Ready to escape, play, and connect? Adult sleepaway camps are the grown-up way to make friends, have fun, and recharge!
Camps for grown ups may offer the same benefits that fans find at conventions.
Key points
- Leisure activities help us manage stress, reduce depression and anxiety, and bolster self-esteem.
- Fan conventions and adult sleepaway camps offer social activities that encourage friendships.
- In these liminal “play” spaces, people can leave their everyday stressors behind and be themselves.
The Wall Street Journal ran an article last week on an activity for adults that is quickly gaining popularity—adult sleepaway camps. The camps are touted as a way to take a break from the stresses of everyday life, try out new things, and make new friendships with other adults who are there to do the same—and sessions are quickly selling out. What’s behind this popularity?
The benefits of indulging in something purely for fun and self-enrichment are well known. Leisure activities are associated with lower levels of depression and anxiety and can result in an increased sense of well-being. Leisure helps us manage stress and bolsters our self-esteem. The catch?
We need to allow ourselves to indulge in leisure activities without feeling guilty about it, which positive media coverage of adult sleepaway camps can help with. Normalizing play and leisure as not just for children can reduce feelings of guilt and allow the full benefits of leisure activities to come through.
While adult sleepover camps are a new phenomenon, fans have been engaging in a leisure activity that offers some of the same benefits for many decades, which can help to further normalize this new activity—fan conventions.
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Fan conventions, unlike adult sleepover camps, are not a new phenomenon. The first fan convention, the World Science Fiction Convention, was held in 1939 and has continued ever since. Comic-Con in San Diego began in 1970 and draws over 130,000 fans every year, and there are countless smaller conventions, too. Like the first adult sleepaway camps, the popularity of conventions initially caught organizers off guard. The first Star Trek convention was held in New York City in 1972. They expected 300 people—3,000 showed up!
The popularity of fan conventions for people of all ages makes sense, and may explain the adult sleepover camp phenomenon, too.
Finding Community and Friendship
It is often assumed that the appeal of conventions is all about meeting the celebrities, but that’s not the only draw—and sometimes not even the primary one. The collective experience of meeting other fans is often more powerful than any celebrity autograph or photo op. Fans come to conventions to meet others who share their passion. Lifelong friendships often begin at a fan convention.
In a study of Kevin Smith film fandom, fans said they would have come to the convention even if he wasn’t there—it was more important for them to come together with their fellow fans, who they considered family. In another study, fans described a convention as “the people who get me,” saying that they understood and accepted them as they were. That makes conventions a little like family reunions, where friendship bonds are created and renewed over the years.
Importantly, conventions take place in physical spaces, so attendees are interacting face-to-face. In an increasingly virtual world, interactions in physical spaces are especially meaningful.
Building Bridges to Socialization
If fan conventions were just waiting in autograph or photo op lines to meet celebrities or sitting in panels listening to famous people talk, that significant benefit of finding friends would be lost. Luckily, conventions have always included social events, as well as opportunities for informal socializing.
These include gaming rooms, costume contests, and other competitions that allow fans to spend time with other fans just having fun. Sing-alongs are also popular, with the Buffy “Once More With Feeling” sing-along a popular staple at Comic-Con for decades (it’s fun, believe me!). There are parties, both formal and informal, as well as opportunities to just hang out with other adults and talk about something that isn’t a work project or political discussion or childcare.
Fans who meet up at conventions often form support groups to help each other navigate the experience, sharing norms, rules, and expectations. Most conventions also have spaces where fans can take a break from the excitement and just chat with other fans. For example, Creation Entertainment’s conventions devoted to the TV show Supernatural have a staffed room where fans can take a break and do some arts and crafts or just hang out.
These social events are not about meeting celebrities, but about meeting and developing friendships with other fans.
The Power of a Liminal Space
Certain characteristics of conventions also contribute to fans feeling like they can be themselves there, and thus be more open to developing authentic relationships. One of those characteristics is that conventions are a liminal space, where a person leaves one world behind and undergoes a change before being reincorporated into their original world.
There are different norms for behavior and self-expression in the convention space, which fans have described as allowing them to be themselves, embracing their identities as fans with the way they dress and the enthusiasm they’re allowed to openly convey.
Conventions have been described as like stepping through an enchanted doorway to another world, a reference to traveling from the everyday world with all its stressors to a different one that revolves around play instead of work. The activities that are offered emphasize the leisure aspect, with fun and connection being the goal.
Conventions have also been described as “carnival space,” Bakhtin’s idea of a transitional play space where people are allowed to try on new ways of being. The encouragement of open and creative expression at conventions, and the explicit permission to take a weekend off from everyday responsibilities and just have fun, is a very different norm from what most of us experience in everyday life.
Liminal spaces are temporary, but their effects can enrich the “real world” that people return to, and the friendships made within them can be lifelong.
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Common Denominators
Adult sleepaway camps are hoping these same powerful things happen there—and it makes sense that they might.
Conventions and adult camps share many characteristics that facilitate finding community and belongingness, perhaps the most influential being that they bring people together in the real world instead of virtually.
Sleepaway adult camps also offer social activities as a bridge to friendship, from beer tastings to arts and crafts, sing-alongs to cooking classes. Both can be viewed as liminal spaces where personal transformation can take place, and as play spaces where adults are permitted to temporarily escape from the responsibilities of everyday life for a weekend and just have fun, facilitating friendships.
The popularity of both fan conventions and adult sleepaway camps, and people’s willingness to pay for them, suggests that they provide an escape that is much needed.
References
Booth, P. & Kelly (2013). The changing faces of Doctor Who fandom: New fans, new technologies, old practices? Participations: Special Issue on Fandom
Kington, C.S. (2015). Con culture: A survey of fans and fandom. Journal of Fandom Studies, 3 (2), 211-228.
Larsen, K. (2015). (Re)claiming Harry Potter Fan Pilgrimage Sites. In L.S. Brenner (Ed.), Playing Harry Potter: Essays and Interviews on Fandom and Performance. Jefferson: McFarland.
Phillips, T. (2011). When film fans become family: Kevin Smith fandom and communal experience. Participations, 8 (2), 478-496
Tonietto, G.N., Malcok, S.A., Reczek, R.W. & Norton, M.I. (2021). Viewing leisure as wasteful undermines enjoyment. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 97 doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104198
Weiss, T. (2025). Adults are going to sleep-away camp to make friends: It seems to actually work. Wall Street Journal, August 13. https://www.wsj.com/style/adult-sleepaway-camp-social-getaway-98e47886
For more insights on the science of fandom and popular culture, visit https://www.peacewhenyouaredone.com/ and https://fangasmthebook.com/
Written by: Lynn Zubernis PhD
Originally appeared on: Psychology Today
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