Just have people over! Chelsea Fagan on combatting loneliness and ditching perfection | Canada Voices

In this era of delivery apps and best new restaurants lists, Chelsea Fagan is somewhat of an anachronist. The millennial writer and co-founder of the Financial Diet website regularly invites friends over for meals and thinks others should, too. Her new book, Having People Over, is not a trad-wife guide, but rather an argument for hosting dinner parties as a way to resist late-stage capitalism and the loneliness epidemic. She spoke to The Globe and Mail from her home in Manhattan.

The expense of hosting is a big reason millennials and Zoomers give for not having dinner parties. But you make the argument that hosting at home is often cheaper than going out for dinner.

It is just much less expensive in general to host in the home and to be hosted in the home. I think, when you look at the data, millennials and especially Gen Z have become accustomed to spending on restaurants, delivery, bars et cetera, essentially outsourcing the food experience to an extent that previous generations never have. Even more so than boomers today, who objectively have much more disposable income on average. And I think we’ve really become kind of inured to how expensive that actually is, and how much of our budget that dictates.

What is lost when we’re choosing dinner delivery rather than having a friend come over and cooking a meal for them?

I think we’re losing several things. Obviously money, but I think we’re losing a sense of intimacy and personal touch when we default to a restaurant. If people want a perfectly curated meal experience, where the food, the service, the ambiance, everything is at a professional level and requires no lift on their end, they can go to a restaurant. They come to someone’s home not just to be with them in an intimate way and have quality time with them, but also to experience the world through their eyes. The homes that we create, the food that we serve, the experience that we curate, these are all unique. I think that there’s just a real lack of humanity and the human touch that we experience when we’re constantly defaulting to these professional third parties.

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In your 20s, you were deep in credit card debt, but you still entertained pretty regularly. What did that look like?

These years really forced me to be creative and thoughtful in a way that I don’t have to be any more. It was a lot of potlucks, it was a lot of pulling together what I had. It was a studio apartment, so we were eating dinner next to my bed. Everything was a little broken, a little chaotic, a little mismatched.

I feel like my worst guest experiences have been in the homes of people with a ton of money. You can make everything go away: all of the labour, all of the imperfections. I’m like, “This could have been at a restaurant, diva.” What makes the experience in a home enjoyable or unique is the personal, the handmade, the imperfect. Often, the more money we get, the less and less of that touch that we have.

We live in a culture of flaking, and sometimes people won’t even tell you they’re not coming to something they said they would. How do you navigate that?

As I’ve gotten older, I have less tolerance. I had a person who flaked on me earlier this year. It was a budding acquaintanceship, could be a friendship. I was just like, “This is my stop.” I didn’t block her, but I muted her on everything. She sent me a half-apology the next day with a completely insane excuse. I am basically forgetting that she exists.

Part of curating is not just about you being a host, it’s about people who show up, it’s about reciprocity, it’s about investing in each other and creating a real community. The number of things I’ve showed up to in the dead of winter that I don’t want to go to can’t be counted. But you have to be a person of your word. You have to be a person who invests, because you’ll want that returned.

You’re better off having five friends who show up, who treat you well, who invite you places, who include you, who think of you, than 50 people who are completely unreliable.

This interview has been edited and condensed.