three things a year of gathering strangers taught me
- we're not short on friends. we're short on strangers. most of us can name our friends. we keep our group texts alive and plan the coffee and trips. but we know something is missing: acquaintances, a broader community, the people we could simply bump into in an earlier world.
- we're surprisingly good with strangers, when the table is set for it. put open people in a room actually designed for meeting, and they open up in minutes. humans reliably produce the magic, if you set the stage and make a room where opening up is the whole idea.
- games are uniquely powerful at closing the gap. a game flattens status, gives your hands and head something to do so you can meet each other sideways, and opens a temporary world you step into together. the game is what opens the door.
hi, i'm brenen.
i spent the last year and change hosting strangers in bars. more than forty nights in now: a table, a game, a candle, and a room full of people who mostly arrived alone.
the experiment is called ligare gatherings, from the latin ligāre, to bind. i seat strangers by how they connect, not who they are, give them something to do that makes real conversation easy, and deploy a little ritual: a candle, some music, some fancy mints.
i host public gatherings where strangers meet, and private ones where workplaces and teams actually bond. and i'm looking for people who want to gather, host, or bring ligare to their community, in whatever shape that takes.
i was lucky to get to share what i'm learning recently through TEDx, and i write (sometimes) about what i'm learning building something weird, social, and a little magic in today's world on substack.
what brings you here?
a year of strangers, drawn
every dot is a real person. every line is two of them at the same table. nobody arrived knowing anyone.