We’ve been steadily weeding out all of the little casual occasions for human contact from our lives over the past few decades. We used to have to deal with bank tellers, gas station attendants, store clerks, theater ushers, telephone operators and on and on…
Now it would be perfectly possible to go for a week, in the city, without ever speaking face to face with another person.
Whenever I go to Paris, the most striking difference to me is the quantity of human contact. It’s diminishing there too, but still, when you do your shopping at the market, you’ll go to this guy for your potatoes, that lady for your milk, that one for your dried beans…by the time you’ve finished, you’ll have spoken to maybe 5 or 6 different people. Do that 3 times a week for a few years and you establish some pretty deep connections with people who may be very different from you, but who are, nevertheless integral to your life. I’m going back there in a couple of weeks, and I fully expect that I’ll recognize many of the same people I knew from many years ago in the course of going about my everyday business, and they’ll probably recognize me.
Humans are complex; we crave social contact at he same time that we don’t want to deal with the messiness and inevitable conflicts and inconvenience that come with it. Our modern solution has been to narrow those contacts down to the least troublesome ones, ones that we can control and with people who are the most like us. In the process, we’re forgetting how to reach out across differences.