How to Escape Professional Isolation?

Question

This pandemic has taught us how to live with ourselves while our social circles shrunk. The impact is also felt in the professional relationships, even more for those of us who are freelancers or independents.Creating new meaningful professional relationships has become hard. I'm a member of a few online communities, but they're more centered around specific questions and answers. I'm happy to chat and share my knowledge, but it has never translated to some kind of connection.How do you deal with this issue?

runawaybottle · Accepted Answer

Why do you seek this? Are you single? If you are, it could be as simple as not having a significant other.
You know, the majority of people lived with a small sphere of friends since grade school. Your typical junior high kid doesn’t have that many friends, and they cope with it and many cope with that for almost 20+ years.
Were you a popular kid in high school? You’ll just have to learn coping mechanisms if things have changed, but many many people deal with a small sphere of connections just fine since childhood (and some literally deal with none).
If the kids can do it, you can do it.

mooreds · Answer

I've been speaking at a lot of meetups, and definitely have seen people from outside the area show up. Meetup.com has a horrible search engine so I use google and search for "meetup ".
Volunteer. If you are a dev, reach out to local bootcamps and see how you can help. In my experience, they would love to have an experienced developer zoom in and talk, or mentor.
Online communities around slack/discord are more real time and may make you feel more connected than async ones like HN.

giantg2 · Answer

Some groups/clubs meet up virtually or socially distanced. This is what my beekeeper group does. I would guess there are some professional groups in your area that might too.