$6,000 of fireworks. 50 pounds of wagyu ribeye. 8,000 paintballs. A 175-acre ranch in rural Wisconsin.
Every year, 26 of our friends gather for a weekend we call Weekend of Man. It’s summercamp for adults, and it’s one of the most important things I do all year.
Not the most fun thing. The most important thing. There’s a difference.
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What Actually Happens
We play paintball, pickleball, basketball, and bags. There’s paddleboard jousting. We eat nothing but meat. We sit around a bonfire at night and actually talk to each other, without phones, without an agenda, without the usual social performance that comes with most gatherings.
The competitions are real. People take them seriously. There’s a scoreboard. There are winners and losers. And somehow, that combination of physical challenge, shared discomfort, and low-stakes competition produces something that a dinner party or a conference never does.
It produces actual friendship.
Why Adults Need This
At some point in your 20s, friendships stop forming the way they did in school. You don’t have the built-in repetition of seeing the same people every day. You don’t have shared adversity. You don’t have time.
What you have are dinners, drinks, and catch-up calls. Those are fine. But they don’t create the depth that comes from doing something hard together.
Research on bonding consistently points to shared experience, especially experiences that involve some element of challenge or vulnerability, as the fastest way to build real connection. It’s why military units become like families. It’s why people who went through difficult things together stay close for decades.
Weekend of Man is a manufactured version of that. We engineer the conditions for real friendship: physical challenge, shared meals, time away from normal life, no distractions.
It works.
The Real Return
Here’s what you can’t put a number on. The 26 people who come every year are also the people I call when I’m making a hard decision. The people who show up when something goes wrong. The people who know me outside of whatever professional context we might share.
That’s not something you can build at a networking event. You can’t schedule it into a quarterly offsite. It has to be earned through time spent together doing things that actually matter.
I’ve started several businesses, built communities of thousands, and had more dinners and coffees than I can count. The relationships I value most didn’t come from any of that. They came from weekends like this one.
Starting Your Own
You don’t need 175 acres or $6,000 of fireworks. You need a group of people, a shared activity, and enough time away from normal life for something real to happen.
A camping trip. A ski weekend. A fishing trip. It doesn’t matter what you do. What matters is removing people from their routines, putting them in a shared environment, and letting the hours pass without an agenda.
The bottom line? The adult friendships worth having don’t happen by accident. You have to create the conditions for them. A weekend like this is how you do it.
Find your 26 people. Build your weekend. Do it every year.