Jess: A World Without Strangers<\/b><\/p>\n
When we think about the people in our lives who we interact with on a daily basis, strangers rank low on the list. How often do the Starbucks barista who serves your coffee in the morning, the Uber driver who shuttles you and your group of friends into Boston, the student who holds the door open for you as you walk into class make lasting impressions in our memories? When such interactions are so frequent and menial compared to our deeper relationships with friends, family members, and romantic partners, they become easy to disregard. However, what happens when we completely remove strangers from our lives?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The start of the pandemic marks a striking period of time when the world had little to no interactions between strangers. Transitioning from life at Harvard to life confined in my home was difficult. Suddenly, the minute interactions with strangers I had overlooked before were gone. For months, there were no more tourists who asked me for directions in the Yard, T passengers to make small talk with about the weather, or any opportunity where I could merely occupy the same space as a group larger than my family. While I could call my friends on FaceTime, entertain myself with multiplayer video games, and consume vast amounts of time on social media, the lack of in-person interactions with strangers made something essential feel missing. The silence in my neighborhood was eerie.<\/span><\/p>\n A series of 2014 studies by Gilian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn address the importance of peripheral social interactions on well-being. Their experiments demonstrate how weak social ties contribute to our subjective social and emotional well-being. The researchers found that participants who had, on average, more weak tie interactions than others reported greater feelings of belonging. Furthermore, they also found that participants reported greater feelings of belonging on days when they interacted with more weak ties than usual (Sandstrom & Dunn, 2014, p. 919).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I found it particularly interesting to learn that the effect of additional weak ties on subjective well-being and belonging is stronger on days when people have fewer strong tie interactions than usual (p. 916). This would indicate that the negative effects of lacking weak tie interactions during the pandemic were especially magnified due to our likewise dwindling strong tie interactions. Indeed, as hard as I tried to maintain the close friendships I had developed at Harvard, it was difficult to feel as close to my friends as I did before. Over time, I noticed a growing apathy for scheduling FaceTime calls and increasing \u201cZoom fatigue\u201d among my friends, which made it even more challenging to keep in touch.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The Social Brain Hypothesis states that our cognitive temporal limitations place limits on human sociability (Perry, 2022, p. 30). During the height of the pandemic, it seemed that our already limited social resources had somehow shrunk to only accommodate a handful of strong ties we had the energy to maintain throughout isolation. Truthfully, I was most successful in maintaining only one to two of my closest friendships during the pandemic and lost touch with most others. Because I had less strong ties than usual, my world without strangers felt even more discomforting.<\/span><\/p>\n An Atlantic article by Joe Keohane echoes the benefit of interacting with strangers. \u201cAgain and again, studies have shown that talking with strangers can make us happier, more connected to our communities, mentally sharper, healthier, less lonely, and more trustful and optimistic,\u201d the author writes (Keohane, 2021).\u00a0 Although my personal discomfort in isolation prompted me to flock back to making weak tie social connections when possible \u2014 even if it meant just a short conversation with my neighbor six feet apart as we walked our dogs \u2014 Keohane noticed that the pandemic produced an opposite effect in others. Despite findings that weak tie interactions benefit well-being, many people still maintain a \u201cstranger danger\u201d mentality, \u201cespecially after the coronavirus pandemic limited our social lives so severely.\u201d These observations suggest that perhaps some find greater comfort in silence and solace in stillness than I did.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Furthermore, perhaps even more lie in between. As noted by Keohane, Sandstrom believed that people simply didn\u2019t know how to talk to strangers and <\/span>fill <\/span><\/i>silence; once they did, they found it similarly as essential and rewarding as studies indicate. Thus, it is important to realize that there are both differences in <\/span>how<\/span><\/i> people seek out weak tie interactions, as well as barriers that might prevent people to do so, in order to better support our overall social and emotional well-being \u2014 even in times of extreme isolation like the pandemic.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Arlo: Post-Pandemic Social Fatigue<\/b><\/p>\n Jess discusses the often overlooked value and power of weak ties in our daily lives, and how this became quite apparent during the most isolated parts of the pandemic. During isolation, I realized that a really important weak tie interaction in my life was saying hi to various acquaintances while walking through campus. Every day on my walk to class I would see a couple of people I knew, ranging from closer friends to people I\u2019ve only talked to once or so. These interactions are often quite brief, maybe just a wave or a little flare of chatter.\u00a0 While these interactions, similarly to most other weak tie interactions, don\u2019t seem that important at first glance, I\u2019ve come to realize how much these little greetings actually lift me up. For me these interactions seem to somewhat subconsciously put me into a positive and lighter state; they feel like belonging, like I\u2019m being slightly held up by all these people and they care, not just about me but about the world, and this would often feel motivating. I think it also gives me some sort of sense of being a part of something, which is comforting.<\/span><\/p>\n Once the pandemic hit, it was at first quite rare that I would have that same feeling. Many of us went for at least a couple of weeks only interacting with a small set of people, often family or friends we were already quite close with. Similar to Jess, I feel like I was able to maintain just a few friendships throughout the pandemic to the extent of closeness that we had before the pandemic. These were particularly people I lived with or was in a tight circle with. Within these specific relationships, there reached a point where we as friends became closer than we had ever been before. After spending so much time together, our social dynamic felt quite deepened and somewhat raw. Yet I also felt that my general social capacity was lowering. With little new social interactions, my time was spent more and more on hobbies and other interests, creating an increasing sense of social fatigue. After isolation, I found that my capacity for general social interaction had decreased. I used to choose hanging out with friends over pretty much any activity, but now I often find myself wanting to stay in and work on music or watch a movie over going out.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This change in social pace made me think about my parents and their social interaction with friends. For a while, I\u2019ve always wondered why my parents don\u2019t socialize that much in general, apart from the occasional dinners with friends or a book club meeting. At first, I thought it was just my parents but it seems like it is quite common. In an article from The Atlantic entitled \u2018How Friendships Change in Adulthood\u2019, the author Julie Beck describes, \u201cAs people enter middle age, they tend to have more demands on their time, many of them more pressing than friendship. After all, it\u2019s easier to put off catching up with a friend than it is to skip your kid\u2019s play or an important business trip. The ideal of people\u2019s expectations for friendship is always in tension with the reality of their lives, Rawlins says.\u201d While this definitely applies to my parents and their friends, it seems as if the pandemic has accelerated me into this a bit as well. When I think back to Freshman year, it was much more common for me to just hang out in a dorm room and talk with someone. These days much more of my socializing is at a meal or a party (aside from quite close friends and roommates). I\u2019ve tended to categorize socializing into a more specific time frame, placing it as less spur of the moment and sometimes less valuable as maybe another activity in the day. As I get older I hope to still maintain at least some level of curiosity and spontaneity in various socialization.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n References<\/b><\/p>\n Beck, J. (2015, October 2022). How friendships change in adulthood. The Atlantic. <\/span>https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/health\/archive\/2015\/10\/how-friendships-change-over-time-in-adulthood\/411466\/<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n