How to Throw the Right Kind of Party
Make time and space to nurture the slowness of human experience.
Posted May 26, 2026 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley
It’s been exactly one year since my book Thinking Like a Human: The Power of Your Mind in the Age of AI was released. In many ways, the core message of the book, that the greatest threat to humanity is not superintelligent machinery but a lack of trust in the power of our own minds, is even more pertinent today.
People are becoming wiser to the hype that is behind much of the AI boosterism and starting to ask the right questions to make better decisions about the tools we use and create healthier relationships with the world around us. When people ask me for a one-sentence prescription found in the book that can most easily help steer them to a more pro-human direction, I always advise them to “throw the right kind of parties.”
What a good party does for cognition
Our productivity , creativity , and ability to build are uniquely supported by the spaces we choose to gather in and the people we gather with. And yet, it’s getting harder to find spaces worth leaving our screens for. This is partially a consequence of tech advances, partially a function of a difficult economy, and partially exacerbated by changing demographics and social norms. It’s not easy to willfully and intentionally create physical, real-world social spaces that nurture the best of what’s in us. But it’s work that can make or break our society.
Creativity is partially defined as an act arising out of a perception of the environment . Throwing the right kind of party is not that interesting to those who idealize the trope of the solitary genius, a group that has dominated creativity research for far too long. They urge us to create alone, showing findings that suggest individual ideation is superior to ideation in brainstorming groups and that individualistic cultures promote creative expression more than collectivistic ones.
But psychologist Vlad Glăveanu argues that these celebrated acts of seemingly solitary creativity are only made possible by sociocultural relations and interactions. Lone wolf genius can only be observed by jumping in at the end of a process, describing the final moment of discovery, the resolution of working through a problem that started long before. The extensive creative process that brings one to an aha moment is always deeply social, even if the credited innovator won’t name it this way.
Colleges used to be known for their parties
Social fitness depends on building spaces that will draw people out. The right party, the right message, the right energy felt through the body in a social setting can be the most likely path to subsequently change the way someone views the world. But there are generations of folks who have never known these feelings. They can’t be rationally convinced of something that needs to be felt without any experiential reference points. And it’s a massive challenge to get them off their phones and into a room.
This is a story I’ve shared before, but worth repeating. While recently teaching an online course, I engaged the class in a thought experiment. I polled the students on the potential of two hypothetical methods for course delivery. The first option was one where we would gather in person. I stated that, as their professor, I would commit to working with and offering to the best of my ability a loving presence in that space, and demand that every other person in the room also show respect and compassion to everyone present. The trade-off would be that all students would necessarily be called on to perform and contribute. This meant that nobody would be excused for skipping class or be allowed to hide in the back without participating. The ask was big, but so was the reward.
The second option was an asynchronous online course, designed as coldly as possible. I would not help or interact with any student outside of basic, contractually mandated, transactional engagements. Further, no student would have the opportunity to meet, even virtually, any of their peers or work together in any form of supportive community. The learning environment would be exclusively, almost comically, designed for competition and self-direction.
Ninety percent of the students surveyed expressed a preference for the second option. The reasoning varied from being afraid to feel to buying into the lone genius myth. They knew this was not the answer I was hoping to hear, but they were being honest.
Any worthwhile activity can become a party
When we are in the room together, our brain waves will sync. The serendipitous relationships will be triggered. Happy accidents will happen. We will then go our separate ways, but the impact of our time together will continue to be felt on numerous levels.
Throwing the right sort of “party” makes us rethink the world, firing us up to do things that challenge patterned thought processes and norms. This takes time. Our parties, shows, prayer halls, beaches, professional development sessions, scholarly gatherings, or whatever types of activity that we are planning can be parties when they happen in a social and physical context linking our creativity to the creativity of others.
Party spaces should aim to nurture the slowness of experience in human time. The goal is to meet and exchange “be with me, please” energy, not “look at me!” energy. A party sparks an embodied feeling that starts well before a planned gathering, when the notion of meeting first enters the consciousness of participants, carries through the event itself to stimulate the syncing of brain waves, and then lingers in the collective minds of all who were there, triggering the emergence of serendipitous occurrences later in time.
We need more of these. Our future depends on it.
Croft, J. 2017. On Working Alone, in Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in Contemporary Music, eds. Eric F. Clarke and Mark Doffman, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Glăveanu, V.P. 2020. A Sociocultural Theory of Creativity: Bridging the Social, the Material, and the Psychological. Review of General Psychology, 24: 335–354.
Goncalo, J.A. & Staw, B.M. 2006. Individualism-Collectivism and Group Creativity. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 100: 96–109.
Mullen, B., Johnson, C. & Salas, E. 1991. Productivity Loss in Brainstorming Groups: A Meta-analytic Integration. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 12: 3–23.
Weitzner, D. 2025. Thinking Like a Human: The Power of Your Mind in the Age of AI. Naperville: Sourcebooks.
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David Weitzner, Ph.D. , is a writer, consultant, and professor of management at York University, who advocates for co-creation, not management. His latest book is Thinking Like a Human: The Power of Your Mind in the Age of AI.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.