Please Talk to Strangers

Despite my hectic schedule as a senior in the midst of college applications, I do my best to maintain some of the habits I’ve picked up over the past few months during quarantine: reading the New York Times morning briefing, dabbling in podcasts, and watching an occasional TED Talk. On one Sunday afternoon, as I did my best to “relax” and distract my mind from upcoming deadlines, I stumbled upon a particularly interesting TED Talk that described much of what I was feeling as a teenager stuck in the confines of remote learning.

That feeling was solitude. Despite doing my best to maintain communication with my friends over late-night FaceTime calls and socially-distanced hangouts, my daily routine easily became grueling. I spend six hours a day behind my computer attending online school, breaking only for lunch, then spending the rest of the evening doing homework, college applications, and the occasional aforementioned call. I’m not complaining: everyone has it tough, stuck in unideal work environments produced by a global pandemic. But after romanticizing my senior year of high school for most of my childhood, weeks without face-to-face interaction wasn’t exactly what I had expected.

In the TED Talk filmed during pre-COVID times, this phenomenon is described in a slightly different manner: sure, people may experience face-to-face interaction under normal circumstances, but the solitude associated with a lack of human connection remains. The speaker, Danny Harris, recalls how he worked a “standard job, in a standard city”— just another man in a suit among a sea of similarly-clad working professionals. In Washington, D.C., this observation was heightened by the diminishing cultural scene, which was being drowned out and traded for government buildings, law firms, and other establishments with a suit-and-tie uniform. Harris describes how one evening, as he stood in a grocery aisle with his head buried in his phone and his hand feeling overpriced produce, he looked up and saw dozens of versions of him doing the same thing—all wearing suits, all in their bubbles without ever striking a conversation with each other.

This feeling of resembling every other worker—of merely being a single, disposable employee in an endless sea of cubicles—is a dystopian image of capitalist America. But for Harris, this moment was less a moment of despair and more of a spark of inspiration. Feeling helpless and utterly disconnected from the world around him, he quit his job and began a project through which he documents a conversation he has with strangers each day. Though quitting your job in favor of pursuing social connection may sound extreme, Harris’s decision is remarkable and one that we should follow to a scaled-down extent.

As I listened to Harris’s despair over the obsession everyone has with their own problems and the personal bubbles we live in, I thought of Stuyvesant. With a student population of over 3,000, we aren’t as large as D.C. or any sizable city, and yet we experience the same problems Harris describes. I once joked that I only know a sliver of the 900 students in my grade without thinking much of it. But everyone was in a similar position, sticking to their confined circle of friends and familiar faces in the classroom. All of us chase after a GPA, a number of Advanced Placement classes, and an extracurricular that takes one hour of sleep away. We sprint up staircases without exchanging more than a strained smile or a superficial greeting with our friends, who have also prioritized their next class, task, and personal agenda. Instead of being carbon copies of suit-and-tie working professionals, we are similarly sleep-deprived, academically-driven students who seldom pierce their personal bubbles.

That’s not necessarily all bad. The drive of Stuyvesant students is remarkable, and I will never stop bragging about the incredible people I’ve met at this school. But in that process, we too have lost the spirit and soul a school should have. We have lost the connection to each other, using stereotypes of “nerdy STEM students” and “the quiet kids” as excuses to avoid starting conversations with strangers.

I’ve been at Stuyvesant for more than three years, and yet the majority of my grade is just that: a sea of strangers. As I sulk in my COVID-19 loneliness, I’m haunted by one thought every day: I’ll form new memories with my friends, and I’ll maintain online communication with my favorite teachers, but I will never form new relationships or learn the stories of the people who have walked the same hallways as me for three years.

I’ve realized this too late, and if it weren't for quarantine loneliness, perhaps I wouldn’t have recognized this phenomenon within Stuyvesant in the first place. And while it’s easy to blame others for the lack of widespread community and interconnection, I too am at fault. I didn’t follow up on the budding semester-long friendships I formed in classes or ask the students who had sat next to me for entire school years about what their weekend plans were. Asking standard questions and truly caring about the people on the fringe of your life shouldn’t be such a rarity. If everyone makes the first step, I’m sure that Stuyvesant can look radically different in only a few months.

As I anticipate the end of college application season, the “second term senior” status, and the college chapter of my life, I know that this behavior toward others is what I want to change. I think back to Harris and how much more meaningful his life has become when he stopped to learn others’ stories and maintained connections beyond typical work friendships. To get to that point, I’ve realized that it’s as simple as asking the neighbors you run into every morning how they’re doing or asking your classmates about their lunch plans. It doesn’t matter if these conversation starters get brushed off. People crave human connection—it’s in our DNA—and I vow to begin taking the first step.