Finding and being with your tribe is the American experience

Note: I thought of this topic more than six weeks ago and now it's really hard to come up with the motivation to write on it. I wish I'd written it earlier.

The idea behind this was this: I don't see American culture anywhere. Specially when I'm working from home, my only connection to the outside reality is youtube and netflix, and rare trips to grocery stores and takeout places. Where are the fun things people do on tv happening, how do people make communities, expand their circle of friends, find interesting cute hobbies that keep on expanding, meet their tribe and just get into this mindmeld with the American way of life, I wonder. It feels like we're floating around in a cultural vacuum with no interaction with the external world, only boosting ourselves.

Then I thought about why I felt that way. Because I've not done most things Americans do. The chief of it being attending concerts and making music friends. Not like there haven't been opportunities there: my favorite podcasts have showed up in town, favorite bands as well, and they weren't expensive to attend. I didn't go, got too lazy and avoided making the commitment. I never got to experience the culture. I've never attended a game in a stadium, not in the North Station Celtics' court, not in Fenway with the red sox, not the Gillette stadium. No mass American experience. I haven't been to any of the popular state fairs. The only large conference or convention I attended was the nerdy tech con two years ago, and that was exactly like being at work but a thousand times bigger and a hundred times more 'tech concentrated'. No fun.

Is it only the outgoing and the extroverted who have designs on the cultural zeitgeist or can more boring people construct a cultural identity that's enviable all by themselves as well? What would that even look like? Or is culture by definition in the territory of those that like to socialize because it needs to transmit to survive?

And then I thought about how that's actually one of the core of American identity. To be able to recreate the person you are. You aren't stuck with the friends and family you were given. You can seek a subculture or hobby or interest, find people like yourself, get into great depths with it and make your own tribe. Be with your own kind of people. Perpetuate your own kind of culture, live in your own mini-bubble. Which I guess I"m already doing with my friends and family, but I want to go beyond. i want to see what's out in the world.

So I need to be more outgoing, see more concerts and festivals and sports maybe learn to drive. Drive, ugh. I just wish I could have access to somebody who would rive me around and take me places. 

Tricky.