This is part 2 of 4 in my series on Ausländer Pov – Life in Germany, where I express my thoughts on the different aspects of living in Germany for seven years that may help newcomers or just be a fun read for anyone who has gone through a similar journey as I have.

Click the links below for the next articles in this series. If there’s no link, I haven’t finished writing it yet.

What do you think are the bigger challenges faced by new immigrants?

Visa issues?

Finding a stable job?

Passing probation?

Learning the ins and outs of a new culture and making friends?

From my perspective, the answer to that question is all of the above. The former are objectively more important, as they are existential. But once you’re lucky enough to get through them, you soon realize that there’s no rulebook for the last one.

I grew up in India. The societal structures heavily influence life there. One must complete schooling at a particular age, graduation at another, and get married at yet another. You make friends in school, college, and at your workplace, like everyone else. I can be forgiven for never having consciously thought about how best to shape my life outside of the moulds of the society I grew up in, as that was seldom required.

But things are a bit different in a foreign city. There isn’t a mould to readily fit in. And while it is easy(ier) to find the exact instructions on how to get through a challenging visa situation or find a job, making friends and finding a family away from home? Not so much. There’s no formal guidance for that, and what makes it worse is that it isn’t openly discussed, shared, or even recognized as a challenge for newcomers.

As a newcomer in the city, you’ll often be surrounded by people who already have, to varying degree, found their people. Some might have been in this city for a long time and grown out of the need to find new connections. Others might have a few people that they’re content with knowing and don’t want to get to know a newbie and teach them the ways.

There will also be those who’d be in the same boat as you, new and alone. Their preferences for forming friendships might not align with yours, leading to conversations that never go further than “Let’s hang out sometime”. Or maybe you do hangout, and then there’s radio-silence for three months before either of you is desperate for human connection and decide to send that message again. Or maybe they live on the other side of the city. Or their work schedules do not match yours, and every hangout gets cancelled, postponed, or someone gets sick.

In short, making new friends in a new city is full of challenges. It isn’t the only challenge, but certainly one that has the least handholding available if you’re struggling. It also isn’t a problem exclusive to immigrants, but one that affects them the most, given their humble new beginnings.

Now I’m by no means a social butterfly, but I’ve spent my fair share of time in this city and have seen people struggle with the same set of things that I struggled (and some days still struggle) with. With many of them, I’ve discussed the following in one form or another, and that’s pretty much the motivation to write this article: To document for my future self if I were to do it all over again. This article might feel like a dejavu if you’ve read my article on local friendships, and that’s expected.

Value invitations, and invite others to do things with you

When I interned in Delhi, I used to get invited to spend time with the locals with whom I worked. I used to decline them because there was always a lot of work to finish. My colleagues were never not-nice about my declining their invitations. We stayed in good touch while I worked from Delhi, and then lost touch once I left.

I didn’t think much about it back then, but as I grew older, I realized what I had missed out on. I was 20, in a new city surrounded by people who were open to introducing me to their friends and made me feel like I was part of the herd. They liked me, and I liked them too. But I just kept my walls high by never interacting with them outside of the work context. The result? There was nothing to keep in touch for after I had stopped working there.

Something I intentionally did right from my first week here in Berlin is accepting invitations. Initially, just about all of them, but even after all these years, almost whenever I see the possibility of getting to know an interesting new person. Every person that I can meet in this city today, with my brain turned off, I have had to meet them awkwardly the first time. That memory serves me well not to let the awkwardness of a first conversation drive me away from meeting new people in the first place.

Not to mention that at the beginning of any relationship, a no to hang out may also come across as a no for any possibility of building a connection.

Workplace and school aren’t the only places to find connections

All of us can relate when I say that being in the same room as a bunch of other people every day is a quick way to form connections. That’s pretty much how most of us have known how to make friends, and that’s what happened in school, university, and the workplace.

But as adults, we can do better than that. In big cities (where immigrants tend to move to), there are more than enough opportunities to meet with people with very similar niche interests as us. All it takes is one common link to connect two people, and often even that isn’t strictly required.

In a foreign city, you can find people trying to learn the same language as you, trying to teach the language you’re learning for something else in return, interested in the same art form or hobby or political cause, or even just professional meetups. The possibilities are just endless, and all it takes is a bit of looking around and courage to participate the first time around.

Be wary of apps that promise a cure for loneliness

We’re told that a shortcut to meeting new people is online apps. This includes dating apps, or apps and services that connect people that looking for friendships. I don’t think there’s any problem using these apps to meet people and find your connections, but often, people rely on these apps exclusively for their social life.

The results are all too familiar. Forming superficial connections with a rolling set of 3-5 people, frustrations and complaints about how everything and everyone in the city feels temporary, ghosting and being ghosted all the time, and so on. The strange part is, almost everyone feels the same thing and leaves me wondering if I also came across as one of these people when I used these apps? I most certainly did.

The problem with these apps is that they give us an inflated sense of our social lives. If my social needs are met by texting eight and meeting two different people every week without needing to build deeper connections, I might never feel I need to do anything differently. I might even sleep every night thinking about how amazing my social life is. It is only after looking back at longer spans of time spent on these apps that one realizes how little comes out of the time invested in them.

When we think about it, these apps really thrive on people engaging with the app itself; swiping, liking, writing, and replying to prompts. One could be forgiven for forgetting what it is that they’re actually doing and getting out of these apps.

Be community-oriented

Have you met the person who has spent years and years of their life living in a city, but they sound (at best) like an informed newcomer on an extended vacation? Someone who has been to all the cool places, done the cool things, someone who has travelled around the world but doesn’t have a regular coffee shop or restaurant in their neighbourhood that would recognise them by their face?

The problem is the same as it is with social media. We create a planet-sized world for ourselves, and then get overwhelmed by the planet-sized miseries and loneliness that it brings. Suddenly, there‘s always someone in a sunny part of the world, someone who isn’t affected by local politics, someone whose life seems perfect. When you have local friendships, you share many of the joys and sorrows, which is an essential part of feeling like you are part of a tribe, that you have people to lean on, that you can count on them to stay despite the differences.

I want to believe that this caters to a part of our monkey-brains that has evolved with seeing the same set of people in real life over and over again, making us feel safe. I’m grateful to technology, but I believe it to be an enabler of new forms of human connections, not a replacement for the traditional form.

Local human connections can take various forms. To me, it looks like seeing the same people at my local restaurant and giving them a flower once in a while, volunteering for a cause in my city, spontaneously meeting friends for a short coffee or chat without needing weeks of planning, asking if the person standing confused at the intersection needs help, or just smiling at the same people I see walking their dog, watering the plants and chatting with restaurant owners on my street. I’ve felt more like part of a herd doing this than any number of likes, followers or pageviews could.

Be open to worldviews that aren’t yours

As immigrants, we’re often surrounded by people whose worldviews differ from ours. It can be uncomfortable to entertain ideas that contradict what we’ve believed all our lives. This is against my religion, this doesn’t fit my political views, this is offensive to my identity as an X are all too common emotions one feels navigating their way in a new culture.

A relatively late realization for me was that there’s more than one way to live a righteous life. It is also possible to entertain ideas without accepting them. For the ones among us bitten by the moral purity bug, it is good to remember that if someone shares nine out of ten worldviews with you, they’re on the same side as you. If you try to find reasons not to like someone for their worldviews, I can assure you that you’ll find them.

In conclusion

Finding your herd can look different for different people. You can be content knowing two people in a foreign city, or feel lonely despite knowing twenty. The difference is your relationship with yourself and your needs for connection. Feeling secure and supported is, at the end of the day, a feeling.

It is just as important to have a healthy relationship with your own self as it is to have a healthy circle of people to call your tribe away from home. Neither of them is a substitute for the other, and treating them as such leads to many miseries.