One of the best pieces of advice I got when moving to a new city was about how to meet new people and form community.
The advice was that if you couldn’t find people who were doing something that you liked, go out and do it, and eventually, people would do it too. Doing something you were genuinely interested in would eventually attract others that were also genuinely interested in that thing.
Because when you go to other things that you’re not interested in, the default is to make yourself seem as interesting as possible to attract the people who are doing this activity that you don’t necessarily enjoy that much.
When you’re not so focused on yourself and making sure people are interested in you, you’ll often connect with people much better, and faster. I heard a quote one time that was something along the lines of:
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming genuinely interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you”
Our nature is to try and make ourself the most interesting person in the room, but people don’t care about you, they care about making themselves the most interesting person in the room. When you can do that, and make them really feel special, you’ll much more easily connect with them and form a closer relationship.
And it’s not only giving of yourself and only being interested in them. You’re not condemning yourself to only hearing about the other person your entire friendship (depending on who the person is). Because by becoming genuinely interested in them, you will automatically become more interesting to them also because of how curious you are about their story. By them feeling so good around you and sharing so much, they’re more naturally going to start asking you more and more questions.
Stop trying to be interesting and start finding other people interesting.