strangers

We simply cannot trust that sides of our deep selves will have counterparts in those we meet, and so remain silent and shy, struggling to believe that the imposing, competent strangers we encounter can have any of the vulnerabilities, perversions, and idiocies we’re so intimately familiar with inside our own characters. - Alain de Botton

Aside from express real-life social gatherings, the way we first come to know strangers these days is all too frequently mediated by machines: email, telephone, chat, zoom, dating app. When ‘meeting’ strangers online, we are frequently flooded with preliminary impressions of them via social-media feeds, photos, (curated) personal histories, even sometimes reviews and interactions by and with nameless others.

These digital introductions can compel us into thinking we ‘know’ people based not on themselves, but rather on OURselves (that is, our random fact-collecting and biased imaginings assembled from what they put out onto social media etc.). How does this (if at all) affect building real-life relationships with others?

(stay tuned in the next week or two for a W.E.I.R.D 'related reading' list, and no-flake policy is in effect for this event, no-shows who haven't updated their RSVP 48 hours BEFORE the event get pushed to the purgatory of eternal waiting list :) )