Where do you seek/find intellectual stimulation IRL?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m not talking about reading or listening to The Great Courses or other solitary activities, but where do you go to find other people you can talk to about stuff besides work, TV, sports, etc?

I belong to a book club-- and it is a SERIOUS book club with some thoughtful, smart people who have challenging and opposing opinions (which is fabulous)-- but this is just once a month. I also have a friend I meet for coffee and we do have stimulating conversations about a variety of things… but I could use much more. I feel like my brain is drying up.

I like to gossip and talk about makeup and the cute things my cats do as much as the next person (always like to hear a good pet story), but I also miss being with people who are curious about things, read everything under the sun, have weird insights, and enjoy posing unanswerable questions. There are plenty of them here at the SDMB, but I don’t know where to find them IRL. As I’ve gotten older, people like this have disappeared from my life.

Do you require this kind of stimulation (from others) in your life? If so, where do YOU find it?

Whenever I post a question like this that I think is pretty interesting, I never know if it will kick off a discussion, or just lie there like a dead thing in the road…

2

Good question. I don’t know. There is a meetup group devoted to atheism, many members tend to be fairly intelligent and the conversations can be good sometimes (but not always). Its kindof like here wrt the quality of conversation, at least some of the time.

Aside from that, I talk to my brother occasionally.

But by and large, I don’t have outlets for intelligent conversation.

3

Last fall, before I moved to the Twin Cities, I had a friend in California I could talk to, but I’ve never been great at making friends. I should probably put some work into that, try to find some kind of social groups on meetup.com or something like that, but mostly I’m just a hermit these days.

4

Is there a college or university near you? In addition to the possibility of taking a class in some subject you find interesting, there may well be events open to the public (lectures, presentations, concerts, plays, guest speakers, discussion groups, etc.) that are open to the public and that would attract intellectually lively people.

5

I pretty much don’t bother at all with people who can’t engage in these ways. What’s the point? I can do it all with the friends I have, most of whom I found very early in my life and never let go. My closest and most cherished friends, who all fit the above description and much more besides, came into my life as follows:

Carrie & Jane - 7th grade = 44 years
Banana - 1977 = 37 years
Ellen, Sherry: 1990 = 24 years

I also have very close and stimulating relationships with Ellen’s husband Simon (11 years) and Carrie’s husband Wayne (44 years).

Here’s the secret to it: we simply never let each other go. We recognized that we were damned fortunate to have found each other; “drifting apart” was never an option. We don’t see each other all that often (I’m a hermit), but we have never stopped having wonderful conversations by phone, and in recent years, by FaceTime. (Love that a bunch, it really is the next best thing to being there.)

Never for a second have I believed that the excellent and amazing friends I have been so blessed to have could be easily replaced, or replaced at all, really, so I have made nurturing and maintaining those relationships the top priority of my life.

Also, by the way, another “Absolute” in the list of things I need in the people in my life, and they in theirs, is genuineness. No bullshit. No tiptoeing, no lies, white or black, always real, always true, always ourselves. Again, why fuck around with anything less?

(I’m enormously gratified to say that, no doubt as a result of this attitude, all of my close friends listed consider ME their closest friend or one of two or three, and have all at various times and ways told me that I am, in fact, an exceptionally excellent friend to have for reasons both light and heavy. I’ve embraced this as the most meaningful and important accomplishment of my life, the thing which justifies my continuing to take up space in the world. Were I offered the opportunity to trade it for writing a hugely successful novel or fulfilling some of my other dreams, I wouldn’t even be tempted. Turns out what I’m good at giving and being is what feeds my heart and mind best as well.

But now that I DO have this stuff wired in, I’m all for doing some of the other, too… :smiley: Which reminds me of a thread I think I wanna start about regrets…

6

What Stoid said. Can’t improve on it at all. M incredibly lucky that one of my best friends is also my sister, and another is my daughter’s MIL:)

7

I’ve found some VERY good friends at science fiction conventions.

Role-playing gaming groups are also fairly good places to meet people who, if maybe a little geeky, are seriously intelligent people. I met a friend via the Steve Jackson GURPS discussion boards, and he’s now a good pal and gaming buddy.

Here on SDMB, by some judicious use of private messages, I’ve made some very good pen-pals, with whom I have a pleasant extra-SDMB correspondence.

Writing groups can be good. I linked up with some other frustrated would-be authors and we meet monthly; everybody reads everybody else’s contributions, we all critique each other mercilessly. It isn’t a real meeting unless someone breaks down in tears. (No, not at all! Seriously, it’s incredibly supportive. If you are a frustrated writer, and if you can find a group like this, it can be great!)

MENSA gets a lot of bad opinions…but if you use it carefully, it can be a good way to meet worthwhile people. A friend of mine was in MENSA for a while, and I sort of benefited in a side-stream way, meeting some of the people he met, and retaining a few as pen-pals.

Use that informal social network! Ask friends for recommendations.

Being pen-pals is a good way to start. It’s non-threatening and there’s no commitment. When you find people you like, then eventually you can ask if they want to meet in person.

8

I’m still looking for it IRL. If you find it somewhere, please let me know. Everyone I interact with seems only able to talk on a single issue. Sports. If not sports, it’s something tangential to sports (Sports figures, Sports wives, Fantasy Sports).

If I may quote myself from another long ago thread

9

I’ve been lucky. I made a ton of wonderful, intelligent friends when I went on a Jonathan Coulton fan cruise a few years ago, and many of us stay in touch in between cruises. Most of the interaction is online, but there’s a large local contingent that tries to get together a couple times a month for game nights, discussion nights, pub trivia, and that sort of thing. We discuss random hypotheticals relating to superheroes and fictional universes, but we also talk economics or medicine or computers - whatever’s on our minds or in the news.

I bet there are a few of them in your area - I’d be happy to try and connect you. :slight_smile:

10

Local politics is hugely stimulating, though that supposes it’s a group of intellectually engaged folks interested in getting to the heart of real issues and not … well, you know, the rah-rah tribal bollocks and shouty nonsense.

11

Isn’t this real life?

12

I pay an off duty librarian for intellectual stimulation. We meet at a local used bookstore and then head to her place. When I go home, I leave the money on the bookshelf.

J/K, but I see an opportunity here. . .

13

The internet has all kinds of intellectually stimulating places and information. SDMB is one of them, and often leads to other interesting sites. Wikipedia is another.

In real life, I have a weekday lunch companion whom I look forward to seeing. He recently got an MBA, so I enjoy picking his brain about business-related issues. He’s an electrical engineer, and I’m a mechanical engineer, so we often talk about wide-ranging engineering/technical issues related to our work or to idle curiosity about phenomenon we enocunter in everyday life. Social issues, religion, obscure humor, relationships. We’re both married, so we talk about the pleasures and foibles of our relationships.

I think Stoid is onto something. Columnist Mary Schmich wrote an article about 15 years ago that became a song. It was framed as a speech to a graduating class, and included this line:

Friendships need maintenance, or they wither and die. I’m notoriously bad at this myself; apart from family, I haven’t kept in touch with anybody I knew during the first 22 years of my life, and I’ve only maintained relationships with two of the people I knew from grad school. As much as I enjoy my lunch companion, I fear our relationship would fade away if he relocated.

14

Nowhere. Smart people are boring and/or obnoxious.

15

Jesus, man, this is probably the saddest and most terrifying response so far! (And I agree with you absolutely in your bafflement…totally leaves me dazed and confused…I can’t even fantasize a reason people can get so caught up) Where in god’s name do you live?? I am so lucky to be able to say that in my life, the sports nut cliches have been largely fictional. Not a single man I was ever involved with gave a shit (well, one did, he was a serious Lakers fan, but still not obsessive and single track by any means) about sports, the only person I can really remember having any passion for it at all was my oldest sister, who was a pretty big football fan.

I am really blown away by what you describe and if you are telling the unexaggerated truth I’m genuinely curious about where you live and what you do that this could be so pervasive in your world. Can you enlighten me?

(I have long said of myself, pretty truthfully, that I’m at least a little bit interested in just about everything…except team sports and cars.)

16

But you do remind me of something…the whole single-issue interest sort. Even if it’s a subject I find interesting, to focus almost exclusively on one area would be impossible for me.

I once spent a pleasant evening having dinner with an acquaintance of mine who is a porn star from way back when (not a porn performer, a real porn star…), and another mildly well-known woman who makes her living writing and lecturing about alternative sexuality and practices, especially dom/sub in the LGBT community, and her lover. Plus me, the net porn gal. We were dining after we’d done a reading from a book about women in porn that we’d all contributed to. It was interesting as hell.

But after the reading and meet-greet, dinner, dessert, long walk around Greenwich Village on a gorgeous fall evening, I don’re member precisely what prompted me, but I clearly recall what I did, which was totally* lose it* at the woman writer, something along the lines of “Oh my fucking god, is there any other subjects on earth outside of sex? Is it really not possible for us to discuss ANYTHING without it coming around to sex?? REALLY? JESUS!”

And I recall the gobsmacked look on her face… I felt horrible the minute I said it, but it was honest. I love talking about sex, from all angles: personal, political, physical, spiritual, humorous, etc. It’s a biggie with me. But I was just fucking exhausted with it at that point and I couldn’t believe they weren’t as well. but there are actually a lot of people like that, folks who have huge amounts of energy and passion for one subject at the exclusion of everything else. I can’t begin to imagine what that would be like. It sounds like a prison sentence.

17

OH…and one other: the NO-interest sort. I have only met one such person that I know of, and I actually count her someone I care about. She’s much younger and the circumstances of our relationship sort of obscured it and allowed us to form affections for other reasons. But it became clear to me a long time ago that she is a genuine narcissist in the purest possible sense: she is interested in almost nothing other than her own life, and that consists of almost nothing except the pursuit of money and attention from men. I’m not exaggerating.

And here’s the most terrible thing: it’s not within her control. There is no cure for it that I am aware of. Think of the things which you find 100% uninteresting, stuff that doesn’t ping a single brain cell. Could you force yourself to find it interesting? Of course not. Now imagine that you felt that way about almost everything. It’s actually a nightmare, because she is, surprisingly, an intelligent woman with a good heart who wants and wishes it were otherwise. But how can it be? We’ve pondered it together, along with a third friend who is just like me, and none of us has ever been able to see an answer for it. The older and more isolated she gets, the more dreadful the consequences of it become…she has a very tiny life.

I feel for her and I wish I had a way to help, but being a person who could keep myself entertained and educated 24/7 for centuries without breaking a sweat because I find everything interesting, I’m probably not the best person to ask…

18

I think it’s about a very core emotional need we have to be really seen, and people who have known you deeply since childhood really see you.

IN my case we had the extra of growing up in the 70’s, in Hollywood, which was a huge influence on us in many ways, not the least of which that during high school we spent more than a few weekends playing “Group Therapy” which was a board game modeled on real therapy. So we were digging deep from the very beginning. And looking back on it almost half a century later I can say with confidence that it was a great thing, helping us blow past a lot of the agony that adolescents are prone to as they fumble with becoming real people, and contributing hugely to our bonds.

19

Thanks for these thoughtful replies.

It seems to me that about 15 years ago, I did have a circle of interesting people. When my late H was alive, we had some great parties with fabulous conversations going on in all the rooms. Some of those couples have split up. Some people have moved away. A bunch have died. It was like a golden age that I’ve not been able to recreate.

20

Maybe strive to move toward a platinum age?