Throw A Party

A few weeks ago my friends and I came up with an inspired idea. What if we just threw a huge party for no reason?

Within the span of an hour, Heather, Dan and I had come up with a hook for the gathering, designed an invite page, and invited roughly 100 different people. Eventually, the invite escaped containment and the list of invitees ballooned to 203 people. We got 81 RSVPs. I’d estimate that was around the number of total people who eventually showed up.

The premise of the concept was goofy and difficult to explain. In the early 2010s, our friend group consisted almost entirely of people who worked low-level jobs in digital media. Some people were young writers, others worked in social media strategy (now called “audience development”), while others worked for a platform like Tumblr.

It was the height of the digital media boom, and each spring we’d see half of our friends decamp for Austin, Texas to do who cares what at South by Southwest. It became a buzzy brag: “Sorry, I won’t be around this weekend because I’ll be at South by!”

Those who were left behind created a counterprogramming party, obviously called NXNE. I was never involved in the planning of the original NXNE events, which we held annually from 2013-2016. But the comments I left on the Facebook Event pages for the original NXNE events indicate that I always had a good time.

“Oh my God, why would you bring that back?” asked one old friend when I informed him that we were relaunching NXNE. He turned out to be one of the top “Oh my God, it’s great to see you!” attendees when he did show up.

“Will there be panels and slideshows?” asked my newer friends who were confused by the premise. (No, we’re dorks but we are not losers.)

NXNE was only one thread in the tapestry of our social lives. Back then, we had to work in offices in Manhattan, which made it easy to coordinate meetups at bars in the East Village or at a book reading at Housing Works in SoHo.

In the wake of our party, I decided to interview some of our attendees. I asked them four questions:

1) Did you make any new friends?

2) What did you think of the concept?

3) How do you feel about parties in general?

4) Do you think people should throw more parties?¹

The answers were, obviously, broadly positive because these were people who chose to come to a party and were willing to answer questions about having a nice time at a party. I’m not doing rigorous science here. I’m just trying to convince you, the reader, to throw a party.