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7 Things I Learned Embedding With Total Strangers
During a lonely year, I entangled myself with horse racing gamblers, renegade aquarium attendants, wizened hostel dwellers, and hundreds of friendly randos.
The cultural meaning of strangers tends to be fear-oriented: they are shadowy and dangerous. That’s often with good reason, but it’s also reductive. “Strangers” is really just a shorthand for “everyone else.” That’s a pretty wide-ranging category, to preposterously understate it! In my encounters letting everyday situations escalate at the dentist, in the grocery store, on trains, strangers were also scratched up lottery tickets to spontaneity and poetry.
The pandemic has understandably strained our relationship to those we don’t know, but hopefully as the vaccines kick in, the social distance we’ve had to cultivate can begin to shrink sometime soon. Because in addition to danger and shadows, there are many spoils to be found among strangers. They affected me so profoundly that I wrote a book, No One You Know, about my interactions with them. Here are some field notes from my wanderings.
Strangers are salves for loneliness
We spend a lot of time focusing on how dangerous strangers are, but they can also…
