My three-year-old has taught me the value of talking to strangers
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I take the approach of being friendly with everyone, and if they prove to be weirdos or assholes, I immediately switch.
Of course it could be considered more risky, and I have been groped myself, but I think it's worth the risk. I find the alternative dehumanizing.
Costs:
- Almost got into a group fight for no reason (the reason was: I was there and anyone there would've been caught up in the fight)
- Got scammed a couple of times
- Random headbutt
- Randomly pushed off a stairs
- Threatened to be beaten into a hospital
- Got groped by random women (random sex workers roaming the streets are the worst -- especially because I can't tell who is a sex worker in another country)
Neutral(ish):
- Got fake robbed 2 times, they could've actually robbed me but they gave it back. (yea, weird, never got actually robbed)
Benefits:
- Friends
- Romance
- A free bus ticket back home (when I lost my old bus ticket)
- Strangers offering to charge my phone (or something similarly small) when I was really fatigued and tired while traveling (and too disorganized)
- Listening to countless and countless of interesting stories
- Rides to safe places when I am completely lost and way in over my head
- Hitched rides when I really needed them
- A lot more really too much to list
---
If anything: my concern is always that you're imposing on someone else's time. I try to do this as respectfully as possible, but even if you ask someone a question, you're demanding their attention.
It's a question posed out of curiosity, as stated.
Trauma sucks.
Which makes me very weird to read some of the responses here. What is the difference and why am I not experiencing the same where I go? I'm not muscular, have a pretty weak stance/look in general so I'm not intimidating enough for people to be scared of me exactly.
If they change it to the United Nations Plaza and Dog Park I think the diplomacy would go more smoothly.
Waiting in line at the grocery store, browsing in a bookstore (or any store), at a farmer's market, the DMV...
There's practically no environment where one couldn't spin up a conversation based on a shared experience.
I recognize that it's way more culturally accepted with random conversations with strangers in the USA (something I really do appreciate with US culture whenever I have visited, BTW) than what I'm used to back home.
I don't think I've ever seen it happening in all my life over here. 99.9% of people will assume you're a creep/dangerously deranged individual and/or flat-out ignore you. There pretty much needs to be in a social context, preferably with alcohol, for people to accept being talked to by strangers.
Not that it should stop anyone from trying as I think it's a positive thing, but the barrier is a lot higher.
Not wanting to stereotype too generally, but from talking to other Aussies about it we chalked it up to a higher level of self-confidence over there.
I know I definitely struggle to talk to strangers, though in part because you really just don’t know what you’re going to get sometimes! It was the part of travelling that I thoroughly enjoyed as a young 20-something. I was thrust into situations (hostels, bars, etc.) that forced me to overcome my shyness.
In Australia, many people tend to stay in the same city for most of their lives, whereas America is full of people who go to high school in one state, university in another, and work in more - even those who stay in the same state often move cities (America has way more cities with way fewer people) they are constantly making new friends.
This means things like: in my 20s in Melbourne, parties tended to consist of friends who've known each other for a long time. In America, the host often didn't know everyone at the party because the invitation is open.
Canberra is actually a little more similar to America - most who live there came from somewhere else, so the social situation is much more open.
What do you mean exactly?
E.g. I spent 2+ decades in the deep south and "southern hospitality" is definitely a thing. I then moved (back) to Seattle and conversation with strangers was/is much more difficult.
Loads of hospitality and warmth once you break through the ice, but the first steps are hard
Very interesting. Where are you from that the US is comparatively more open to stranger conversation?
Coming from latin america where it is the norm to end up in lively conversation with any random stranger if you share the same space for more than a minute, I've always found the US culture extremely disconnected. In the US you can stand in line at (say) the DMV for an hour and nobody talks to anyone.
Northern Europe and Eastern Asia. I don’t think I’ve even observed such an interaction (outside of social settings like bars and events) for the past couple of years even before COVID.
Someone mentioned population density but sunlight and latitude seem to affect culture around this even more so.
Sun and light seem to bring out the extrovert side of the populace. To the extent that Scandinavians are extroverts with strangers, it’s generally in spring and summer.
these are different though since it is more of a chore or an errand
As an introvert that can't even imagine myself doing that, seeing them in action leaves me in shock and awe.
I think it's practice and/or motivation, and it's orthogonal to being introverted/extroverted.
But if no such common subject of interest can be established, then that often leads to awkward moments and conversations cut short.
I think the people that are good at this can sustain conversations and interest even in that second situation. Maybe it's like you say - asking insightful questions about a topic they might be knowledgeable about but you're not. I can understand the concept, but I always feel very awkward, probing, and intrusive doing it unless they start passionately spilling the beans immediately.
I would say almost every friend I made beyond high school was because we had some kind of common interest or passion.
I'm the polar opposite in that I'm introverted. For whatever reason, whenever I engage in conversation with someone I don't know I always assume that they'd like the interaction to end as soon as possible and that they're not interested in prolonged conversation with me.
One thing I notice is that whenever I'm walking with my brother in the street, whenever we're approached by someone, they'll always approach him for whatever reason. I tried to think of reasons why, but can't come up with anything. I'm taller than my brother (he's about 5'6" and I'm 5'9") so I'd assume that people would approach me first, but it's always him. Sometimes I feel like it has to do with face symmetry. My brother's face is fairly symmetric, whereas mine is slightly assymmetric in the jaw area. Maybe it makes people more responsive/comfortable?
I wish I remember where I heard this. It might have been from one of Olivia Fox Cabane's lectures on charisma, but it was certainly eye-opening.
> "I'll never forget the day Marilyn and I were walking around New York City, just having a stroll on a nice day. She loved New York because no one bothered her there like they did in Hollywood, she could put on her plain-jane clothes and no one would notice her. She loved that.
> So as we we're walking down Broadway, she turns to me and says 'Do you want to see me become her?'
> I didn't know what she meant but I just said 'Yes'- and then I saw it.
> I don't know how to explain what she did because it was so very subtle, but she turned something on within herself that was almost like magic. And suddenly cars were slowing and people were turning their heads and stopping to stare. They were recognizing that this was Marilyn Monroe as if she pulled off a mask or something, even though a second ago nobody noticed her.
> I had never seen anything like it before."
> ~ Amy Greene, wife of Marilyn's personal photographer Milton Greene
See https://www.sunnyskyz.com/blog/2610/No-One-Recognized-Marily...
I presume it's from a biography or published interview, but I can't find it.[1] Google, and especially Google Books, is a ghost of its former self and only gets worse with time.
There's a slightly different retelling from a book review:
> "Do you want me to be her?" Marilyn said to the friend. "Watch." And taking off the headscarf and opening her coat to thrust out her chest, she went into the MM sashay, and within half a minute was surrounded by a baying mob of fans and autograph hunters.
See https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/03/marilyn-monroe...
[1] I did find this promising citation,
> Mailer, interview with Amy Greene, in Mailer--UT; "Milton Greene," B & W: Black and White Magazine, Spring 1949
visible when searching for "Greene" in the Google Books preview of Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox. The year seems suspect, though, as Amy Greene (nee Amy Franco) didn't marry Milton Greene until 1953. (EDIT: I think the first part of that citation is to Norman Mailer's 1973 biography, Marilyn: A Biography, and the second part possibly to the photograph which Mailer was expositing. So perhaps his book is the original source of the Amy Greene quote. Though the literal veracity of his accounting is suspect, AFAICT. I don't think his book was a typical biography, but rather something of an artistic gloss on the concept of a biography.)
I know I’m in the latter camp, but if I force it I can spend some time in the former.
I can be described as introverted but you wouldn't tell that from my behaviour at social gatherings.
Hell, I know a few actors and there appears to be no correlation between this line of work and character.
And while it sometimes seems like a gift (folks in this thread in awe at the ability to easily chat folks up in a bar), it feels like a burden sometimes too. She'll talk to someone somewhere, get emotionally invested in their life, and next thing you know she needs to give someone a ride hours away, or she's calling other friends looking for a job for her new friend, etc. I guess those are normal, friendly, human social behaviors, but it feels like she takes it to a level that I personally find exhausting. Which makes sense, as I tend to be slightly introverted.
It was a wakeup call to me to just say hi to other dads at the playground and I'm glad I do it. Sometimes it's awkward but most of the time I find someone who also wants to make time go by quicker.
In my hometown, now 85 thousands, half of that when I was a child, it's now more unusual, but it's still very natural for you to start all kind of conversations with anyone with little excuse.
Actually it's expected in many situations, like when giving a heads up, and there's no prelude or pleasantries, you just go to the point as if the other is someone you know and you've been talking for a while and now changed subject. The other wouldn't thank you either, just make some more question or joke.
People from Madrid find it weird: "Did you know that guy? But he talked to you as if he knew you..."
This was maybe the hardest transition for me when I moved from London to Stockholm. In London, despite its size and what people often claim is its 'anonymity', there were always many opportunities every single day to have smalltalk with strangers: standing at the bus-stop, in line at the grocery store, looking at albums in a record shop. It really helped to soften the edge of being self-employed, and English people really relish these micro-interactions talking about the weather or jokily disparaging their political leaders.
Coming to Stockholm, the thing that shocked me - I'd even go as far as to say traumatized me to a certain extent - was that Swedish people were completely at ease pretending that others around them were invisible. This went beyond not making smalltalk, and left a deep mark on me which has never been erased. I still find it hard to cope with the erasure that I experience every single day when people behave as though you are not there at all.
A female Swedish journalist that had been a correspondent in Israel for many years and then retired back to her home in Stockholm talked about the invisibility phenomenon very eloquently in a newspaper feature which I've been unable to find online today (it was a few years ago), but she also talked about how upsetting it was, after becoming accustomed to being greeted and 'noticed' by the humans around her as a 'normal' part of her everyday experience, to suddenly disappear into nothingness.
Strangest of all, is that this isn't even a Scandinavian thing: whenever I visit Norway or especially Denmark, strangers constantly try to make smalltalk in all sorts of contexts. Then I always have to apologize for not fully understanding their language (especially the Danes), and when they hear me speaking Swedish they usually give up on me instantly - Swedes being well-known for their unsociability in those parts.
Sad to say, after 20 years I've also adjusted my own behavior to the Swedish norm, and usually find the approach of a sociable Dane with some nervous trepidation.
Here's an analogy: imagine a neural network having to train it's neurons but without them having any connections to each other! Is such a thing even possible? Interconnections are what help us tune to (maybe even perceive) reality!
For a very extreme version of this: In Germany there are somewhat regular cases of duty to rescue charges against people because they just straight up ignored a person in distress.
One of the worse cases was a 82 years old man collapsing at a bank ATM and going unconscious [0]: Four people were just ignoring him on the ground, literally stepping over the body to keep doing their banking, it took 20 minutes until somebody who found him actually called for help, he ended up dying in the hospital.
[0] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/nordrhein-westfalen-82-...
I remember the first time I went to LA and people were walking up to me and started talking to me out of nowhere and I was like "what the hell is wrong with these people and why are they talking to me? I don't know them". I was so exhausted after two weeks that I basically stayed inside my apartment for a week when I got home to Sweden.
I have to be honest - that sounds lovely. I'm sorry it affected you negatively, but that sounds like gold standard of social interaction for me.
Edit: In fact, people pretending that others are invisable are the easiest way to spot the outsiders who only come here to steal our outboard motors
I basically feel a need to jokingly apologize when my 2.5-year old waves and says "hi hi" to strangers outside. :)
Talking on the bus stop? What?
>Talking on the bus stop? What?
I don't want to suggest that your post is in bad faith, but it does seem to be willfully misinterpreting what I was describing.
Quite obviously people aren't heartily haling every total stranger they meet walking down Oxford Street in London. But in small encounters there's not only the custom to be polite and acknowledge the other people around you, there's an expectation that you'll make smalltalk, and reduce the friction of everyday city life. It shows consideration, and it's considered to be a mark of civilization.
I'm sure for shy people it could be seen as a negative, but if the bus is delayed and you and one other person are left standing at the stop for 30 more minutes, a few words grumbling about the transport service, and then the weather, are a way to soften the discomfort.
And as others have pointed-out, it has utility in everyday life: people 'noticing' each other can even save lives. In Stockholm I cannot even begin to enumerate the number of times I've stepped into a situation that others have ignored, staring straight ahead and behaving as though they're alone in the city.
My biggest learning is that I am in an incredible bubble. Everyone I have been interacting with for my whole life, even the strangers at the store have been heavily filtered without me even knowing it. Social media has done nothing to expand my bubble because it is an echo chamber where most voices are down-voted, drowned out or never expressed in the first place.
My conclusion is that on the one hand, there's so much variation in people's circumstances and values that you need these filters in order to ever find a person who you are remotely simaler to. On the other hand, there's a great joy in hearing about someone's life and perspective who is so different that they would have never had a conversation with you on the street. It expands your world, makes you less judgemental, and makes you more acutely aware of what a difference ethnicity, age, class, education, and nationality can really be when we don't have our guard up and can speak freely.
For this reason also I also try hard not to talk to female colleagues at work without good reason - unless not interacting with them would be weird. i.e. I try to treat them the same as men at work.
When I was younger, I did have a little bit of a habit of being a bit friendly with the ladies at work/social events - and I've consciousnessly tried to move on from that (especially as I have a partner too). I want to be seen as a good solid guy.
But yeah, talking with strangers is great, the few times it actually happens.
I do have to remind myself that the world is much differently experienced by women.
Like the author of the article, I'm the father of a toddler and we've spent an immense amount of time over the past year walking (or triking or wagoning) around the neighborhood. I've certainly spent more time talking to my neighbors over the past year than over the previous 8 or so years that I've lived in the same house.
One neighbor that has become a friend (or at least a friendly acquaintance) is a young woman who is often outside with her 2 dogs. On walks, she always seems excited to see us, stops what she's doing to come talk to us, etc. On a couple of occasions, I've seen her walking alone while I've been driving in the neighborhood and I've waved from the car. She doesn't wave back, or even make eye contact, and continues to walk with a very "don't bother me" posture.
I don't think she knows what car I drive, and she probably doesn't recognize me in the car. She also probably doesn't want to appear interested by making eye contact or looking at the car too much. She's probably had enough negative experiences with men on the street that she's making her best effort to avoid hostile/unwanted contact. It's a sad reality, but I get it.
Yeah. I completely get why some women act cold to strangers. Along with them having so many bad experiences, men can badly misread women that are friendly. So no wonder.
I really disagree with the mentality of hitting on women during day to day activities / service transactions (e.g. don't hit on your dentist/grocery checkout/coffee shop worker. I personally think it should be more frowned upon.
It's also kind of good training for my sometimes social anxiety; For some weird reason strangers don't bother me that much compared to people I have some actual relation with.
Less is at stake usually.
It's a hard mental paradox to fix though, even though we logically understand that people like confident worry-free people more than people who worry about how they are liked, we still often worry about how we are liked anyway.
> It's a hard mental paradox to fix though,
One of the things I've learned in the past year of therapy is that if a mental problem is hard to fix at one level, it's usually because that problem is just an emergent symptom of a different deeper level issue.
Also, you never really "fix" psychological problems, so much as grow forward into a slightly different person that both combines that problematic history and adaptations to deal with it. It's like we're weird amphibians that can't regrow lost limb, but can grow an unrelated new limb at a different location that lets us walk again.
(even for strangers, I stated that less is at stake, but it is actually still quite hard for me to speak to them! I'm way more at ease with people I know. I am very much aware that it goes very well every single time though. It's so dumb! Practice helps though.)
The sad part is you come to realize there are actually some people out there who feel severely threatened by authenticity, and will actively try to tear you down; make you less. That can really hurt when you're not prepared for it. People are really odd sometimes.
One thing though, I've recently started taking my fitness seriously and I've noticed a borderline magical improvement in my confidence and social energy without actively focusing on it at all. Worth trying.
It's easy to overthink this stuff, but that might just be another way of staying in our head. I don't what it is, testosterone maybe, but we shouldn't forget that our head is just as much a part of our body as our arms and legs, and if we take care of our body our thoughts tend to also be taken care of.
The better the stranger.
Luckily for my kid he naturally has this ability and enjoys it. Dunno how!
Kids are more natural than adults, that's how. Less conditioning.
2. Be proud you have a superkid.
3. How's your other kid (from Cygnus days), the BFD library, doing nowadays?
Heh.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_File_Descriptor_libra...
I am always amused/happy when I see instructions to use code I wrote simply for debugging the library itself (e.g. objdump) being used in other contexts.
Interestingly, my son is the type who has "never met a stranger". I often wonder if it's just natural, or if it is from watching me being comfortable chatting with others. Either way, I'm glad he is not burdened with the same anxiety I was.
I also picked up the FORD method (just Google that, there are countless articles), which I fall back to as a set progression if I can't think of anything else.
The biggest tips are to ask a lot of questions, listen more than you talk, take a genuine interest in what the other person is saying, and to just do it enough that you wear down any natural anxiety. That last point is key, because most anxious people will naturally convey their discomfort in their tone and body language, which keeps others from feeling at ease.
That was the only time something like that happened.
As a young child, though, I was terrified of strangers and children that were a few years older than me.
That sounds like someone who was very defensive or uncomfortable talking about themself, or just in a bad mood. Who knows? People are unpredictable some times. Generally showing an interest in people is met favorably though, as I'm sure you know. I think it's worth the occasional outburst.
"You think you're a wise guy, eh? You ask a lotta questions"
It’s a very good book. However, for me personally, it was too advanced in the beginning.
The book that really helped with first dealing with social anxiety was The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane. It has a bunch of exercises that allow you to be present and become more social.
To put it in perspective: The Charisma Myth tells you what to do and HTWFAIP tells you what to say.
If you are too nervous/anxious and you mostly just want to get out of there, then read The Charisma Myth first. If you are mostly ok with being around people in general, but don’t really know how to strike a conversation, then try How to Win Friends.
Yes, I think that's very accurate. My problem was often that I didn't know what to say, or that I thought people wouldn't be interested in what I said, so it worked well for me.
I'll need to check out The Charisma Myth some time. Thanks for the recommendation!
Which is to say, I'd be happier to be in your boat, but I am sure both of our kids will be fine since they've got loving parents to worry if they'll be fine ;)
This is an internal conflict for me. On the one hand, I very much built my life and livelihood around actively seeking out strangers. I don't want to put the same fear that anyone would kill you for looking at you funny that my wife's parents put into her. It's also a fact that the vast number of cases of child harm come from someone the child already knows, so "stranger danger" is sort of a misnomer.
On the other hand, I feel like all of this assumes a form of "common" sense that she doesn't have the experience for because she's only been around for like 3 year
As much as I occasionally try this tactic, I don't have the desire for connection she has. I also think it may be easier for women then men.
It's like one of those video game lootboxes. Most of the time it's not bad, sometimes it's good, rarely you meet someone really cool.
No matter what, just hearing about people's lives and experiences can be great. People's lives are really quite fascinating.
The phrase 'Truth is stranger than fiction' didn't come frin nowhere.
The chance of running into someone with similar values and interests is much higher in a specialized community (such as on the internet or in academia).
I've found the most fascinating people are those that I share absolutely nothing in common with. I learn a lot about their lives and their views, and it's often fascinating. I met one person who is a fanatic Republican, something that I don't share, and she believes in a wide range of conspiracies. I've met people on the left that also have the same level of conspiracies coming from the other direction. Talking with people who are just like me is often boring and I find I learn a lot less that way.
The experience of being bullied plays a lot into me being cautious with random people, but this often served me well (e.g. when picking PIs, several people in my peer group ran right into abusive situations and ignored warnings - a lot of luck is involved already and it’s easy to slip here if you have not learned to take little warning signs seriously, or even perceive them). I’m still often trusting too quickly and have to hold myself back.
Don’t you think that the time you have spent with the republican conspiracy theorist, however fascinating, could have been better spent with someone who doesn’t have strange internet-formed beliefs? There are lots of people in specialized (e.g. nerd, travel) circles who are searching for true friendship who might have more common ground. I do talk to randos if there is such an initial filter. Most educated people in society seem to prefer it this way, there is a reason why the linked story creates a sense of novelty.
If you have any further suggestions, they are welcome.
Then I started working too much and the fast pace of everyday life, exhaustion and just deteriorating ability to banter because I'm poring over code or documents all day for artificial deadlines just took away all my desire to show any interest towards other's lives.
Is this normal?
It can take me an hour to come back to the world of the living.
If I have to do it next time, I will most definitely cancel.
> There we were, this stranger and I, threading flowers into our hair, one after the other, until our heads were wreathed with plucked daisies. It occurred to me, as I accepted yet another bloom from my daughter, and suggested that she might want to leave some for the other people in the park, that I didn’t feel remotely awkward. My comfort zone was larger than the last time I had tested its borders.
People, even of rival teams, don't hate each other. There might be ribbing but it is a topic that makes it very easy to have commonality across demographic and socioeconomic lines.
The world is just so much more exciting that way.