Talk to Strangers

A question at a cafe leads to an unexpected heart-to-heart.

I was simultaneously devouring an omelette and a book at a neighborhood breakfast spot the other day when the man at the next table asked me what I was reading. If you’re enjoying a little solitude, this kind of interaction can elicit panic, especially if you’re female. (Oh no, he’s about to tell me about the book he’s reading, or even worse, the book he wants to write.) But, in this case, I was eager to talk about the book in my hand, which was an astonishingly gripping piece of narrative nonfiction.¹ Plus, his curiosity seemed genuine rather than agenda-driven.

“What about you?” I asked when I was done enthusing about my book. “What are you working on?” I had noticed him tapping away at the open laptop beside his plate of eggs.

“I’m trying to write an email,” he said. “Can I ask you something? How do you make a decision?”

I am a collector of conversation-starting questions, and this was a terrific one. The best of this category of questions are open-ended enough to allow the recipient to take it in a direction they find interesting but have enough specificity that the person being questioned can find a handle to grab onto without having to think too hard. This one checked both boxes. Everybody makes decisions, everybody struggles with them, and everybody has strategies for managing their paralysis. I suddenly wanted to pose the question to everyone I know.

We chatted for a bit about different approaches—logical (making lists of pros and cons), emotional (pretending to choose one option to see how it feels), and spiritual (asking the universe for a sign). Then I asked what kind of decision he was trying to make.

It turned out that my breakfast companion (I’ll call him BC) had come to town to meet the team at a job he was pretty sure he would be offered. But that morning he had received an email from a former colleague offering him an entirely different job. The two options were in different states, doing different kinds of work, with different kinds of bosses at different kinds of institutions. They represented a kind of fork in the road—each one leading to a sharply different career path.

We ended up talking for 30 or 40 minutes. Like a lot of conversations I’ve had with strangers, it got deep fast. There’s something about talking with a person you don’t know and will probably never see again that leads to candor. I learned about decisions BC had made in the past that he regretted, like the job he’d taken to impress his mother. We talked about how different kinds of work were viewed in our families and what it felt like to have a job where you felt valued rather than disposable. I heard about his childhood dreams and his adult setbacks. Within a few minutes I was completely invested—not in the question of which particular job he’d choose, but in the question of how he would make the decision.

Eventually though, I had to go; I had an appointment that I was now running late for. I wished him luck with his decision, paid my check, and went on to the rest of my day. As I thought about the encounter afterward, I noticed how happy it had made me. I felt like I’d received a gift. And in fact, I had. It was the gift of the unexpected, of hearing a story I would never otherwise have heard. But more than that, it was the gift of connection.

The Large Effects of Small Talk

Study after study has demonstrated two things. First, that social interactions with strangers almost always enhances feelings of well-being, and second, that most of us are adverse to having those interactions until we actually do. We think it’s going to go badly. If we’re the conversation-initiator, we assume that the other person doesn’t want to be bothered. If we’re not, we assume the other person is going to be trouble.

Phones, of course, are a major culprit to the decline of the so-called “weak ties” that keep us feeling rooted and connected. I suspect that if I’d been looking at mine, BC would have been more hesitant to pose that initial question. (For some reason, “What are you scrolling through?” feels way more invasive than “What are you reading?”) There’s something about a phone that erects a barrier, that signals an unwillingness to interact, even though most of us who are staring at our phones in public spaces are mindlessly scrolling through videos of dancing parrots in order to avoid the awkwardness of making eye contact with another human.

Now, whenever you talk to a stranger, you have the sense that you’re interrupting them. It’s only people who have spent the majority of their lives in the analog world who default to the idle pleasantries that were once the norm. The young’uns find this behavior extremely weird. TikTok is full of videos made by Zoomer baristas annoyed by Boomer customers making small talk and dumb jokes because, *eye roll* can’t you see there’s a line? And also, that joke was super not-funny.²

Often, when I speak to college students, I extol the benefits of talking with rideshare drivers. The students look at me as if I’m insane. They do everything in their power to avoid talking with the driver, they tell me. They love the Quiet Mode option, where you can specify NO TALKING. The idea of being stuck in a conversation with no way out seems horrifying to them.

Yet few people are in a rideshare for longer than twenty minutes, which is almost the perfect amount of time for having a satisfying conversation. I travel a lot, so I take a lot of Lyfts and taxis. Not every conversation I have is a banger, but I’ve heard more incredible stories than I can count and have shared a weirdly high number of heart-to-hearts³. There was the former AI researcher who’d abandoned his work in tech when he realized what kind of society he was building. The father of two who became a father of six overnight when he got an emergency call asking him to take in the four kids of his opioid-addicted sister. The professional poker player who’d once had his underwear stolen by the son of a well-known newscaster. The former OSHA inspector whose job took him to the scene of gruesome industrial accidents that could easily have been prevented were it not for a combination of corporate greed and lethal machismo.

I’ve discussed raising kids and caring for parents, learned the history of Eritrea and Ethiopia from the perspective of people from both countries, talked about books from people I never expected to be readers, heard fascinating/heartbreaking/inspiring immigration stories, persuaded someone to join a protest, met an actor who had just finished shooting a movie called Blindspotting, and heard folktales from half a dozen places around the world. (I was working on a piece about story-telling at the time, so my go-to question was “What’s a traditional story for kids that you could tell from memory?”)

But the conversation doesn’t have to be riveting to be delightful. Simple pleasantries have their own magic. Eye contact and a smile. Shaking your head over the length of the line you’re standing in. Exchanging banalities about the weather or the local sports team or where you plan to go on vacation. All of it leads to a sense of belonging and cohesion, a feeling that we are part of something, that the people around us are fundamentally good, that if we were suddenly to fall down a manhole, other people might notice and help get us out.

One researcher has termed the act of smiling and making eye contact with a stranger, “psychological generosity.” Doing so requires a small expenditure of energy, but the benefits are profound for all concerned. Without realizing it, most of us feel the absence of these small acknowledgments of our existence. Shunning is a form of bullying in which no one will speak to you or look at you. It’s devastating. But for many people, particularly marginalized ones, it’s just another day.⁴

Talking to strangers is thus a revolutionary act, a small blow against a system that no longer values any behavior that can’t be automated or monetized and that is actively working to keep us isolated. If you want to level up, try making your life a smidge more inconvenient in order to have more opportunities for face-to-face interactions. Avoid the self-check out line at the grocery store. Pick up your take-out yourself, or try eating at an actual restaurant. Buy something from a store instead of having it delivered. Take public transit. Act like it’s 1995. It may be awkward, but remind yourself that every time you ask a stranger how their day is going, a robot dies.

With a sigh,

Dashka

1. Greek Tragedy by Jeanne Carstensen. Read it.

2. As an old lady who likes to talk to strangers, I bridle at these posts, but I also get where they’re coming from. This is a generation that mostly doesn’t talk to anyone they don’t know, and the prospect of doing so is both terrifying and appalling. (There’s another genre of videos in which young adults have to call to make a doctor or dentist appointment and absolutely panic at the prospect.) If you didn’t grow up having to talk to your friends’ parents every single time you called to talk to your friend (remember landlines?), or being sent to the corner store for milk or cigarettes, you might never have developed the muscle necessary for navigating small talk. (And, of course, that very-normal feeling of awkwardness has now been social-media diagnosed as social anxiety/autism/trauma but this footnote has already drifted pretty far into kids-these-days territory so let’s just stop here.)

3. My opening question in each of these cases was, “What do you do when you’re not driving?” The beauty of this question is that the recipient can answer it however they like—some people talk about their other gigs, some about their hobbies, some about their families, some about their ambitions or dreams. A few follow-up questions later and we’ve usually gone somewhere interesting.

4. I’m convinced that one reason people like having a dog is because a dog gives you a reason to interact with other humans. Dogs greet strange humans and strange dogs alike and so their humans end up following suit. “What kind of dog is that?” is another great conversation starter.