Camp Social is an adult sleepaway camp with an explicit product: friendship, delivered in a weekend. More than 400 women, some as young as 21 and some over 80, spent the third weekend of August at a children’s camp in the Poconos bunking in log cabins, running the ropes course, making friendship bracelets and dancing at the flagpole to Cher and Shania Twain. Everyone there, whatever her age, was called a “girl.” The tagline promises that “99% of campers arrive solo and 100% leave as friends.” The Atlantic’s Nancy Walecki signed up to find out who pays for this and whether it works.
Her answer is more interesting than either a trend story or a debunking. Friendship turns out to be substantially engineerable — and the design that works is not the campfire or the nostalgia. It is the norms.
What the camp actually does
Camp Social is run by Liv Schreiber, 29, who arrived via real estate, a viral matchmaking Instagram account and a party business, and now has a waitlist north of 60,000. Her camp does not rely on campers figuring out how to approach strangers. It hands them a script. A pre-arrival guide called “How to Camp Social” asks women to reconnect with the child “who made a friend at the playground in four minutes flat, who didn’t ask if she was too much or not enough.” A “10-Foot Rule” says that within ten feet of another camper, you smile and say hello. Bunks are grouped by age, but the camp actively pushes friendships across generations. Counsellors dance at mealtimes, cheer at the rock wall, and keep a call-and-response going to reset the room’s energy when it sags.
That is not decoration. It is the removal of the two hardest parts of adult friendship: the approach, and the assumption that the other person might not want to be approached. The activities — archery, pickleball, the water slide, karaoke — mostly serve to give people something to do with their hands while they talk.
The people who sign up are not the problem
Walecki’s sharpest observation is who was in the cabins. Not the socially incapable: new mothers, grandmothers, empty nesters, divorcées, widows and retirees — “pretty much everyone was going through some kind of potentially isolating life transition.” The average camper was 39, an age when many women are caring for children and ageing parents at once, “which doesn’t leave much time for friendship.”
She also corrects a common assumption. Women typically have more friends than men and are less likely to be severely socially isolated, “but having a lot of friends doesn’t necessarily mean that a person’s social needs are getting met, and overall, rates of loneliness between the genders are roughly the same.”
For one cabin of women in their 50s and 60s, the weekend produced immediate closeness. Jackie Prendergast, a retiree, said she never would have talked so openly with women she had just met in her twenties and thirties; Linda Gryn supplied the reason: “We no longer give a shit.” The group adopted the flamingo as its mascot — flamingos lose their pigment after reproducing and get it back with time and nourishment. “We’ve lost our color, but we’re going to get it back,” Jackie said.
The part the design doesn’t reach
Walecki’s own cabin of twenty-somethings stayed at the level of friendly roommates who ask about each other’s day. Younger women she interviewed told her they had made no friends at all, and — more tellingly — “were ashamed that, even in an environment set up for friendship, they hadn’t connected with anybody.” Those who did connect wondered aloud whether these would be only “camp friends,” a category everyone recognises and nobody wants. Asked whether she would stay in touch, one bunkmate said: “Only time will tell.”
That is the honest limit of the format. A weekend can manufacture the conditions for fast intimacy — shared activity, repeated contact, permission to be open, an expectation of friendliness — and it demonstrably did for Cabin 3, who left with a WhatsApp group, a lunch planned by the three who live near each other, a marathon team name and a reunion under discussion for next year. What it cannot manufacture is the part that comes after: recurrence in ordinary life and a reason to keep showing up. Pointedly, the women of Cabin 3 do not plan to return. “The camp served its purpose.”
The uncomfortable reading is that the camp is a paid, accelerated version of something cheaper and duller — a weekly knitting group, a recurring class, the same people in the same room on a schedule. What Camp Social adds is a high price and a promise, and what it reveals is how badly people want the promise: 60,000 of them are waiting.
Read the full story at The Atlantic.