How Can We Save the Cookout?
When I was growing up in the South, cookouts and all of their cousins—block parties, potlucks, and family reunions—were my favorite communal traditions because of the two Fs: folks and food. These gatherings had everything, from music, dancing, laughs, and storytelling to the best spreads of dishes. But as I got older and moved thousands of miles away from home, I celebrated such traditions less frequently, as many present-day 20-somethings do. They are often out of our reach for a range of reasons: cost, living far from loved ones, estrangement from family, lack of IRL community, or simply not knowing how to cook. So the question becomes: Who runs the cookout, and how can communal traditions thrive if we don’t actively engage them?
I’ve been in the kitchen whipping up recipes since I was three years old, thanks to the tutelage of my late grandmother Shirley. Working the assembly line behind the scenes of these gatherings demystified the tradition. I knew a cookout didn’t come together out of thin air. It took strategic planning—all hands on deck from aunts, uncles, big cousins, and family friends—to pull it off. It took a participant willing to host the festivities, or chip in for a space, or get a permit for a public park. Even before it took place, a cookout was a community coming together, each member partly responsible for making it happen. If we aren’t willing to take on those responsibilities now as adults, ready to help out in whatever way we can, these communal traditions will die over time. We’re not the proverbial “old heads” just yet, of course, but we are the big cousins who can ask how we can help.
But before we can even do that, we must have communities to commune with. For me and many others, our 20s have felt stifled with loneliness and isolation. In 2019, I moved from Texas to Los Angeles for grad school at 23. Not long after, the pandemic hit. Life became online classes and remote work, and just me and my thoughts in my studio apartment. There was little to no opportunity to explore my surroundings or build new relationships. When I finally emerged from quarantine, I felt like I’d been reset to default factory settings, relearning how to make friends and making a new environment feel like home.
As outside opened back up, I found I’d become jaded. I did not want to participate in interactions that felt one-sided. I did not want to put in more effort than others and risk feeling embarrassed or used. I didn’t feel like an adult. Instead, I was the new kid, scared about fitting in at a new school. My loneliness fed on itself, and I became functionally depressed due to the mundane routine of isolation. I only left my home for work events. The community I’d spent years building in Texas wasn’t physically with me anymore, and the dream of my adult life being communal—as it was on my favorite TV series, Living Single—drifted away.
As my 27th birthday approached this year, I had to ask myself: “Daric, are you even open to the idea of community?” And the answer was a resounding no. I was constantly busy working to pay bills, essentially house-poor, and too embarrassed to discuss it. If invited somewhere, I’d decline with some made-up excuse for cost reasons. I stayed home to sleep, so I could work more. I was stuck in the endless rat race, crumbling under capitalism, forced to choose basic needs over building community.
There had to be another way. Community means more than cookouts and fun times—it’s about being able to lean on one another and be transparent, about asking for and providing help; community is reciprocity and love at its core. By closing myself off and not giving others a chance, I was preventing myself from building the community I wanted. I had to actively seek it out.
So many of us in our 20s feel lonely, isolated, and jaded by one-sided relationships. Why don’t we realize we make each other feel that way? That it’s an endless cycle? That realization shifted my mindset. It was a revelation to understand that platonic and romantic communal relationships require willing openness and trust on both sides. That openness and trust lead to communing at cookouts and social gatherings. Those aunties and uncles who weren’t blood relatives but your parents’ close friends? Those relationships began when our parents’ generation started fostering those bonds in their 20s and supporting one another however they could. And now it’s our turn to step up to bat as we build our adult lives.
So I began opening myself up. It was small steps—getting coffee with a colleague, grabbing a bite to eat with a mutual from online, attending whatever non-work thing I’d been invited to. But what really helped was expanding my peer pool and finding community with older folks. They reminded me of my big brothers and sisters, taking me under their wing because they remembered their own rocky 20s. They understood that I was in a different place financially, never clowning me for what I didn’t have but honoring what I could bring to the table, whether it was a $10 bottle of wine, helping out in the kitchen, or providing the tunes. By ignoring the media portrayals of older people and endless Twitter discourse about cross-generational divides, I’d found a community that felt familiar.
Just like the cookouts of our youth did, it took cross-generational help from folks in different parts of their lives to give what they could to make this community happen. Most cookouts and social gatherings I attend these days are spearheaded by my 30-something friends. They’re more established and financially stable enough to host a get-together. But I’ve also begun getting creative with my friends in our 20s. We host game nights and whip up dishes in our air fryers, folks pick up whoever needs a ride, and we’re transparent about it if we don't have the funds for something—one of us can cover for the other, no strings attached. This reciprocity and communal love wasn’t possible until I tackled the jadedness caused by isolation and allowed myself to actively let others into my life. It’s not easy, and it doesn’t happen all at once—you’ll often close yourself off again. But what I know is that the cookout doesn’t happen unless we all make it happen.
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