm”.

“In the early 2000s, it was the norm to have a room of 100 students in the first period, and this happened every semester,” he said.

Dr Teague said many students were missing out on important experiences that older generations took for granted. Having to meet in college. Or they spend long hours in the office when they first enter the workforce.

It turns out the flip side of flexibility is insulation. He also accuses social media of distorting the human experience of socializing.

“As young people post everything to Snapchat, to TikTok, to Instagram, they are mediating, diluting, distorting and then adjusting that experience,” he said.

“Ontologically, you’re having this experience, but you’re also thinking: ‘Well, how is this going to be photographed or captured so that it can be recorded for history?’ “We are changing people’s ontological experience.”

If the channels through which people make friends are disappearing, what’s replacing them?

For McKay, who has built a career on party curating, Perth’s loneliness seemed like a problem he could help with. He recently founded Elsewhere Social Club, a weekly meet-up at various venues in Perth with the slogan “Because Life Goes Offline”.

His social media is very anti-social media. “Hot people meet offline,” one post reads. “Social media apps are literally anti-social,” says another.

McKay is clear about the purpose of Elsewhere Social Club: This is not a dating event. A party where people can connect and make friends. Where they can party like it’s 2006.

“Everyone who buys tickets does so because they want to meet new people and be part of a new community. I think that’s something that’s missing,” McKay said. “What we want to build is something that’s a little bit more of an insider’s club. People are like, ‘I don’t go out on the weekends anymore. I go to other places during the week. The people there are legendary. You wouldn’t believe the amount of friends I’ve made since going to these events.'”

Dr Teague said he was pleased people were being proactive in connecting, especially young people. “It’s really cool that we’re actually trying something,” he said.

McKay isn’t the only one trying something. While social groups are nothing new (MeetUp, which helps people organize events, has been around since 2002), post-COVID organized friendship groups have been a godsend.

In 2023, dating app Bumble launched a separate app for people to search for friends instead of dates. A group called Kin Connect hosts coffee chats for groups of people selected by age and interests. There are lots of social groups on social media – Perth Social Society, Perth Pals, Social Run Club, the list goes on.

Befriend is a Perth-based organization that has been around for 15 years and helps people create communities around their interests. It has 19,000 members.

Carmel Croft, one of 80 volunteer community-building and social support leaders at Befriend, has a theory about why Perth is a particularly difficult place to make friends organically.

“Perth is a small city and a lot of people grew up here and have had friendship groups for years,” Croft said. “We don’t have a great public transportation system, we don’t have a great nightlife. We don’t have a lot of the things that big, vibrant cities have. So if you don’t know people already, it can be difficult.”

Befriend has made it easier to form many friendships; 88 percent of attendees said they made friends at their events.

However, Dr Teague says if people truly want to connect with others they need to look up.

“A lot of times when people are out and about, they’re looking at their phones, looking at their watches. There’s somewhere else they need to go, or something else they need to do the next morning. Our eyes are fixed on what’s in front of us,” he said.

“The first challenge will be getting people to put their phones down and look you in the eye. Connecting that way. And once you achieve that, you’re at a good starting point to start building a relationship.”