I’ve always been frustrated with the side of human behavior where people put up a wall between themselves and another. We sit next to each other in coffee shops, walk down the street, yet there is a barrier put up between us under our own accord.
What if this barrier was torn down? What if we actually talked to the person next to us for once? What if we took a moment to hear their story and thoughts.
I believe the world in the future will be fundamentally different. We will live in a world where there is no barrier between two people. A world where you do not need to “initiate” a conversation because each conversation flows from one person to the next.
We raise kids with the notion that “strangers” are bad people. There is some truth to that, but how often do we go through daily life alone? How often do we go through a store adrift upon an ocean of our self-centered thoughts. We do not give a damn about the person next to us.
Is technology promoting this? Perhaps. Maybe it could improve it.
The question remains — how can we break down the barrier between two people? Because… if we can do it, then we stand a much better chance at fixing all of the shity problems we have.
Serendipitous Connectivity
Serendipitous
ser·en·dip·i·tous ˌserənˈdipitəs
adjective
occurring or discovered by chance in a happy or beneficial way.
It’s one of my favorite words. It means exactly what the definition entails. It is an experience that occurs “by chance” in a beneficial way.
I have been thinking about this a lot recently, and it came to a breaking point tonight when I was sitting at a coffee shop in the West Village in New York.
This place to be exact.
I was moving chairs around and looking for a place to put my longboard. (This is a small shop with no places to put things). The girl next to me said I could put it on the wall next to her.
“Sounds good.” I said in my head.
This interaction then pivoted into us talking about things. This person ended up going to college in Boston and knowing one of my friends. She was a painter spending the summer in New York at a program designed to help young artists.
I told her about my work here in New York and why I think it’s important. I drew a parallel between Art and Technology and how I express my creativity through code in the same way she expresses her creativity through art.
All of this does not happen to people on a normal basis. This serendipitous connectivity helps when you live in a city such as New York.
As a person who thinks a lot, I feel somewhat of an obligation to figure this out. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but perhaps we can make tools to bridge this gap between two people and make serendipitous connectivity occur more often.
That is all.
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