The stack of introversion/APD/etc. that I have makes crowded, noisy environments absolutely hellish. The default venue for social events appears to be somewhere so loud you can barely hear yourself think, let alone what anyone else might be saying a foot from your face. If you miss your 4 second window to ingratiate yourself to a conversation while stunned by the literal wall of noise, you'll spend the next hour worming between closed circles of participants, trying not to bump into too many strangers/coworkers/parishioners.
Consequently, I've acquired the reputation of being "anti-social", despite being desperate to forge friendships with other people. I'm forced to conclude that normal people actually like this state of affairs, though my natural assumption is that this is an Abilene Paradox situation.
There simply does not seem to be a sufficient market for social events which are structured to facilitate, rather than impede, socialization. This seems like a massive market gap, but no one is rushing to fill it. The obvious enjoinment is for me to organize such events myself. This is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, however, so I'm skeptical that I'd get an adequate pay-off for my efforts.
For instance, in the time since I left the first half of this post in my drafts, I hosted a small secular Solstice gathering in my apartment. It wasn't a bad event, but it wasn't such an enjoyable experience that I'm in a huge rush to host small events on the regular. I've got plenty of ideas for rat-themed events, but pretty much everything requires a certain buy-in. I don't know where I'd even begin on trying to reach people outside my existing small circle, so only fairly well-established concepts like Solstice are likely to reach the break-even threshold.
