The Power of Strangers
The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World
(Sprache: Englisch)
A “meticulously researched and buoyantly written” (Esquire) look at what happens when we talk to strangers, and why it affects everything from our own health and well-being to the rise and fall of nations in the...
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A “meticulously researched and buoyantly written” (Esquire) look at what happens when we talk to strangers, and why it affects everything from our own health and well-being to the rise and fall of nations in the tradition of Susan Cain’s Quiet and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens“This lively, searching work makes the case that welcoming ‘others’ isn’t just the bedrock of civilization, it’s the surest path to the best of what life has to offer.”—Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Homeland Elegies
In our cities, we stand in silence at the pharmacy and in check-out lines at the grocery store, distracted by our phones, barely acknowledging one another, even as rates of loneliness skyrocket. Online, we retreat into ideological silos reinforced by algorithms designed to serve us only familiar ideas and like-minded users. In our politics, we are increasingly consumed by a fear of people we’ve never met. But what if strangers—so often blamed for our most pressing political, social, and personal problems—are actually the solution?
In The Power of Strangers, Joe Keohane sets out on a journey to discover what happens when we bridge the distance between us and people we don’t know. He learns that while we’re wired to sometimes fear, distrust, and even hate strangers, people and societies that have learned to connect with strangers benefit immensely. Digging into a growing body of cutting-edge research on the surprising social and psychological benefits that come from talking to strangers, Keohane finds that even passing interactions can enhance empathy, happiness, and cognitive development, ease loneliness and isolation, and root us in the world, deepening our sense of belonging. And all the while, Keohane gathers practical tips from experts on how to talk to strangers, and tries them out himself in the wild, to awkward, entertaining, and frequently poignant effect.
Warm, witty, erudite, and profound, equal parts sweeping
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history and self-help journey, this deeply researched book will inspire readers to see everything—from major geopolitical shifts to trips to the corner store—in an entirely new light, showing them that talking to strangers isn’t just a way to live; it’s a way to survive.
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Chapter 1Strangers in a Classroom
In which I travel all the way to London to relearn what should be a laughably rudimentary human skill, and am made to feel uncomfortable a sign of things to come.
Our journey begins on a bright day in a small classroom at Regent s University in London. I m sitting on a chair, palsied with jet lag, clutching my third cup of coffee. There are four other people there, too. They appear to be functioning at a higher level than I am, thankfully. We have come here to learn how to talk to strangers. Our teacher in this endeavor is an energetic twenty-nine-year-old named Georgie Nightingall. Georgie is the founder of Trigger Conversations, a London-based human connection organization that hosts social events aimed at facilitating meaningful conversations among strangers. Georgie had been recommended to me by a renowned psychologist whom we will meet soon. I got in touch with her, and when she told me that she was planning an immersive three-day seminar on talking to strangers, I bought a plane ticket. Not long after, I landed in London, slept a couple of hours, and then arrived bright and early to a classroom, more coffee than man, but ready to learn.
Georgie started Trigger Conversations in 2016. Up until then, her background had been eclectic. She had graduated from college in 2014, where she was pursuing both an undergraduate degree in philosophy and a master s in emotions, credibility, and deception, from a psychology and linguistics angle, as she says. That got her interested in language and conversation. After school, she tried her hand at a few different jobs. She interned at a start-up, worked a series of jobs as a project manager, and was for a time at the Francis Crick Institute, a world-renowned biomedical research facility. That was my last real job, Georgie says. After that she struck out on her own.
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She was always a talker, though the prospect of talking to strangers made her a little hesitant, partly because of some social anxiety about the fact that it wasn t normal to speak to strangers, she says. However, she had also grown bored with the conversations she was having with new people the usual What do you do? and How was your day? interactions that never go anywhere. She wanted to help introduce people to the idea that these conversations don t have to be dull or formulaic. They can be scintillating, informative, and exploratory. After she founded Trigger Conversations, she drafted a short manifesto along those lines: We are adventurers in conversation, she wrote. We are travelers without a destination. Exploring the unknown, without expectation. Each one of us a teacher and every person an opportunity.
Georgie, as it turns out, was exploring the unknown in particularly treacherous territory, conversation-wise. London in particular, and the United Kingdom in general, is something of a global center of a nascent talking-to-strangers movement in large part because of a concerted national effort to combat the nation s loneliness epidemic. A recent study by the British Red Cross found that a fifth of the British population often or always feels lonely. In 2018, the United Kingdom appointed its first loneliness minister, a high-ranking government official who steers policy geared toward repairing frayed social ties and reinforcing social cohesion.
In the past few years, numerous grassroots groups have cropped up to try to get Britons to talk to strangers in cafés, pubs, or on mass transit. A Chatty Café initiative, in which pubs and cafés set up specially marked tables where strangers can chat, has spread to more than nine hundred l
She was always a talker, though the prospect of talking to strangers made her a little hesitant, partly because of some social anxiety about the fact that it wasn t normal to speak to strangers, she says. However, she had also grown bored with the conversations she was having with new people the usual What do you do? and How was your day? interactions that never go anywhere. She wanted to help introduce people to the idea that these conversations don t have to be dull or formulaic. They can be scintillating, informative, and exploratory. After she founded Trigger Conversations, she drafted a short manifesto along those lines: We are adventurers in conversation, she wrote. We are travelers without a destination. Exploring the unknown, without expectation. Each one of us a teacher and every person an opportunity.
Georgie, as it turns out, was exploring the unknown in particularly treacherous territory, conversation-wise. London in particular, and the United Kingdom in general, is something of a global center of a nascent talking-to-strangers movement in large part because of a concerted national effort to combat the nation s loneliness epidemic. A recent study by the British Red Cross found that a fifth of the British population often or always feels lonely. In 2018, the United Kingdom appointed its first loneliness minister, a high-ranking government official who steers policy geared toward repairing frayed social ties and reinforcing social cohesion.
In the past few years, numerous grassroots groups have cropped up to try to get Britons to talk to strangers in cafés, pubs, or on mass transit. A Chatty Café initiative, in which pubs and cafés set up specially marked tables where strangers can chat, has spread to more than nine hundred l
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Autoren-Porträt von Joe Keohane
Joe Keohane is a veteran journalist who has held high-level editing positions at Medium, Esquire, Entrepreneur, and Hemispheres. His writing—on everything from politics, to travel, to social science, business, and technology—has appeared in New York magazine, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, Wired, Boston magazine, The New Republic, and several textbooks. An avid parallel parker and occasional working musician, he also won a prestigious Screenwriters Colony fellowship in 2017 for a comedy television pilot that remains, sadly, unproduced.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Joe Keohane
- 2022, 368 Seiten, Masse: 12,9 x 20,1 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Random House Trade Paperbacks
- ISBN-10: 1984855794
- ISBN-13: 9781984855794
- Erscheinungsdatum: 23.07.2022
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
This is one of those remarkable books you may not realize you re going to love (or need) until you re well into it. The Power of Strangers is deeply and gamely researched, lucidly and engagingly written (as if by a pal), informative, thought-provoking, playful, useful, and possibly life-changing. What a great way to start the post-pandemic. Kurt Andersen, author of Fantasyland and Evil Geniuses In a thrilling, immersive journey across time and continents, Keohane upends everything we thought we knew about the people we don t know. Will Storr, author of The Science of Storytelling
Joe Keohane has changed my life. The very thought of talking to strangers has always given me mild nausea and stress sweats. But after reading this book, I ve been converted. The Power of Strangers is an important tool in rescuing our tribal, smartphone-obsessed world. If you see me on the street, please say hi, so we can discuss it. A. J. Jacobs, author of Thanks a Thousand: A Gratitude Journey
Why do people feel so disconnected, divided, and alone? Could a simple fix lead to increased happiness, ingenuity, health, and attraction? In this perfect post-pandemic read, Joe Keohane answers these questions illustrating via scientifically backed evidence and engaging real-life examples how talking to strangers can address many of the biggest problems facing our societies and ourselves, and how it is far easier than we think. Sarah J. Tracy, Ph.D., professor, The Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University
Thank Zeus, human nature, and the brilliant Joe Keohane for The Power of Strangers, an illuminating, witty and dare I say life-affirming blend of psychology, anthropology, and lived human experience. I never knew, before now, why strangers are chattier at farmers markets than in supermarkets, or why the vital and broadly applicable craft of listening (and the gift of being listened to) feels
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so good. God knows this book is timely and necessary, in this struggling republic of ours. I not only love it, I'm grateful for it. Paige Williams, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Dinosaur Artist: Obsession, Science, and the Global Quest for Fossils
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