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Welcome to Group Project, a series on the many ways young people are building and engaging with community. From queer resistance to finding new hobbies to forging alternate paths, working together is more important than ever. Here's how young people are getting off their phones and seeking community IRL.
One night while seeking a feeling of connection during a TikTok doomscroll, I discovered Evan Cudworth, who calls himself the world’s first and only party coach. “I don’t think you realize how not partying is not only making your life worse, but breaking down your trust in society,” he said in the video, disco balls spinning in his neon-lit room. “Every time you choose to scroll and stay in and build this little narrow view of the world, you’re breaking down society’s trust. If you’re feeling anxious and like you’re missing out on the world, it’s because you are.”
I came to this video five years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when social isolation wasn’t just a choice, it was a necessity. But despite the time that’s passed, I was still feeling that isolation that many of us got comfortable with in 2020. There's been a decline in face-to-face interactions, and Americans spend significantly less time socializing than they did 20 years ago. Anecdotally, an increasing number of people I know are using ChatGPT instead of reaching out to friends, forfeiting human interaction for an affirmative machine. Personally, I fill up far too much of my social cup with TikTok. The seclusion these technologies can cause is not only spiritually and politically dangerous, but desperately unchic.
Watching Cudworth’s video, which currently has 65,000 likes, brought a long-nagging feeling to the surface for me. Real community doesn’t exist in the form of yet another “What I Eat In a Day” video. I was wasting my time bedrotting, when I could be getting real social interaction outside.
But there’s one little problem: the social anxiety that kept me doomscrolling all these years didn’t exactly make it easy to jump out of bed and hit the social scene. That’s where Cudworth comes in.
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Despite the rise in technology that makes it possible, it's never been a less fashionable time to be a party-shy introvert. After years of domestic coziness and fossilizing in our homes, a cultural beckoning has emerged, urging us to go outside and create something real and greater than ourselves. In 2025, we still feel the lingering effects of Charli XCX’s Brat Summer, a cultural moment that reinstated the trashy glamour of partying and even made it virtuous — a moral rite for healing a pandemic-frayed society. Following Charli’s lead, sleazy electro and skeezy recession pop made a triumphant return. Kesha came back. Brands seized on people’s thirst for community. A glut of books discussing the revolutionary potential of raves were published.
It is the perfect cultural climate for a party coach to exist, and Cudworth may even have been a little ahead of the curve. Since 2021, he’s been coaching social anxiety-filled introverts like myself to break out of their shells and fall into the collectivizing thrust of partying, so I reached out to him immediately after seeing his TikTok.
Unfortunately for me — and really, everyone who’s ever had to suffer my drunken company — I came to Cudworth not just a bad partier, but a diabolical one. I’ll spare you the details, but it was messy, probably unhealthy, and certainly sexually confusing. Too afraid to reunite with my nightlife self, I’ve chosen instead to hide away from the world, watching while others perform their lives for me on their phones.
The party coach and I discussed all of this on an initial call. Cudworth, who says he had his own drunken past (even with a Facebook dedicated to his party alter-ego), is now sober. He tells me he’s completely reframed partying, from escapism to self-discovery and true social connection. For him, partying isn't drinking and being wild with friends; it actually means participating in life, shifting from passive consumption to active, intentional engagement. Now, Cudworth is a conduit for helping others to reintegrate into life. He meets people where they’re at and helps them to create nourishing habits that curb their tech-addicted tendencies and lean into the party.
He says he can do the same for me with a seven-stage course he refers to as ‘The Party Within,' a structure made up of reflective journal prompts, actionable missions, and guidance that should, hopefully, detangle its participants from distractions and bad habits, activating confidence while enabling them to curate an ideal social circle. After building up to it, the process culminates in an actual party which should provide the bedrock for sustainably applying the lessons from the seven-stage process for life.
The Party Within is self-paced but it typically takes around seven weeks to complete. Cudworth offers this, alongside a dedicated Discord server and daily check-ins, for a sliding scale price (and an encouraged $25 Venmo donation).
For several weeks, I devoted myself to it. My end goal was to attend a party in LA as my most scintillating self: no excessive drinking, no heinous shenanigans; just being a good hang, feeling at home in a crowd, and coming home to a self I could be somewhat proud of.
As per the party coach’s guidance, the first step towards getting there was what Cudworth calls a “dopamine reset.” My first challenge was to go a full 24 hours without social media, streaming, or junk food. I wanted to quit within the first 20 minutes, but eventually, as I sat a little more calmly with my boredom, old feelings reemerged. I went back to my 12 -year-old self, a time when the MGMT lyric “I'll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone,” made me feel terrified to grow up, a projected future so full and busy that boredom would become a virtue. Throughout the digital detox — which I extended to a full week — I got to feel the boredom of childhood again. I felt gratitude for it.
A little rewired, the party coach encouraged me to introduce three new habits into my life: no more than one hour of social media a day, a cold shower every morning, and making sure to compliment a stranger at least once a day. The cold shower, he said, was aimed to make me feel “more comfortable with discomfort,” something he said I could apply to social situations to ultimately enlarge my social battery. I took to that far more easily than I thought I would.
Complimenting strangers was more difficult. When I saw a well-dressed stranger pass me by on the street, I felt confused by my own hesitance. But once I went through with the compliment ("I like your shoes!”) I understood why. That compliment caused the stranger to scrutinize my own shoes and evaluate whether they should return the compliment. Most of the time, they did not. This was uncomfortable, and made me reflect on my own fashion choices. Maybe it’s not the point of the compliments (I wasn’t particularly comfortable with this discomfort), but I started dressing better and started getting more compliments in return.
With the coach’s encouragement, I journaled through prompts like “what social armor do I tend to put up in social situations” and took on missions like engaging in a social event I’d usually opt out of. I went to have drinks with my wife’s coworkers, an event I would have once said “hell no” to, believing that difficult events full of social friction should be avoided. This time I leaned into the discomfort the way I’d been forcing myself into a cold shower every morning. While I struggled through small talk, I eventually became a slightly more charming version of myself by the night’s end. I thought of something Cudworth taught me, that only one in three social engagements will be any good — he called this the Rule Of Thirds — and it took pressure off the whole evening, as well as giving me hope that the next event, the party this had all been leading up to, would be better.
People have long talked about parties as though they are revolutionary spaces. At the club in Los Angeles for the party all this was leading up to, I was enveloped by the half-hot air, the rooty smell of moving bodies, and the candy scent of smoke. Standing there, I did not experience revolution. What I felt instead was an intensely labored experience. Everyone was working very hard to get free, or whatever that meant to them, but not quite getting there. We were all struggling through our alienation together.
I soon learned that I was overburdening the experience with the weight of my own expectations. This club night couldn’t support my heavy desires for personal transcendence or social utopia. It just wasn’t that deep. What it did do was make me confront what it was really like to be in and among a crowd, with everyone’s projections and refractions and insecurities and arrogances. I danced among them. I was present through it all: ebbing between bored self-consciousness and giddy unthinking. This is what it really means to be alive, I thought.
The party was close to the rhythm of life; it wasn’t euphoric or epiphanic — though it did have glimmers of that — it was just sort of OK. After some more thought, I think that may have been the best outcome. I leaned into the discomfort and the friction. I felt in true community with everyone there hoping for more. Thanks to the party coach, I will go out again and try again. Maybe next time we’ll all get free.
