This Is Not a Story About Hanging Out in Bars
Written by tikli. Also available as a Mastodon post.
Page last updated on 16 July 2023 [change log].
Me and my friends spend a lot of time together hanging out in this one bar. Some time ago, it was sold to a new owner. All of us agree that the place has gone to shit under the new management. Music plays louder, some of our fave drinks are not available anymore and the bouncers aren’t doing their job, so you can’t enjoy a nice evening without getting harassed by someone in the next table.
We’ve talked about finding a new place to frequent, but we’re also used to this familiar environment and are a bit afraid to try new things.
Anyway, a new bar just opened, and it’s not even far from “our bar”, it’s in the next block. It’s pretty similar in style, they have food and drinks, comfy booths, dance floor upstairs etc. Price level is the same, or even lower than in our regular bar.
I know these details, because last weekend I decided to check it out.
Everything looked nice, there was no weird smell around (like there is in my usual bar; yet another thing the new management caused), the drink list had several of my favourites, the music was good etc. All in all, a place I’d love to hang out.
Unfortunately, after sitting there for half an hour, nursing my drink, I decided to go back home.
Why did I leave, if the place was so good?
Well, it’s good on paper. It has all the right qualifications. But it lacks one thing.
My friends weren’t there.
Yesterday, I went to my regular bar again. It was so much fun to hang out with my friends again, even if the bar did experience a couple of power outages and a small fire.
I mentioned visiting the new bar and how nice it looked, but how I didn’t really have a good time there because it was so quiet.
“Oh, I went there last weekend, too!” one of my friends said.
“Damn, I didn’t see you.”
“I got there at 10 pm.”
“Oh, I had already left at that time,” I lamented.
Another friend chimed in. “I popped in a bit before 11, but I didn’t see you either.”
“Yeah, I think I left around 10:30, because I got bored.”
We sat in silence for a while.
“The drink list was so good, though.”
“Right! And there was a lot more leg space in the booths!”
“I could actually hear my own thoughts because the music wasn’t too loud.”
At this point, our conversation got rudely interrupted because the people in the next table demanded that we explain to them why we hate music. We tried to ignore them, but eventually we just decided to leave the bar, since the whole place was getting noisier by the minute and they still hadn’t put out the fire in the bathroom.
When we were walking down the street, I suggested that we should just go to the new bar, right now, together. Maybe that way we could better gauge if we truly would like to hang out there.
Because it’s not about the place, it’s about the people.
If all is this really happened, instead of being an elaborate metaphor where I compare Twitter and Mastodon, me and my friends would have spent a lovely evening at the new bar, and decided to stop going to the old shitty place. We’d tell all our other friends to come to the new bar and hang out with us, because the venue really is quite good, and once you get the party going, we’re gonna have so much fun.