Talk to Strangers!
This may sound like a rather modest challenge.
I decided to start talking to strangers.
Not for dating.
Not for networking.
Not because I need anything from them.
Just to see whether I can start a small conversation with almost anyone.
In Switzerland, this is more interesting than it sounds.
This is not the United States.
People here can be extraordinarily reserved. On a train, in a shop, on the street, there is often an unwritten agreement that everybody will politely pretend the other people are not there.
The result can be a peculiar public atmosphere. People walk around with closed faces. You look at them and think:
Probably not.
Better leave that person alone.
So I started ignoring that thought.
If somebody seemed particularly difficult to approach, that almost made it more interesting.
What could I say?
It turns out the answer is:
Almost anything.
The words matter much less than I expected.
A comment about what is happening.
A stupid observation.
Some harmless nonsense.
What seems to matter much more is how it is said.
If you approach someone without demanding anything from them, without trying to impress them, without needing the conversation to succeed, something strange happens.
Very often, the door is already open.
I would guess that in perhaps ninety percent of these little experiments, people respond positively.
And sometimes the contrast between appearance and reality is extraordinary.
There is a cashier at a supermarket I regularly visit.
She has one of the most impenetrable expressions I have ever seen.
If you judged her purely by her face, you would conclude that this woman has had quite enough of humanity and would prefer not to hear another word from it.
So naturally I started talking to her, I would simply say something whenever I went through her checkout.
After a while, the person behind that formidable expression turned out to be completely different from the person I had imagined.
Now, when she sees me, she notices me immediately.
Do you need something?
Can I help you with something?
Same face.
Different person
Or rather, probably the same person all along.
I had simply mistaken the public expression for the private individual.
Maybe this is particularly Swiss. Maybe not.
But I have begun to suspect that reserve is often misread as rejection.
People may not want to make the first move.
That is not the same as not wanting contact.
And once I started testing that distinction, something changed in the way I moved through public space.
The street felt less hostile.
Not because other people had changed.
Because I had stopped deciding what they were going to say before they said it.
That reminded me of one of Paul Watzlawick’s best little stories.
A man wants to hang a picture.
He has a nail, but no hammer.
His neighbour has a hammer.
So he decides to ask whether he can borrow it.
Before he goes next door, however, he begins thinking.
The neighbour did not greet me properly yesterday.
Perhaps he does not like me.
Maybe he will refuse.
Who does he think he is?
Why should I have to beg him for his stupid hammer?
By the time the man finally reaches the neighbour’s door, he is furious.
The neighbour opens it.
And before the poor man can say anything, his visitor explodes:
Keep your hammer.
I wouldn’t take it from you anyway.
The neighbour never refused.
The entire argument happened in somebody else’s head.
I increasingly suspect that quite a lot of everyday social life works like that.
We look at a face.
We imagine the answer.
And then we behave as though the conversation has already taken place.
My new experiment is much simpler.
I let the other person answer for themselves.