What talking to strangers taught me

There’s a difference between a conversation where you’re waiting for your turn to speak, and one where you’re actually listening. I only learned that after dozens of conversations with people I was never going to see again. Oddly enough, it was the lack of consequences that made me listen more carefully than ever.

People want to be heard, not judged

The most common mistake in a conversation with someone new is searching your head for a reply before the other person has even finished talking. When you talk to complete strangers regularly, you quickly notice that the best responses are the simplest ones — “and then what happened?” works better than any piece of advice ever could.

Nobody’s looking for a solution when they talk to a stranger online. People are looking for someone who, just for a moment, takes what they’re saying seriously.

Our assumptions about people are almost always wrong

I once talked for over an hour with someone whose opening message sounded cold and distant — I was ready to end the conversation after two minutes. It turned out to be one of the most interesting conversations I’d had all month. It taught me that a first impression from a text message says more about our own anxieties than about the other person.

The more you talk to people you don’t know, the faster you notice how often we project things onto others that have nothing to do with them at all.

Closeness doesn’t need a shared language

What surprised me most was how little it matters where someone’s from once translation happens in real time, the way it does on HEYID. A conversation with someone from Brazil turns out less different from one with someone from Poland than you’d expect — people usually end up talking about the same things anyway: work, relationships, whatever’s been bothering them lately.

Every conversation is a little practice at being human

Talking to strangers is, in a way, training. It teaches patience, teaches you to ask questions instead of assuming answers, teaches you that you can disagree with someone and still have a good conversation. Those are skills that come in handy everywhere afterward — at work, in a relationship, talking to a neighbor. Except here, you get to learn them with nothing at stake.