Joe Keohane - The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World

I have a story for you. Its about a stranger.

A couple of years ago, I had the obscene good fortune to spend two weeks on the island of Nantucket as part of a screenwriters fellowship: three other writers and me living in a house, honing our craft, and meeting industry people, while going to parties and methodically divesting our host of liquor and food. Early one morning, after a party, the four of us are standing outside in the dark waiting for a cab. Im telling them that while my businessprint journalismmay indeed be hurtling toward oblivion, taking with it many of my prospects, hopes, dreams, etc., I wouldnt trade the experience for anything, because it gave me a chance to make a living by talking to strangers. And when you talk to people you dont know, I tell them, you learn that everyone has a bit of gold; everyone has at least one thing to say that will surprise you, amuse you, horrify you, edify you. They tell you things, usually with minimal prodding, and sometimes those things can deepen you, and awaken you to the richness and the grace and even the pain of the human experience. They show themselves to be freestanding worlds. When youre allowed in, you can internalize a little piece of that person, and by doing so, you grow a little. You gain a bit of empathy, wisdom, or understanding.

The cab finally shows up. Its driven by an older woman. We pile in, and I decide to show my friends what I was talking about. (As youll see, I have a real fondness for cabdrivers.) I ask her about living on Nantucket. She answers. I ask something else. She answers. She gets comfortable, and, over the course of a twenty-minute drive, she tells us her life story. She was born into money on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. When she was small, there was some kind of deranged socialite fad her parents went in for that involved binding a childs calves. This, she explains, was meant to spare said socialites the humiliation of being seen with a child with inelegant calves.

Her parents crippled her with this treatment. She struggled to walk. What did they do when they realized what had happened? I ask her. Did they consult a surgeon, or a physical therapist? Did they try to redress the damage they had done and restore proper mobility to their daughter? Did they even apologize?

They did not, the cabdriver says.

Then what did they do?

They made me take dancing lessons.

Oh my god, I said. Why did they make you take dancing lessons?

Because they wanted to teach me to fall down more gracefully, she says.

Reader, Im the grandson, son, and brother of Irish Catholic funeral directors in Boston, Massachusetts. My background has shaped my worldview, my sense of humor, my whole sensibility. So believe me when I tell you that I have never in my life heard a more perfect summation of the human condition than what I heard from that random stranger, at that late hour, on that gilded little boomerang of an island in the Atlantic.

After that interaction, I started thinking a lot about strangers. Why dont we talk to strangers? I wondered. When will we? And what happens when we do? Because the fact was, outside of my job, I really hadnt been talking to strangers. Not in the wild, anyway. The dueling demands of a job and an infant daughterthe so-called work-life balance that so often feels like a war of attritionleft little time to hang around places where people do talk to strangers, and little energy with which to do it. Even when I did manage to carve out half an hour to stop into a bar or caf, I didnt talk to people. When I did, it went badly. This, I expect, was because, as any parent of a very young child can attest, my brain didnt really work anymore. I found myself withdrawingeither reading or, more shamefully, staring at my phone, numbly consuming content that just minutes later I would have absolutely no recollection of, but that still left me feeling vaguely unwell. In time, I stopped talking to anyone. I barely made eye contact. Even that felt like a chore.

What struck me was just how easy it was to withdraw, to absent myself from most human interaction. Throughout his career studying cities, the sociologist Richard Sennett has praised the idea of friction in life: those little inefficiencies that force you to interact with strangerslike asking a butcher for grilling tips, or asking for directions, or just ordering a pizza over the phone. With the march of technological progress, those interactions have become increasingly unnecessary. And that, I suspected, was eroding our social skills. I was evidence of this. Why did I always pick the self-checkout lane at CVS even when there was no line? Why did I get annoyed with a store clerk when he asked what my plans were for the day? Why did I stop chatting with strangers and disappear into my phone when I knew from experience that what they would tell me would usually be far more interesting than whatever toxic slurry was coursing through Twitter at that moment? I dont know. But I did. And I did not feel great about it.

Still, though, there were times, like on Nantucket, when I did wind up talking to a stranger, and it went well, and a little world opened. I gained something: an insight, a joke, a different way of thinking about things, a good story. But more than that, I felt, as strange as it is to say, relieved. And I wanted to understand why.