When Strangers Meet

How People You Don't Know Can Transform You

Kio Stark

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781471156106
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Part of the TED series: When Strangers Meet Our lives are increasingly insular. We are in a hurry, our heads are down, minds elsewhere, we hear only the voices we already recognize and rarely take the effort to experience something or someone new. When Strangers Meet argues for the pleasures and transformative possibilities of talking to people you don't know. Talking to a stranger pulls you into a shared humanity, it's a source of creative energy, it opens your world, it cements your relationship to the places you live and work and play, it's a beautiful interruption in the steady routines of our lives. Talking to strangers wakes you up. But who is a stranger? Many of us have a deep-seated belief that strangers are dangerous. That idea cripples us and prevents us from connecting with the wider world. Exploring the rich meanings that are conjured up in these experiences of fleeting intimacy, Stark renders visible the hidden processes by which we decide who to trust in passing, and the unwritten rules by which these encounters operate. When Strangers Meet teaches readers how to start talking to strangers, and includes adventurous challenges for those who dare.

1

Who Is a Stranger?

How do you divide the world into known and unknown?

Stranger is a slippery word—you think you know what it means until you try to account for yourself. It names an idea that invisibly structures your everyday life, what you see, the choices you make, the way you move. Are you ready to see just how slippery it is? Tell me what you mean when you say stranger.

I ask this a lot, and almost everything I hear boils down to this wonderfully contradictory list.

•   Someone you’ve only seen once.

•   The entire world of people you’ve never met or encountered.

•   All the people who are unknown to you but possibly knowable, the people who you’re aware of as individuals in some way, but have never met or encountered in person.

•   People you have personal information about but have not met, like a friend of a friend, or a public person.

•   A person who doesn’t share your context, whether that is ideological or geographical.

•   A person you don’t have anything in common with.

•   Someone who is not part of any group you define yourself as belonging to.

•   Someone you can’t understand.

•   Someone who is a threat.

•   Someone you encounter frequently but don’t know anything about other than what you can observe.

•   Someone whose name you don’t know.

When we examine our ideas about strangers, the notion that a stranger is someone to be afraid of often falls away, chalked up to childhood training in “stranger danger” or something gleaned from the media, in contradiction to our lived experiences. Who we think is a stranger is an individual thing. It’s also defined by culture and history. The ways we interact with strangers—and so our very ideas of whom they are—can change in response to major events. During major disruptions in our lives, in storms, floods, outages, transit strikes, we suspend our usual expectations and put feelings of community above fear. Ever more frequent terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamentalists around the world have directly increased suspicion of strangers—and have fueled illogical and unwarranted assumptions about what kind of stranger poses a threat.

Our concepts of strangers and how we behave toward them also vary by situation. Is it dark, am I alone, am I in familiar territory, am I lost, am I in the minority in this place?

Who counts as a stranger? Who do we greet? Who do we avoid? My four-year-old daughter forces me to ask these questions constantly. My family lives in a city, in an area with residential blocks and commercial streets crossing each other. As my daughter and I walk around the neighborhood, I watch her sort strangers.

I say hello to most people, and she wants to know why. Are they our friend? she’ll ask. “No, just a neighbor” might be the answer when it’s someone we see often or people who are walking near our house. Do we know them? “No, we’ve never met them.” Why did you say hi then? “It’s just nice to be friendly.” I think twice when I tell her that, even though I mean it. And as a woman, I know very well that strangers on the street don’t always have such noble intentions. It is good to be friendly, and it’s good to learn when not to be. But none of that means we have to be afraid.

Our apartment is near a halfway house, and some of the people who live there are hard cases, apparently a little “off” in one way or another. They might be dressed in very shabby or unwashed clothes, or behaving in ways that look like they’re high on something. Their speech or body language sometimes puts me on alert for behavior that may or may not be harmless. I feel varying degrees of discomfort about any of these situations, and I want my daughter to see that I make choices—and learn to make her own—about who I greet and how I avoid interacting with someone I think might be unpredictable or unpleasant. I want her to understand an essential distinction in a world of strangers: unpredictable and unpleasant are not by definition dangerous.

On our way to school one morning there was a man in the middle of the block we usually walk down, and he was yelling angrily at the air, stomping his feet and swinging his arms. I said to my daughter, “Let’s go another way.” She asked, Why can’t we go that way, isn’t he our neighbor? Once a question is asked, it snakes through many others. I had to wonder what made me uneasy and whether or not it was based on good instincts or prejudice I’m blind to. That day, I said, “Well, that man looks pretty upset and I don’t want to get too close to him.” Why is he upset? she asked. “I don’t know what’s bothering him, but I can tell by the way he’s yelling and what he’s doing with his body that I don’t want to get near him right now.” I watched her taking that in. I had sidestepped the shorthand of saying, “He’s acting crazy,” though that’s what I would have said to an adult. I wasn’t being delicate about my choice of language as much as I was avoiding a cascade of questions I wasn’t prepared to answer there on that street corner. What’s crazy? How did he get that way? Is he always crazy? How do I know someone is crazy?

What was important to me in that moment was that she learn to perceive, not learn to name or categorize.

That’s an uphill battle, because categorizing is something human brains do. We categorize people as a shortcut to learning about them. We see young, old, white, black, male, female, stranger, friend, and we use the information we store in that box, the box labeled OLD or FEMALE or STRANGER to define them. Sometimes that’s the best we can do, but it creates a dreadful lack of knowing at the individual level.

Categorization and its malignant offspring, stereotyping, are learned at home, in school, on the street. These ways we have of seeing each other also have deep roots in human history. The blunt argument made by some academics (and further oversimplified by the media) says we became hardwired for this in an early moment in human evolution, when having a strong sense of “us and them” helped humans in an extremely resource-poor environment choose who to help and who to exclude so that their group had a better shot at survival. In other words, fear and bias were once useful. It may be in one way or another true that we were once dependent on keeping our groups closed. But turn your most suspicious eye on theories that say humans are hardwired for anything. Someone may be using an idea as a sledgehammer. That word is trying to tell you there’s something we can’t change. The fact that “us and them” thinking has long roots in human history does not mean that it is natural, or acceptable. It does not mean bias is inevitable and immutable, or that fearful and defensive instincts should continue to drive us.

There’s no question: We have to choose whom to trust. The world is full of dangers, and a few of them arrive in the form of an unfamiliar face. We have to navigate that world safely somehow. We can make these choices with attention and grace. If we don’t, we will find ourselves in a one-dimensional world, deprived of honest human connections and interruptions that awaken us.

None of this is easy. To learn to truly see someone you’ve never met is hard. Slotting them into categories is a lazy shortcut we rely on too often. Relying on your perceptions—giving careful attention to what your senses are telling you without jumping to conclusions—costs time and effort. It’s not a lightning reflex but a skill to be learned. You can practice it in places with low stakes. Take a walk in the park, in daylight, and look at the people around you. What do you see? What puts you at ease or sets you on edge? Who counts as a stranger?

Whatever you find, and wherever you think it comes from, one thing is certain: we are surrounded by individuals, not categories. There are adventures to be had here, adventures you can set out for every day of your life. To really understand how you divide the world, to use your senses to choose whom to make familiar, and to stop and say hello to a stranger, these bold acts can transform your emotional experience of the public world. And you can transform the public world itself right along with you.

2

Fleeting Intimacy

This if nothing else: Talking to strangers is good for you. Talking to a stranger is, at its best, an exquisite interruption of what you were expecting to happen when you walked down the street or rode on a bus, shopped at the grocery store or wandered around a museum, whiled away some time on a park bench or waited in a long, slow line. When something unexpected happens it calls you to full attention, turns your awareness outward to the world. You are awake. When you interact with a stranger you’re not in your own head, you’re not on autopilot from here to there. You are present in the moment. And to be present is to feel alive.

You are also connected. Conversations with strangers fill an essential need, one you might think only people you know can fill.

The name of that need is intimacy. When people don’t have the makings of intimacy in their lives—a sense of connection, of belonging to some form of community, of closeness to others—they suffer. The relationships we usually call intimate are with family, friends, romantic attachments, mentors, and confessors. The people we know as well as ourselves, the people we see often and miss when they’re gone, the people who make us feel at home. This kind of closeness is a long, taut thread that ties us over time.

But the need for intimacy casts a wider net than you might think. There is another kind of intimate relationship, one that holds us together for just a fleeting moment and then vanishes. Its brief and bounded nature takes nothing away from the reality that an intimate moment has been shared: unguarded, honest, with meaningful interior echoes. This is street intimacy. You find it, when you’re lucky, by talking to strangers.

If intimacy is private, street intimacy is public. It’s a nod of acknowledgment exchanged on the sidewalk, a glance held or a quick “hello” when you sit next to someone on the subway, a parting “take it easy” to the last person getting off the elevator before you do. You find it in all the places people who don’t know each other cross paths in passing.

A friend of mine, thirty years ago, was on a train stuck in the station, looking out the doors. Another train pulled up across the platform, and it too went nowhere. She held the gaze of a man on the other train for the long seconds their trains held still. As the doors closed, they waved to each other. The interaction was so emotionally moving for her that she remembers it to this day. For her, it was a moment of connection with a stranger that felt real and good. They didn’t need to know each other. Just being human was enough.

You see, it doesn’t take much. A shared glance or an exchange of what seems on the surface to be inconsequential patter can make you happy or etch itself into your memory. What’s happened is that your existence as a person has been noticed and spoken to. You have been seen.

Ritualistic things we say in passing that we don’t really mean much by, like “How are you?,” “Good morning,” “Nice day, isn’t it?,” “Take it easy,” “How you feelin’?,” “Hi, mami,” “Cómo estás?,” these phrases are known to linguists as phatic communication. They’re things we say that have little semantic value—we’re not really communicating anything factual or necessary. What they have is tremendous social value. These meaningless meaningful words are used between strangers as well as between people who are close. What we mean when we say those things is this: I see you there, hello. These mere acknowledgments carry genuine pleasure and togetherness. We don’t want a real answer, we’re affirming each other’s existence—and that is no small thing.

You can choose to make such simple acknowledgments a habit, and that choice can change you. When experimenters asked a group of customers at Starbucks to either talk to the barista as if they were an acquaintance or to refrain from talk, the ones who made conversation left with positive feelings. Similarly, people on a commuter train were asked to talk to strangers (or not), as were people in the waiting room of an experimental psychology lab where they believed they were in limbo for an experiment to begin. The results of these experiments demonstrated to the researchers that, in general, people feel good when they talk to strangers—even if they expect not to. Think about how extraordinary this is: These fleeting connections, what scholars call “minimal social interactions,” leave us with such real feelings of connectedness that they actually contribute to fulfilling the basic human need for sociability.

It’s Valentine’s Day and the subway is full of people who look either sad or happy, no one is indifferent. I squeeze in the middle seat next to a short, round guy with doe eyes and a shaved head. He adjusts a little, but he’s still got half my seat.

“I’m sorry,” he says, in the gentlest voice. “I’m getting off at the next stop and I’m really uncomfortable, that’s why I’m still sitting like this all spread out.”

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “I’ve got enough room.” I’ve turned and looked him in the eye. I’m smiling. It’s really all right. For some reason I want him to know that.

He looks at me a moment. “You know, I don’t have a valentine, and that’s okay. At my age, I realize that love is my valentine. Just love. You can share love with your family, your aunt, your brother, your pet, your cousin, you can share it with everybody.”

“You can share my seat,” I tell him.

“See, it’s beautiful, right? Happy Valentine’s Day,” he says, rising as the train slows its way into the station.

• • •

The Skin of the Self

As much as cities are shot through with chances to connect in passing moments, they are also full of noise and tension and crowds, of insults and injuries, of people who don’t see each other. Street intimacy is special precisely because it is unexpected and far from automatic. City dwellers aren’t primed for it. When you walk out the door, you toss your coat on and with it you cover your inner life with a protective shell. It’s a thin, invisible boundary that keeps the soft parts of your self safe from people you don’t know. Without it, the vulnerability is too great. Just because someone is near you, or interacting with you by necessity, that doesn’t mean you owe them access to your inner life. We have contradictory desires. We want to be seen and we want not to be seen. We want to be known and we want not to be known. In every interaction we have, the thickness or thinness of that boundary is negotiated over and over. We close and we open, open and close.

Sometimes when you talk to a stranger it seems that you’ve gotten more than a dose of their small talk, you’ve gotten a real glimpse of their inner self. And part of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Who Is a Stranger?
• Chapter 2 Fleeting Intimacy
• Chapter 3 A World Made of Strangers
• Chapter 4 The Mechanics of Interaction
• Epilogue
• Expeditions
• Acknowledgments
• Works Mentioned
• About the Author
• Watch Kio’s Ted Talk
• Related Talks on Ted.com
• More from Ted Books
• About Ted Books
• About Ted
• Copyright