Talk to one stranger a day

My experiment

“What’s over there on my left?” the blind woman asked me.

“It’s a food stand.”

“What kind of food?”

Hoping my voice wouldn’t crack with the emotion I was feeling, I proceed to describe the variety of Turkish deli foods - baba ghanoush, hummus, different colours and flavours of creamed fetas - before receiving her next request and taking her by the hand, guiding her to the market stand on our adjacent side, where I began to describe the brightly coloured enamel cups that were on display.

“Can I touch them?”

I guide her hand to a cup, my heart bursting with the intensity of this sudden, unexpected sensory adventure I find myself on, all because I'd asked a blind woman who bumped into me whether she needed help.

It was the perfect gateway to seize the moment for my current challenge:

I have given myself the task of speaking to one stranger a day.

Now, however open-hearted and friendly I might think of myself, I am not really the kind of person who speaks to strangers. An introvert at heart, my default is to generally treat the outside world with a certain wariness. I am frequently to be found with my headphones on when I travel and - although I try and withstand the temptation - am often busy on my phone, feeling awkward and irritated when someone bursts my personal bubble and asks me for money. My body contains countless uncomfortable memories of being stared at and approached in less-than-desirable ways.

And so after a week of connecting to strangers wherever I can - sitting on the tram or at the tram stop, drinking coffee in the cafe, the man in the South Indian restaurant eating his masala dosa next to me, the woman ahead of me in the queue at the Sisyphos toilets, the market stall vendor selling herbs and spices - here’s what I’m noticing and learning:

Speaking to strangers feels like a tiny yet powerful rebellion against a very large and mostly invisible system.

It’s doing something that the entire architecture of modern life is seemingly organised to prevent.

The headphones, the screens, the apps, the self-checkout tills that mean you never have to interact with an actual human to get what you need - it’s all structured around efficiency and profit being valued over the wellbeing of people. It’s built on the assumption that other people are, at best, an inconvenience, a friction to be reduced, and at worst, risky and dangerous.

I confess… I am not immune to these feelings at times. Perhaps you aren’t either. It is, after all, the air we breathe, the water we swim in. I feel like my body contains an infinite number of micro-tensions that hold these beliefs in place.

I don't think there are villains out there who decided to make us more isolated. This is just what happens over time - the slow erosion of ordinary human contact - when we build from within a culture that simply hasn't valued connection. It's the accumulation of systems that work better when humans are predictable, optimisable, reducible to data points and purchasing behaviour, rather than actual human beings.

And somewhat unbelievably, no one paused to ask what that might cost us.

And yet… we feel it. The loneliness and isolation. We lament our lack of belonging, our feeling of rootlessness. We worry about falling through the cracks, of not knowing who to call when we need help. Events, workshops, retreats and plant medicine rituals attempt to offer what we’ve lost. And yet what if the thing we're aching for is available, right here, in the most ordinary of moments - if we're willing to be the one who reaches first?

Every time I step out of my comfort zone and speak to a stranger (and I’ll add that every single one has been a positive experience) I feel something in me softening, uncoiling. I always feel a little more connected, uplifted, alive. The beauty is also in the mutuality of it: knowing that the stranger you speak to also receives something. They too get the counter-evidence to the narrative that humans are just background noise or something to be wary of. They too get reminded that they’re visible, that they exist to someone, that the world contains people who will meet their eyes.

And something else I’ve noticed: while at the beginning I had to push myself, the more I do it, the easier it becomes - but more than that, it’s as though something in me invisibly opens, and people approach me more. I have found myself having multiple interactions with strangers in a day without even really trying.

The act of seeing the humanity in those around us - these repeated tiny acts of courage - weaves the relational fabric that holds us. It is the slow restoration of human connection and our sense of shared humanity.

It’s the antidote to a dehumanising world.

It requires no institution, no tradition, no app, no leader. It’s completely available, right now, to anyone. That really is a kind of power - not power over anything, but power with. The power of reweaving something that’s coming apart, one small thread at a time.

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This morning the man drinking coffee and reading the newspaper in the Berliner cafe next to me laughed out loud a few times.

“There’s things that give you a good mood, reading the newspaper?!” I asked him.

He proceeded to go through various pages with me, explaining the parts he found funny or uplifting. We started chatting about this and that, and after some minutes I excused myself - I had a call to jump on - and thanked him. I told him I’d been feeling down about the chaos and suffering in the world; about knowing that Germany is the largest European donor to Israel, and that my taxes therefore help finance this war.

“But we can’t do anything about that!” he exclaimed.

“This is what we can do something about,” and he gestured between the two of us.

“Just simple moments of connection like this.”

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P.s Comments are always welcome in response to my writing (and greatly appreciated). If you want to share a comment, please do so on the Substack article, rather than replying personally to this email. Thank you!

P.p.s And speaking of reaching out to strangers - if you're navigating something you'd like support with, I work one-to-one with people navigating moments of change, stuckness, or searching. Find out more here.

P.p.s And if you’d like even more inspiration on this subject, I recently met the inspiring Dr. Gillian Sandstrom - a professor in the psychology of kindness, who is soon to publish a book on the topic of speaking to strangers, which you can order here or from your local book shop.