The Fall of Talking To Strangers
I was sitting in the nail salon getting a pedicure, scrolling on my phone, trying to chip away at my to-do list just like everyone else sitting around me, when I suddenly noticed the room that had previously been dead silent outside of the whirring of the nail files was not so quiet anymore. I looked around in an attempt to see what had changed.
I quickly noticed an elderly woman had just walked in, sat down, and began her pedicure with one of the employees. And…she started a conversation! She asked her nail attendant questions as she began to get to know her. Where are you from? Do you live here? Do you have any children? Are they in school? All the things.
Her phone was nowhere in sight as she sat fully upright in her chair, leaning in towards the woman speaking. She intently gave her full attention to the woman in front of her.
They were the only people talking in the whole room. They laughed, shared stories, and made connections. Not a soul around the room paid any attention.
Somewhere along the way, this interaction became rare; strangers turned from a possible new friend to an enemy…or worse, to nothing at all.
Part of it is the world we live in. We are not wrong to be discerning. There are real dangers, real brokenness, and real reasons to be careful about who we let in and how. A culture shaped by conflict and division has handed us a story about all the people around us that we don’t even know yet. They are a threat, or, at the very least, not our problem. And so we have learned to keep our eyes down. To move through public spaces efficiently and privately without making contact.
But somewhere in learning to be cautious, we also learned to be closed. And those are not the same thing.
We stopped seeing people as people and started seeing them as just part of the scenery we pass by during our day. Not worthy of the interruption to get to know them. Or, more likely, not worthy of the extra few minutes “lost” out of our busy schedules.
The irony is that we have never been more connected—more followed, more messaged, and more notified—and yet, something about the texture of daily life feels increasingly thin. Not because we lack contact, but because we have quietly stopped making it. Real contact. The kind that happens when you put your phone down and actually look at the person in front of you long enough to wonder about their life.
There is something quietly radical about a woman who still does this. Who asks the nail technician where she is from and actually listens to the answer. Who notices the young service worker who looks like he is carrying something heavy and says something kind. Who listens to the elderly woman in the doctor’s office waiting room discuss her grandchildren and asks questions about them. Who makes the elderly man’s passing joke land by laughing at it genuinely instead of offering a polite smile and looking away.
She is not doing anything grand. She is just seeing people.
But something shifts when she does. Not always dramatically. Sometimes it is just a moment—a question asked, a laugh shared, or simply a small acknowledgment that says I notice you are here. That you are a person and not a backdrop. That your life outside of this interaction is real and worth asking about.
We were not made to pass through each other’s lives without leaving a trace. The elderly woman in the nail salon knew this. She carried it in the way she leaned forward, phone nowhere in sight, giving the only thing that actually costs something in a conversation.
Her full attention.
And in a world that has gotten so good at looking past people, that is enough to change someone’s entire day.
