How much brain power do you invest in optimizing processes, acquiring skills, managing projects and writing reports for professional purposes? I personally found myself applying most of my cognitive skills in solving professional challenges, and from my life experience, this behavior applies to a large number of people.

Having reflected on this, let’s ask why we limit the application of our cognitive and organizational skills to professional purposes only. Would it make sense to utilize these skills for a fulfilling leisure time as well? After all, it is a well-founded fact that a contended life requires social and emotional satisfaction just as much as professional development.

1. New Format of Socializing and Leisure Events

What if I told you that once a month, you could join an event at which you would meet about fifteen of twenty-something–year olds who are passionate about what they are doing in their respective student and working lives. Additionally, they enjoy fun-loving behavior and for them, spending quality time is not necessarily limited to drinking alcohol. In fact, it aligns with their notion of widening the horizons, acquiring new skills and undertaking active pursuits. Thereby, this group of young people explicitly cherishes a wide variety of leisure activities. This month, they might visit an exhibition on the psychology of magic; next month, they might discuss their favorite books and how those impacted their personalities and after this, they might go to a trampoline park.

Millennials Born in the 90s +/-	Thirsty for Knowledge Enthusiastic about Development	Joy of Living Fun-Loving and Spontaneous

This idea of a series of events strives to create circumstances in which young enthusiastic people are more satisfied socially and emotionally in their leisure time. It is meant for those millennials who want to spend their little available free time in inspiring and meaningful ways and are willing to connect with their like-minded peers. In case I have triggered your attention, let me elaborate on the five main driving forces that resulted in the above-presented idea. I would appreciate your comments on this article because I consider you as a representative of the aforementioned target group.

2. Driving Forces

(1) Time Matters

There are two reasons for launching this initiative as soon as possible. Firstly, according to the elders, the older you get the harder it becomes to build meaningful relationships. From what they say, it is better to build a strong social environment in our 20s than later because the older we get, the “more you need the people you knew when you were young.”¹ Here is why: as time goes by, our life paths are growing apart—we develop our habits, make our own observations, build both emotional and professional relationships, acquire skills and all that shapes our unique personalities that eventually result in our very unique understanding of the world.

Now imagine that we meet someone for the first time in our 50s. It then becomes hard to catch up on all the missed interaction since we have channeled most of our energy into other relationships already. Building trust and getting to know each other require a lot of emotional effort and time. However, when done with the right people, it is definitely worth it.

The second reason for getting to know the right people (and staying in touch with them) promptly is the key to leading a satisfied life. The sooner we meet each other, the more quality time we can spend together. Bronnie Ware, who worked for over 20 years as a caregiver for the dying, mentions spending little time with friends as one of the top five regrets of her dying patients.

“Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.” ²

Bronnie Ware, Australian caregiver and author of the book The Top Five Regrets of The Dying (2012)

(2) Deep and Inspiring Relationships

Picture this: Lina is a 46-year-old mom whose children are gradually growing up and will leave the family nest soon. Thinking about how she is going to spend her newly won leisure time, she starts to reflect on her social life. She draws the conclusion that apart from her family members, most of the plenty of people who surround her physically are emotionally not close to her. She realizes that many of her assumed friends were, in fact, contextual acquaintances in high school, university and working environments with whom her interaction faded once she left those settings.

In short, there is a very limited number of people that she shared her life path with and vice versa. This means that most of her relationships were superficial and did not include meaningful interactions about her feelings, milestones, aspirations, hopes and so on. If you were Lina, would this have been a problem for you? For me, it would definitely be one because I feel a strong positive correlation between the quality of my relationships and my contentment in life. My thinking is supported by the main takeaways from the most consistent study of happiness ever conducted—the Grant Case Study.

(3) Quality Beats Quantity

In many situations I have observed that life urges us to decide between high quality or high quantity because our resources, i.e., energy, money and time are limited. For instance, I can save up lots of money to buy one high-quality bicycle in a cycle shop. On the contrary, I am also free to spend the money on several low-budget bicycles available at discount stores. Another example would be a comedy show whose quality decreases as its number of produced episodes within a month increases.

For me this principle of quality beats quantity applies also to leisure activities—at least when it comes to socializing events or in other words, events to meet people. If you asked me to plan my evenings for the upcoming weeks, and I had to choose between several usual leisure events and one extraordinary event, I would prefer the second option. How about you?

You might wonder why this black and white decision should make sense. First of all, it helps to illustrate the core ideas behind the new suggested event format. Secondly, it is mostly about the scarcity of our time. We are all super busy with different responsibilities and have little leisure time. Why should we not spend this limited time in the company of inspiring people and in fantastic ways?

(4) Fun-Loving Enthusiastic Millennials

After flying from my parents’ nest, I had the chance to interact with quite a few people of my age in the last five years. I met them during my studies and international youth projects and at all kinds of spare time and professional events. Being a reflective person, I started to look for patterns in order to understand why sometimes my interaction and spending time with peers was extraordinarily amazing and in other cases, it was boring to me.

“You can laugh of everything, but not with everybody.”

Pierre Desproges, French humorist of the 20th century

This portrait was created by Maja.
Check out her channels on Instagram and ArtStation.

The answer, I found, was that the attendance of the appropriate people is vital in making our interaction valuable and enjoyable. I then discovered that for me, personally, being among appropriate people means to be in company with fun-loving personalities who, at the same time, find joy in learning something new and developing themselves. Up till now, I have met such neuroscientists, programmers, marketers, engineers, journalists, urban planners, economists, linguists and logisticians of my age. Owing to the pure quality time spent with the aforementioned people, I started to ask myself the following questions: Why do we not spend time all together? Who are the enthusiastic (and upcoming) sailors, psychologists, actors, archaeologists, astronauts, musicians and doctors of our age?

(5) No Local Offers So Far

Once I discovered this, I wanted to get to know more people who match both traits because in their company, no one has to justify themselves as to why they are intrinsically motivated to conquer life in a joyful way. If you ask me where I find such people, my answer would be international youth projects. I experienced many of my lifetime’s best moments exactly within the settings of such events.

Urban Spaces in Berlin	Moments of Unity in Saint Petersburg	Creating Movies in Hamburg
In this international project we dealt with different types of urban spaces. We examined street art, talked to urban researchers, visited a neighborhood of yurts alongside the Spree and so on. The active part of the project involved trying out unusual behavior in urban spaces ourselves or presenting situations that are typical of our hometowns, in the form of small theater performances.	In the course of the FIFA World Cup, MitOst organized a double project in order to emphasize how  soccer can foster intercultural exchange between Germany and Russia. We first visited Saint Petersburg and afterwards, the Russians came to Germany. In both the countries, we visited stadiums, talked to different teams (i.e., blind, LGBT and university communities) and played by ourselves, of course.	During this project we were first educated by media professionals on how to use camera equipment properly. Then, we were divided into little groups, and our group chose to shoot a small movie about an animal shelter in Hamburg. All videos were later broadcasted on the channel of a local media organization in Hamburg.

After returning home from these projects, I found myself missing such kind of events in my daily life. The reason may be that most of our socializing activities involving our youth, particularly, are somehow related to drinking alcohol. Moreover, most leisure event formats attract their participants through one or two characteristics only. For example, when you go to a volleyball club, you find people who enjoy playing volleyball. Likewise, when you join a discussion club, the attending people like talking over things—but all other characteristics are always random. It seems like there are no local events that can uphold the amazing settings that arise during international youth projects.

It took me a long time to understand why the socializing events that are being provided by the local event organizers do not meet my requirements of a valuable interaction. However, at some point of time, I realized that all the things around me are the result of other people’s views of this world … and I personally like how Steve Jobs formulated this wisdom. If I do not like their thinking, I can try to do it better. Armed with this kind of entrepreneurial approach of initiating the change that I wanted to see in this world, I started to change my mindset from a consumer’s perspective to a producer’s perspective when it came to socializing events.

3. New Event Ideas

After deep diving into my motivation to organize such events and bring together this very specific group of people, let me now walk you through the specifics of the events that I am thinking of. Kindly keep in mind that all of these events would take place in a group of 10–20 millennials.

I strongly believe that there are many more millennials out there who would enjoy such ways of spending their time. How else would I meet, in almost every social group, one or two of them? And I just cover a few; how about all the other social groups out there? Unambiguously, there are more people like that. Appropriately, it falls into place that we are facing just one problem: we are unorganized. We simply do not know each other, and there is no one who would consciously organize a setting in which we could meet each other on a regular basis. If this is the only problem that we face, I would be more than happy to solve it.

4. Conclusion

Now let us get back to the question that I asked at the beginning of this article: what if I told you that once a month you could join an event that meets all the above-mentioned demands? You would meet plenty of enthusiastic twenty-something–year olds who are keen on spending their scarce leisure time in inspiring ways. Going forward, I plan to organize such events both online and offline once a month. To be clear, let me state a few disclaimers regarding those events:

• It is about social and emotional interaction; this initiative is not for professional networking.
• You do not have to join every time, especially not if a particular event does not match your interests.
• The first setup will include millennials only. Later on, we can organize events for other generations as well.

Finally, I am knocking on this door because I am interested in building meaningful relationships. Even though superficial acquaintances might be thrilling from time to time, I am firmly convinced that the beauty of human relationships arises from sharing one’s inner world and building trust, and in order to do all this, we need an appropriate context and also peers who share this ambition. I frequently find myself reflecting that if profound relationships play an essential role in my happiness, I do not want to miss the opportunity of building them with like-minded people. What do you think?

References

• Cover Image was self-made by the author using the Marquee Light Bulbs Creator Kit
• ¹ Baz Luhrmann, Everybody’s Free (1997)
• ² The Guardian: Top five regrets of the dying (2012)
• ³ Techniker Krankenkasse: Plogging ist das neue Jogging (2020)
• ⁴ Psychology Today: You’re Not Laughing Enough, and That’s No Joke (2011)