Try Contra Dancing

A popular icebreaker in San Francisco these days is “How would you spend your life if AGI meant nobody needed to work?” For me, I think a surprisingly big part of the answer is a dorky-sounding kind of folk dance called contra dancing.I started trying to answer that question by thinking: what are the things I do atelically—because I enjoy them for their own sake, not in pursuit of some longer-term goal? For me, a lot of that has to do with things that are (1) physically joyful, and (2) help me feel connected to other people.My pitch for contra dancing is that among physically joyful and connecting activities, it’s one of the ones where it’s easiest to get to the point where it’s fun, and therefore one of the best to start out with. Many other forms of dance require weeks of lessons before you’re even encouraged to do it socially at all. By contrast, the format of contra dancing means that you can go to a half-hour beginner lesson before your first dance, and there’s a good chance you will be having a lot of fun by the end of the evening.What’s more, the fact that it’s so easy to start having fun shapes its community and priorities, such that it has among the best vibes of any activity I do.I first encountered contra in middle school. My mom ran an intentional community, and we had a housemate move in named Bree. Bree was obsessed with this thing called “contra dancing,” and every week she would try to convince me and our other housemates to come with her.Which I absolutely refused. I was an extremely uncool middle schooler, and that meant I was terrified of doing anything that even whiffed of uncoolness, lest I give my classmates another reason to judge me. I was also deeply awkward; I’d never even been to a school dance and barely talked to girls. But Bree was persistent, and one of our other housemates got hooked, and eventually I was intrigued.By then, though, I was dug in as a contra hater, and I was scared that if I admitted I had changed my mind, my housemates would make fun of me. So I kept refusing.Finally, my housemate Thomas, who was even more of a skeptic than I was, told Bree that he would only go if I went, presumably so that she would stop bugging him and bug me instead. Aha—my golden opportunity! I could pass off my change of heart as a prank on Thomas. “Okay, sure! It’s a deal!”Bree and I showed up at the Concord Scout House one Thursday evening and jumped into the next dance. It was an unusually complex square dance, and I got confused—in fact, so confused that my entire square ended up giving up halfway through.✻✻ This is at least a 1-in-10,000 event; I've never seen it happen again in over 20 years of regular dancing.I was mortified. Not only was I doing a deeply uncool activity, I was the least cool person there, ruining it for all the slightly less uncool people with my incompetence and lameness.Except that the other dancers didn’t seem to see it that way. Instead of resenting me or making fun of me, they said things like “Gosh, that one was really tricky!” and “Sorry, that’s really not what it’s usually like!” and “Please don’t give up, try a few more dances! Want to dance with me?”I tried some more dances, I didn’t cause any more collapses, and by the end of the night I was overflowing with exhilaration and joy. I went back the next week, and the week after that. I went to the twelve-hour Snow Ball and then the weekend-long Flurry Festival. I got to feel cool for the first time in my life when people started…

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