You cannot overestimate the impact of being a good host, who hosts consistently. For several months in 2023, I hosted a dinner, pregame, or party ~weekly. Always at least 6 guests, usually more like 15, frequently more like 30 of them. Hosting on that cadence was fun but taxing! I only had the stamina to do that for several months while I had a default co-host (my roommate) and we lived in a building with tons of other friends. I’m so glad that I did it, and I’m terribly glad I don’t feel the need to do that anymore. Before and since then, I have 2-3 people over most weeks for a chill hangout. I throw a proper event (eg 15+ guests, with a partiful) only every 3 months or so. Usually NYE, my birthday, and another couple of random parties in a year. They’re always so much fun. I rarely send out an invite more than 10 days in advance, but they’re always well-attended. One of the most delightful things in the world is when my old roomie from years ago gets excited about seeing our old neighbors who used to come around all the damn time, bc they’re both at the same big party and haven’t seen each other in ages. The other delightful thing is when I go to somebody else’s party & they’ve invited one of my friends who they met through me — and they’re homies now, and maybe even closer to each other than they are with me. It fucking rocks. Tons of my friends now host stuff on the same cadence that I do: a handful of significant events a year. You know what the sum total is of 15 people inviting you to 4 events a year? You have plans every week, at least. When you hear about New Yorkers humble-bragging about how swamped they are with partiful invites, it’s bc tbh we actually have 40+ friends who’ll throw us an invite every so often, bc if you attend these things even 50% of the time and you’re even a little friendly, you meet a new friend-shaped-acquaintance almost every single time. The lists just keep growing. And that doesn’t even account for one-on-one and small group hangs. When we say we’re oversocialized, we really mean it. Very few of my friends had this kind of social abundance 5 years ago, or even 3 years ago. It all compounded over time bc we participated in creating the social lives we wanted. I implore all of you to start trying. You gotta start somewhere. I didn’t always have 30 actual friends to invite to things — I had maybe 30 people I kinda knew, and some of them were proper friends, and then I invited smaller groups over until more people were proper friends, and it just ballooned from there. It’s not magic or rocket science. Get over yourself and let people you like hang out in your slightly messy living room all the fucking time. You will not regret it!