Have We Forgotten How to Socialize

With more than 50% of Americans vaccinated, we are slowly returning to face to face socializing. We've spent so long in some form of isolation that it makes me wonder. Have we taken for granted that our social skills will be intact when we need them. Welcome to episode 40, where I discuss how we can feel comfortable socializing again. This episode is sponsored by Nickerson, a full service branding, marketing, and PR and communications agency with team members in Boston. LA Miami and New York city. For the past three and a half years, I've kept a five year line a day journal. Each page of the journal includes an entry for five successive years, allowing me to revisit my thoughts and activities on a specific day, over the span of five years, in essence, it's a snapshot of each day. In the year of my life, and then I can easily compare that day to the previous year in the lines of, but for the past 15 months, my line a day has represented a virtual Groundhog day, each day, starting and ending the same exact way over and over again. Morning, run. Weightlifting worked all day. PM Peloton ride and then whatever Netflix show I happen to be bingeing at the time. Right now it's the serpent. Each night as I write that same sentence, day after day, my eyes look up to the previous year's entries. What's scary is now the line from this year. It looks exactly the same as the line from a year ago. Morning run worked all day. PM Peloton, Netflix. I have to look further up the page to 2019 to see what. A day in the life used to look like pre pandemic. It started the same morning running lifting, but that's where the similarities end. Because then it would be filled with activities. Morning, speech afternoon, business lunch, happier with the girls evening networking event, home late. The activities from years ago seemed effortless. Filling your calendar seemed effortless. As of the release of this podcast, I'm fully vaccinated. I can now begin to resume regular activities. My calendar has started to be populated with lunch meetings, business development, get together as an even in-person speeches. I've actually booked three flights like on a plane. In the last week. It all seems so surreal. Almost as surreal as working from home, wearing a mask in staying six feet away from everyone did when the pandemic first began. For the past 15 months, we've gotten used to treating people as if they are potentially toxic guarding ourselves from being too close to other people. So it makes me wonder have the past 15 months diminished our social skills. Have we forgotten how to socialize. I bet the answer is yes and no. There will be people like me. I circled May 13th on my calendar and wrote in big fat letters. Watch the fuck out because Julie is back. As soon as I got my second shot, I started booking things in my calendar for 14 days out, BD lunches meetings, happy hours and get togethers. Why we'll hug and kiss every other fully vaccinated person. I come in contact with. There'll be so much that he needs to catch up on that. I barely have time to come out. Prayer. In 2000 Ray Oldenburg and urban sociologists published his book. Celebrating the third place. Oldenburg identifies third places as the public places on neutral ground, where we can gather and interact. In contrast to first places, which are the home and second places, which is your office or your work. Third places allow people to put aside their concerns and simply enjoy the company and conversation around them. Oldenburg explains that beer gardens, main streets, pubs, cafes, coffee houses, post offices, and other third places are the heart of community. Social vitality. Over the past 15 months, we've all been stripped of our third places. And even if we did visit them, we were still masked and socially distanced, handicapping, and their ability to provide a place of ease and enjoyment. I am eagerly awaiting the full opening of all of our third places. But I know that for the vast majority of people. They'll be somewhat of a learning curve to feeling normal in social situations. Again. As Dr. Marisa Franco mentioned in episode 38, we are seeing a huge uptake in the number of people who are experiencing social anxiety, even people who never experienced anxiety before. She went on to mention that when you haven't interacted socially in a while, it's normal for you to feel a bit rusty. For the better part of the last 15 months, our social interactions have taken place via computer screen. Yeah. We've had driveway drinks with the neighbors and other socially distance interactions, but none of them felt normal. As we ease back into being social creatures, again, at whatever pace serves you, we can probably expect to feel the same level of fatigue as we felt when we pivoted from in-person to virtual. Remember how fucking tired we all were. When we first started working from home, how our bodies and our minds had to adjust to doing everything in a virtual platform. Well, Now we have to train ourselves to interact outside of the virtual space in person. And this will inevitably lead to fatigue, but like any other skill socializing gets easier. The more we do it. Our muscles may have atrophied, but they haven't disappeared. On April 30th, the day after I got my second shot, there was an article on CNN titled how to socialize for the first time again, after a year of isolation. Aptly timed. In the article they interviewed Jane Webber. An assistant professor of counselor education and doctoral program coordinator at Kean university. In the article, Jane lays out a few steps to enter your first social engagements. The first is to be okay if you feel nervous, like I'm super excited to get back out there, but I'm still nervous. Like I'm constantly thinking, do I have to wear a mask? Do I need to tell the wait staff at the restaurant that I'm fully vaccinated? Can I shake hands with somebody? I don't know. I'm nervous about all of that stuff, even though I'm excited to get back out there. A second piece of advice is that perhaps for your first foray into a third place, pick a place that you know, that you are comfortable in. Perhaps go to a restaurant where, you know, the wait staff or the owners this'll help you feel more comfortable getting back out there. Her advice for conversations is actually to avoid talking about the pandemic instead. Talk about what you used to talk about before the whole world went to shit. In her last piece of advice is to just take the first step we isolated when we needed to, but we don't need to anymore. We are human beings who thrive with social connections and our lives are better when we are with other people. So if there was ever a drink made for groups in socializing, it's a scorpion bowl. Are we actually doing it this week? Yeah, well, sorta, because I actually do make and test all the cocktails before I share them with you. I'm bringing back the single serving. Scorpion cocktail, which is how it was originally served before trader Vic's realized in 1947 that you can serve it in a big fucking bowl. If you want it a little pop culture with your cocktail. As a teenager, Candace Bergen drank scorpion cocktails at the Lou, our restaurant in Beverly Hills, which was known for allowing underage drinking. After drinking it. She said it was such a strong drink. I couldn't figure out how to get out of my chair at the end of the meal. And another piece of pop culture, cocktail history, Joseph Marshall, a college student back in 2001 still holds the record for drinking a scorpion bowl by himself in just under 11 seconds. I'm sure his parents were so proud. Look, I'm a sucker for a Tiki cocktail. I blame the Brady bunch and I blame Elvis blue Hawaii for that. This recipe actually, isn't just for one cocktail. It's for two, because we're easing into socializing. All right. Ready? Three ounces of orange juice, two ounces of lemon juice, three ounces of light rum. Half an ounce of gin, half an ounce of Brandy and one ounce of almond cert. Now you're gonna mix all that together and pour it into a small pitcher over crushed ice. And then we're just going to let it sit for a little bit, like not. Not super long, but like these sort of cocktails always get better. The more they sit and sort of stew. So just let it sit for a little bit. And then when you're ready to serve it, pour it into a hurricane glass filled with ice, or you could pour it into a champagne flute. I've seen it serve that way before and garnish it with, um, Garnish it with an orange and a cherry. All right then family. It's that time of the podcast, where I ask that you please subscribe and review the podcast on iTunes. This podcast has been downloaded thousands of times. And yet I only have 49 reviews on apple, which is great. I love those reviews, but I'd really love some more because I know so many of you are listening to the podcast. So if you like this podcast, Please do write a review that would mean so much to me. I really appreciate it. Also, if you're wondering where you can get more Julie Brown, I don't know why you want to, but if you're wondering where you can get more, Julie Brown. You can find me at my website, which is Julie Brown, bd.com. Or you can follow me on Instagram at Julie Brown, underscore a BD where I post shit all the time. Sometimes it's the cocktails from this podcast. They make it onto my stories. Sometimes it's the Visha. At work's kitchen where I test out recipes. It's usually cake. I love cake. So it's honestly, it's usually like cake or cookie recipes if you're into that. So. Check me out there. If you want. Until next time. Thanks for being here. I really, really appreciate you coming back every week. Until next week. Cheers.