Hangout Geometry

an essay from Harry on the many shapes of hanging out

I was recently at a Substack writer’s happy hour party in Carroll Gardens with Randa. She was there for work, cultivating a vibe that fucked, and naturally had a few more social to-do’s at the party than I. I was there representing nmjc–this very staque–with a whopping [redacted] subscribers. We were talking shop with published authors and savant teenagers running small businesses out of their inboxes. 

There was a moment early on in the party when Randa left me to go chat with a friend and I was alone. This is the worst-case scenario. Nobody wants to glansberg at the quasi-intimate networking event. 

If you DO find yourself g-berging, you have 3 options: find the person you came with, go on your phone, or join an existing conversation. If you are choosing life, the answer is option 3. 

The point of a third space, after all, is to break up the fun-yet-entrapping comfort of an inner sanctum riff sesh.

So in this moment of solo-party-attendance, the whole world starts to slow down. I’m neo in the matrix, scanning wildly for something to do. In these cases I sometimes pathetically find myself trying to ID someone wearing an adult menswear garment from a brand I’ve heard of. Thankfully, a substack employee made eye contact with me, saw me glansburging, and invited me into her conversation before I had to ask someone if his sweater was Aime Leon Door. 

In the matrix moment, seeing possible conversations with strangers rain down in cool-looking green code, a theory about hanging out hatched in my brain. There is a certain literal geometry to a good hang.

This is not necessarily a novel idea. The idea of the “open floor plan office” which moved from genius, to annoying, to sinister, to totally irrelevant in 10 years, was a funny attempt at hang-out geometry. The hope, of course, was that the UX leads at Uber would just saunter over to the engineer and strike up a relaxed low-key conversation about fine-tuning various gesture tech motions in the next update.

When I worked at IBM we had an open floor plan and it was ass. The only good way to get to know your coworkers is to drink a beer on a Wednesday with them, im afraid.

The Harvard Business Review wrote a takedown of the open floor plan in 2019, invoking 18th-century French philosopher Denis Diderot’s 4th Wall theory. HBR argues that employees create their own 4th wall in an open floor plan. They pretend they are alone, and in the same way that a good actor convinces you their drama is real, a UX designer who really doesn’t want to talk can do a good job convincing their office of the same. HBR found that when some firms switched to an open floor plan it led to a 70% decrease in human interactions. LMAO. 

HBR also used these images from Artist Olalekan Jeyifous’s series “The Political Impermanence of Place” which are so sick.

Tech job or not, we’ve all experienced this kind of Open Floor Plan Hangout Dysthymia before. It’s the reason good bars are cramped and kind of fucked up. A proper hang should be optimized for chaos not comfort. 

CONVERSATION MICROFRACTALS / NAPE MINIMIZATION THEORY

I was recently at a ‘singles party’ with my single friend Al. We knew very few people there and obviously wanted to meet hot chicks. Step one is entering a conversation with like….anybody. When you’re in that situation, the  last thing you want to see is the back of somebody's head. 

There is nothing more fucked up then trying to enter a conversation from the back. If someone came up from behind me and said “hey whats up” my first thought is I need to locate weak spots on their body in case I need to kill them or stun them or something. Imagine introducing yourself to a stranger and the first thing they say is “oh”.....you my friend, are cooked. 

Nape City, USA

The answer, of course, is a semi-circle. Standing in a semi-circle at a party will change your life. Socrates thought he snapped with the circle. Wrong. That dude was a loser. A circle is for children playing duck duck goose, not adults Being Ironic at The Bar. 

The semi-cricle helps those INSIDE the circle too. Bits and good points and dangerous ideas need room to BREATHE. Plus there’s always the possibility for a party-defining chaotic moment. A friend once got into a tiff with someone because they overheard him saying something about BDS and thought he was talking about BDSM. Or maybe it was the other way around….

Anyway, give it a try. 

COUCH TRIANGULATION VIBE DIFFUSION

I heard a story about someone who was sitting on a couch watching TV when a girl they had recently kissed came into the apartment. There was some fun and chaotic ‘we just kissed’ vibes and the girl asked “what are you watching”. The guy then said “i think you should leave”. The girl was stunned, of course. Though she didn’t realize that he was answering her question, he was watching Tim Robinsons incredible sketch show “I Think You Should Leave.” They never kissed again, I’m told. 

Now, partially this has to do with our fracturing monoculture, and some bad luck with TV show titles, but I’m convinced another part of it is that there is nothing more sexless than trying to have a conversation when one person is watching TV and the other person isn’t. You are sitting on a couch, squirming around like a dog attempting to dry itself off, all while trying to talk to the person behind you. Whats worse? They’re stuck too. Total no mans land. What are they gonna do? Sit next to you on the couch and just pretend that they’re also watching the second half of a Duke vs Kansas pre season classic game? Are they gonna move into your sight line so they can watch you watch TV? The vectors are broken. The point is, a level of hangout geometry is at play here. 

I’ve seen it platonically too, I live in an apartment with stairs (ladies…) and our downstairs has a TV. As a hang drifts from upstairs to downstairs, I notice the tenor of the conversation shifts. Big ideas move to “why is Andrew Wiggins shooting like ass”. There is room for both of these conversations, of course. Everyone knows you need your full diaphragm to talk about politics.

would love 2 chill here

SPLIT PARTY DEATH SPIRAL 

When you turn 11 and you have a birthday, inevitably one of your basketball friends or your ‘camp friends’ (for me it was a Theil coding bootcamp my parents sent me to when I was 8) is at the same party as your school friends. This can be many young peoples first time experiencing true shame. Something doesn’t work, and your world starts to fall apart. This happens over and over as you get older, crescendoing your freshman year of college when the high school squad meets the college boys. It usually works but its never perfect. In part, I attribute this to flawed hangout geometry. 

One tell tale sign that the vibe of a party is Slight Off is when there is Indoor Squad and Outdoor Squad. Or perhaps Upstairs Squad and Downstairs Squad. Legendary hanger outer and football coach John Madden coined a phrase that is so sick that you don’t even really need to understand it for it to land. He said  “if you have two quarterbacks, you actually have none.” This is such an insane bar and we need more people saying stuff like that. In any case, if you have two squads at a party, you actually have none. 

The geometry here is in the negative space. The shapes, whatever they may be, need to be close to each other. And more importantly, they need Integrative Nodes. A fella who knows a girl in the other circle. A guy who works with someones GF. 

No party should be arranged in a way that tolerates a circle of 8 or 9 people. A cluster of 8 or 9…MAYBE. But a circle, like with a coffee table in the middle…YUCK. Don’t get me started about a circle where 3-4 of the people are on a couch. Just go home! If the party stops spinning for long enough for a big circle to take shape, you’ve lost the battle and the war, I’m afraid. 

CONCLUSION

My friend eli told me once that Whole Foods across the country had their stores audited for “Feng Shui in the early 2010s. He told me that the stores with better Feng Shui actually performed better than those with worse Feng Shui. I believe this, or maybe the spirit of this. 

I’ve never really tried playing an active role in a sesh’s hangout geometry, but perhaps I will. Maybe I’ll post up at particularly powerful vector at a bar, seeing if I can turn a circle to a semi-circle or something like that. I hope to see you there.