Chatting with a guy at the Denver Bouldering Project coworking spot flipped my view on meetups

He told me he stopped going to big generic 'freelancer' mixers because they felt like sales pitches. Instead, he finds small workshops for specific skills, like a recent Figma animation class. He said the real connections happen when you're actually learning together, not just swapping cards. Now I'm looking for a local WordPress plugin dev meetup instead of the big monthly mixer. Anyone found a good small group for something specific like that?

4 comments

4 Comments

cora8133mo agoMost Upvoted

People talk about quiet quitting like it's some new epidemic, but isn't it just... having a job? Most folks have always done their core tasks and gone home. Calling it a trend makes it sound way more dramatic. It's just a new name for clocking out at five instead of burning out.

laura_wilson3mo ago

Read a blog post about this exact thing, lol.

craig.piper3mo ago

Yeah, it's funny how that happens. You see one blog post about something, then suddenly you notice it everywhere. Like when you learn a new word and then hear it three times in a day. I saw a video about "quiet quitting" and then started seeing signs of it in my own office, with people just doing the bare minimum. It makes you wonder if the idea was always there or if talking about it just makes us see it more.

nancyramirez19d ago

OMG YES that totally makes sense! I went to one of those big freelancer mixers downtown last month and it was EXACTLY like that, everyone just trying to sell their services and handing out cards like candy. But last week my friend dragged me to this tiny little watercolor meetup at the community center and we spent like two hours painting and talking, I actually made a real friend there. It's weird how focused on learning something makes people drop their guard and just be normal humans instead of sales machines. I'm lowkey jealous of that Figma animation class, that sounds WAY more useful than another night of awkward networking.