And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
A few weeks ago I read The Great Gatsby for the first time. It was a pretty good book. I don’t have much experience reading Fitzgerald, and the style of his era — as well as the upper class focus — is a bit different from what I normally read. I enjoyed the story, but the only thing that really stuck with me was the quote above. It is not central to the book, but I find it particularly profound and relevant today.
Throughout my life, and particularly in college, I tended to avoid scenes with large groups of people. I consider myself pretty good at talking to new people, but I don’t find myself enjoying the process. At least, if I do in the moment, it doesn’t stick with me enough to feel better about the next time it happens. So, parties or general large gatherings were always very overwhelming. I needed to be thrown into the situation with no warning, otherwise I would psyche myself out of participating before it even began.
What I find curious about this quote is how it frames the concept of a large party. When I have talked to people in my life, most of them like large parties for two reasons: They’re good at being the center of attention, or they prefer to be as anonymous as possible. In either case, it’s a sort of release for many people. There isn’t much to worry about, and excepting a particularly heinous action, most of what you will do will go unnoticed. There is a safety in crowds (in fact, this is the understanding behind the bystander effect.)
It’s then a natural extension I’ve never made to realize that a large party is the perfect place to meet up with one or two people you want to be thoroughly engaged with. Thinking back throughout college, time alone, with distraction or the threat of it, was incredibly rare. Spaces sufficient for good conversation or serious discussion with another person were sparse. Parties, however, were often at a premium if you knew the right people. And from my understanding, considering how many people know other people, you’d find yourself within the 6 degrees of separation necessary to enter.
So, when you couple together the availability of parties, and how little attention most people will give you while you’re there, they suddenly become an excellent spot to just sit and talk, or share a small moment that nobody else will likely notice. This speaks to the broader mantra of “You worry about what other people think about you a lot; if other people spend the same amount of time worrying about themselves, they certainly don’t have time to worry about you.”
There is freedom here. If you can’t have an apartment to yourself, and it’s raining outside so you can’t go to your favorite solitary park, just go to a large bar. People will leave you alone, and typically won’t care much about your conversation.
Of course, the second part of the quote is just as interesting: At small parties there isn’t any privacy. Consider a situation where you’re on a dinner date with 4 to 8 other people. There’s a group of you at a long table, perhaps even around a circular table if the group is a bit smaller (or the restaurant a bit larger). You haven’t seen one friend in a particularly long time, and want to tell them, in person, some sensitive information that is really on between the two of you. Is there a way to do this and feel confident nobody else will hear, or notice? In the first case, you may never know, but may be constantly worried the conversation happened to dull somewhere else at the table and a few people caught what you had to say. In the second case, where your private conversation is visually noticed, can be just as bad. Now you have the curiosity of others fighting against you. Not only that, unlike in a large party there is far less attention to be obtained.
Attention is really the key here. Imagine you are with one other person and you see a squirrel with a neat and abnormal stripe on its back scurry by. You might try to grab the attention of the person you’re with (if they aren’t in the middle of talking), and point it out. You’ll both likely get a bit of enjoyment from that shared moment.
Now, try to get the attention of 20 or more people fixated on that same squirrel scurrying by a window in a house. You would have to use some pretty weaponized tactics to make that happen in the requisite amount of time. The nature of attention is very dependent on the unit size. The attention of a single person is often fleeting and malleable based on the situation. The attention of people is much harder to sway without grandiose efforts. In this way, it is an intuitive conclusion to reach that small groups offer no privacy, unless the entire group is on the same page.
So I find it an interesting mental adjustment to make. I’m still uncomfortable in large parties, if only because I like places that are quieter in general, and making connections with a select few people. Yet the idea still sits in my head. It’s something to explore a bit more, although large parties are a bit less frequent or available in normal adult life.