Matt Hartley
15 Minute Read
Volume 2. Issue 1.
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What I discovered about myself, other people, relationships, and
conversation in my attempt to meet someone new every single day
of 2022.
The
Adjacent People
by Jean-Luc Currie
20 Minute Read
February 2023
Volume 2, Issue 2
It's some Thursday in May, the first time I meet Joseph. I’m running errands to the west side of Denver to return a weed eater to Lowes. On my way home, I stop at a Target to buy socks and dog treats. I pull into a parking space and immediately notice someone panhandling for money. He or she, I can’t tell because they’re facing away from me, confronts another shopper as she passes by. The shopper shakes her head, gets in her car, and drives away. I don’t judge the shopper-lady who told the panhandler “No.” In fact, I’m mentally steeling myself to do the same thing.
The person stands in my direct path to the store entrance. They haven’t seen me yet. I contemplate a circuitous route to the front to avoid them, but that feels cowardly, so I check my wallet—no cash. Thank God, I think to myself, I won’t have to lie.
I step out of my car and head toward the door. As I walk by I look to my left, catching the eyes of the person. “Do you have money for the bus?” he asks. It’s a young boy with a ponytail and a clean-shaven face except for a thin, catfish mustache. I notice a blanket and other belongings inside a plastic bag. It’s the sort of bag that usually holds a duvet or comforter, the clear kind, structured with a zipper. His clothing is decent and he looks clean. His eyes, set far apart, are bright. Something about him, about that moment, draws me toward him. “Why do you need money for the bus?” I ask.
“To go to the youth shelter,” he responds. He smiles as he speaks, it’s genuine, full of hope. I ask a few more questions, and he gives prompt, clear answers. He doesn’t shy away from telling me that he’s been on the street since 14 because “both of my parents are strung out.” I’m playing the game in my head, the game of how-much-should-I-believe-about-this-person, the game where we try and protect ourselves, not because we’re trying to shield ourselves from genuine danger, but because we’re trying to shield ourselves from humiliation, the pain of being taken advantage of, made to look foolish when we believe a story that isn’t real.
“I don’t have cash,” I tell him, “but you can come in with me and I’ll get some for you.”
My mind flashes back to when I took two homeless opioid addicts into the Black Sheep restaurant in Charleston, West Virginia, three years earlier. The hostess wouldn’t seat us, so we waited for our food in the waiting area. I understood why. The man attempted to confront a local lawyer, the prosecutor on his most recent court case, and the woman kept offering me her suboxone tablets by way of thanks.
Joseph accompanies me around the store and we get further acquainted. I keep asking if he needs anything (“Socks? A sweatshirt? Food?”), but he turns me down each time. “I have everything I need,” he says. “Except bus fare.”
“I’m pretty lucky,” he adds.
I feel self-conscious as I search for socks and deliberate over dog food. He calmly tags along, telling me about his life, and introducing me to legal terms like “liberation”. He dropped out of school at the end of his freshman year, and now he spends most nights in the youth shelter. The shelter has a three-night consecutive limit, so he sleeps in a park every fourth night. “The other day it rained,” he told me, “and I got new socks.” I’m unsure how those two things connect.
“What about something to eat?” I ask. “I have a subway gift card,” he responds. “I’ll use that for dinner.” “Something to drink?” I press. He finally relents, and I add a Dr. Pepper and a box of chewy granola bars to my basket, like some sort of penance for what feels like decadent wealth. As I pay for the items, I’m conscious of how easy it is to swipe a debit card. Suddenly $60 feels like a fortune.
I hand him $10, more than enough for bus fare, but I also offer him a ride, and for the first time in our conversation he looks bashful. Confused—I think he’s being polite—I offer again. He refuses again. Then I catch on. “You don’t take rides from strangers, do you?” He shakes his head. Smart kid, I think. At the same time another thought pops into my head, a darker, sadder thought, as I wonder if he gained this wisdom through experience.
As we part, I give him my phone number. Then, with a Dr. Pepper, chewy granola bars, $10 and a plastic bag of belongings, he walks toward the bus stop. He wants to be a software developer when he grows up, and I wonder if I’ll see him again.
It's a Thursday.
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When I left the Marine Corps in July 2021 and moved to Denver, I had no job and no place to live. In the absence of a greater plan, my brother graciously agreed to let me to crash on his sofa, which I did for a few short weeks. Read that as nearly three months. He lived on the sixth floor of an apartment complex in Denver’s Ball Park area, right across from Coors Field. It was a busy place full of people, and stepping onto the elevator induced waves of anxiety in me. At the time, I was extremely self-conscious, afraid of the awkwardness of interacting with other people, mostly afraid of what they might think of me.
It was around this time I ran across a podcast from Brett McKay’s Art of Manliness entitled “Why You Should Talk to Strangers”. It was the jumpstart I needed, and I began the awkward process of engaging people on the elevator, sometimes with a simple “How are you today?” I noticed a change happening in me after these conversations: I felt better. I was getting a huge emotional boost from simple human interactions.
It didn’t come easily, and I faltered through the rest of 2021 with mild success. I didn’t track my efforts in any meaningful way, just attempted to talk to people when I could work up the courage to do so. (Also, I was still unemployed and living on my brother’s sofa in a 600 sq. ft. studio apartment, so there were other things weighing on my mind.) Then things accelerated.
I got a job. I signed a lease. And with these basic needs addressed, I started looking to the future. After several years in the Marine Corps, what did I feel was missing? How did I want to approach the next year? With a birthday in December, it wasn’t just the start of a new year for me, it was also the beginning of a new decade. I had been challenged by a mentor with the question, “How do you want to spend your 30s?" and I kept coming back to the idea that people needed to be at the center of the next 10 years. My thoughts settled on words like relationships, intimacy, friendship, and community.
Research validates what we already know—our social circles shrink as we get older. But it starts happening younger than we think. A study in 2016 from universities in England and Finland found that our social circles peak around age 25, with women contacting an average of 17 unique people per month and—this is a shocker—men contacting an average of 19 people per month. They detail their findings in a titillating study entitled “Sex differences in social focus across the life cycle of humans”, reminding us why we don’t ask academics to name Netflix shows.
Pope Benedict XVI writes, “For man is the more himself the more he is with ‘the other’. He only comes to himself by moving away from himself. Only through ‘the other’ and through ‘being’ with ‘the other’ does he come to himself.” It was becoming increasingly clear to me that self-discovery happens in community. So I set a goal for myself: I would try and meet a stranger, someone completely new, every single day in 2022. This wasn’t just about growing my social circle, or challenging myself, or learning new skills. It wasn’t just about discovering new ideas and ways of life. It was about something more, something bigger than my individual pursuits.
The second time I meet Joseph he still has the same catfish mustache, the large crooked grin and heavy, dark eyebrows. His fine, straight hair is still done up in a ponytail, looking exactly the same as the first time we met.
It’s the fourth game of the 2022 Stanley Cup. Denver is playing Tampa Bay, and I’m in a packed local pub with a group of friends. I receive a text that reads, “Hey its Joseph I met you at target a while back I wanted to ask if you can maybe help me out with something to eat sorry to ask out of the blue”
I leave the pub and head to a local McDonald’s. I pick up a Big Mac, ketchup only, and fries and a Powerade, no ice, and meet him around the corner from the same Target where we first met. I ask how he’s doing, where he’s sleeping, and why he’s on crutches. He tells me he got a job working “demo”, meaning he’s working under the table for a couple that flips houses. His job is to demolish things, tear down walls, and clear out the debris. “I dropped something heavy on my left foot and broke my toe,” he says.
“If you don’t mind me asking, how did you see a doctor?”
“I have Medicaid now,” he says. “I applied a few weeks ago and got accepted.”
We stand outside the car talking, and I watch as he struggles with the drink and McDonald’s bag while wielding crutches. “Where are you staying?” I ask. “Do you want a ride?” This time he accepts.
He’s staying at a little motel less than a mile away. The motel has the feeling of most motels across America at night. Garish streetlights, where they work, throw an orange glow across a rough looking parking lot. I glance in the nearest window. The tan curtains are falling off the rails in some places. A few windows are broken or boarded up. He has two more nights at the motel, he explains, which is paid for by the couple who hired him. They felt poorly about his injury, and in the absence of worker’s comp, this is the best they can do. Given the illegality of it all, they aren’t even obligated to do this much, I think. It’s a stroke of kindness.
As he gets out of the car, struggling with the crutches and drink and bag of food, he turns back to me. “I think I may be getting a computer,” he says, “I’d like to talk about this software thing.” Eyes full of hope, still smiling. This kid never gives up, I think.
He's on crutches.
“Whoever asks questions controls the conversation.” My father used to give me this advice, often following it up with a story about a car ride with Bill. Dad was in his early 30s, Bill was at least 15 years older, and they had very little in common except that they would be riding together for three hours. Dad loves to tell how anxious he was thinking of the prospect of several awkward hours in the car with a man he hardly knew. But this advice, which he first heard from Larry King, came to mind. So he hopped in the passenger seat, buckled up—both literally and metaphorically—and asked his first question. “Bill answered that question and didn’t stop talking for another three hours,” dad recalls with gleeful satisfaction.
When I began this experiment at the beginning of 2022, I came armed with plenty of questions. By asking questions I gave the other person primacy in the conversation, showing genuine interest and making them feel valued. But many of these conversations were one-sided and static. That's because there’s a darker side to asking questions. As Larry King so astutely points out, questions are about control. In other words, there’s a fine line between interest and interrogation.
I began these early conversations with the intent of steering them where I wanted dialogue to go. The logic went something like this: the greater control I have, then the less I have to fear. If I hold the reigns tightly enough, I told myself, then the conversation won't go galloping off in unexpected directions. The questions were not really about the other person, they were actually about me. I eventually discovered the only way around this was through vulnerability. While questions may open doors in conversation, vulnerability helps others to walk through them.
This didn't have to be the type of vulnerability I offered my closest friends, family or partner, but it’s offering a part of myself to the conversation by showing a willingness to engage. It might be as simple as offering my name first. Or meeting someone at the dog park and giving a fact about myself, “Oh, my mother’s French Canadian” or “I moved to Denver 3 months ago. How long have you been here?” By opening up, just a little, I gave my stranger something to grab onto: “Oh! You moved here 3 months ago? From where?”
Vulnerability relaxed my grip on the reigns.
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Originally from New Jersey, he’s worked in the restaurant industry throughout his life, including owning the steakhouse that used to be in Denver’s downtown strip club. (The burgers were so good that the strip club attracted a sizable clientele solely for the food. Allegedly.)
Zach stands out in a place like Denver, his hair slicked back, a Jersey accent, gold chains around his neck. But he’s a great conversationalist, and I watch as he chats to each of the patrons, many of whom, it seems, are regulars.
A few weeks later I attend an event hosted at his restaurant. These are three course meals prepared by the restaurant’s very own Chef Luke McCoy, who looks like a cross between a convict and a computer software nerd. Before each course he emerges from the kitchen in his black-and-white striped pajama pants and battered chef's hat, announcing the next course, “short rib empanadas with a mojo sauce”, with jokes that fall very flat. The dinner attracts a surprisingly diverse population. One table of six speaks exclusively Spanish. Another table is full of Cubans. And, in a sort of physiological diversity not native to the fit Denver population, several guests are overweight. It’s odd, but a breath of fresh air.
I meet Zach in May.
The Uber, a black Toyota Rav 4, pulls up, and I open the door and hop in the back. The driver is a handsome, trim older man with olive skin and glasses. Pleasant jazz music plays through the sound system. As we pull out of the parking lot I ask him, “Do you like jazz?” He immediately brightens. Mohammed loves jazz music.
He tells me how as a boy in Morocco he rushed to the TV set each Saturday night to listen to the one jazz program that played each weekend. My mind instantly conjures images of a traditional Moroccan living room: benches covered in ornate seat cushions built against the walls with a central table, the TV probably stuffed away in one corner of the room. I see him in my mind’s eye, huddled in his home in Rabat, a love affair with jazz beginning to bloom.
As we drive, his story unfolds. He trained as a lawyer at the well-known Mohammed V University in Rabat, but immigrated to the United States in 2010, leaving Morocco because he couldn’t find decent work. “There were no good jobs,” he tells me. So he sought his fortune in America at 48 years-old. But here he is driving a Lyft from 6am to 5pm each day. “Is this all you do?” I ask. It's his main source of income, and this is June 2022. Inflation plus the hike in gas prices means he might drive all day and make only $50 in profit.
I ask about his family. “I met my wife in Denver,” he says, but otherwise has no family in the United States. The rest of his relatives are still in Morocco. He moved to America for its promise of opportunity, but he finds the American citizenship test notoriously difficult. He doesn’t lack intelligence, speaking multiple languages and holding a law degree, but he’s failed the test on several previous occasions.
I see the Rocky Mountains as we drive north on Speer Boulevard, past the Buell Theatre and the Performing Arts Center and Ball Arena. It’s a clear day with beautiful weather and Empower Stadium rolls its steel wave on the horizon against a cloudless sky. About the time Mohammed finishes explaining his current financial straits we slow down and stop at a red light. Outside the driver’s side of the car sits an older man, shirtless and wearing blue jeans. His skin is tanned and leathery, and his face weather-beaten. His cheeks have turned an odd shade of purple-blue, a potential side effect of drug-use and sun exposure. He carries a small, white gallon bucket and is missing multiple teeth. As I notice all of this I also realize that Mohammed is holding money out the window.
I’m sitting on an airplane that just took off from John F. Kennedy airport. At the very last minute a very large man comes to occupy the middle seat between myself, at the window, and a woman, sitting on the aisle. We’d both been hoping the middle seat would remain unoccupied and had said as much to one another not two minutes before.
As the plane takes off the man cranes his neck around to glance out the window. I’m reading a book and pretend not to notice. It eventually becomes impossible as he’s practically leaning against me at this point to watch the ground slipping away beneath us. So I begrudgingly put down my book and ask, “Do you fly often?” He doesn’t, and asks if I can take a picture with his iPhone out the window. “I haven’t flown in 15 years,” he says.
We introduce ourselves. His name is Brandon, and he lives in Fort Collins. My annoyance forgotten, I’m suddenly fascinated by this grown man who’s flown so little. He continues to unabashedly look out the window, occasionally snapping a photo. “I’m a plumber. What do you do?” he asks. When I explain I work for a tech company he responds, “So then you’re a programmer?” I do my best to clarify that not everyone in the technology industry is a programmer, but I’m fairly certain I miss the mark. That world is a black box to him.
As our conversation trails off into the comfortable tolerance we hold for one another in the economy section of a commercial airplane, I contemplate the differences between our worlds. Am I connected to his world? Does he remotely understand mine? I realize that I don’t understand what it’s like to be an on-call plumber, hauled out of bed at all hours of the night to fix sewage pipes and toilets within a two-hour radius.
Meeting strangers gives us new perspective on our own lives and takes us outside ourselves. “The conversation between [people] comes into its own only when they are trying, no longer to express something, but to express themselves, when dialogue becomes communication,” writes Pope Benedict XVI, but sociologist Zygmunt Bauman points out that our separation from our fellow man is a defining characteristic of modernity, and all of our technology and technological advances serve to put us at even greater distances from one another. We are, in fact, always one step removed from the other. This is why we can find ourselves alone in the midst of a crowded airplane. Indeed, we want it that way. It’s not just the state of things, but the preferred state of things.
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Jean-Luc is co-editor of The Hart & The Cur
Bonding social capital constitutes a kind of sociological superglue, whereas bridging social capital provides a sociological WD-40.
I’m solo at this event, so Zach seats me at the bar. Tomasz, the sommelier for the evening, and I get well acquainted as I watch him work. He was born in Poland, lived in England for ten years, and eventually immigrated to the United States. “When people ask where I’m from,” he tells me, “I say America because my kids were born here and I’ve lived here the longest.” He’s bald with a round face, large belly, and graying goatee. He has two small rows of equally-sized, well-made teeth which show when he laughs, which is quite often. “But it’s complicated because you don’t feel like you’re really from anywhere,” he says. “It’s especially difficult when England plays Poland in football matches. I just get loaded and then don’t care who wins.”
Both the food and the company are a culinary menagerie. I listen as Zach and Tomasz complain about their wife and girlfriend. Home Title Lock plays endless commercials on the TV screen behind the bar. I watch the 50th Speaker of the House try and convince every Republican in the country to sign up for protection against the fastest growing white-collar cybercrime in the country. “Growing 2.5x faster than credit card theft!” he tells anyone who will listen. I wonder what the historical equivalent might have been—maybe Henry Clay in the 1840s as a snake oil salesman? And I wonder how we’ve fallen so far and whether he actually needs the work or is just a greedy son-of-a-bitch who can’t help but take the ridiculous amount of money they must be paying him to do this.
All of these locations contain captive audiences. My Lyft driver on April 27 is the 50-year-old single mother of five children. Katrina tells me that she’s a pre-school teacher, just finished her undergraduate in criminal justice, and she started a master’s degree that week. Is it true? I don’t know. But does it matter? Everyone is a self-contained world of hopes and dreams and contradictions, of lies we tell strangers, and lies we tell ourselves, of projections and facades, of smoke screens and mirrors, of wishes, beliefs and regrets.
Ski lifts, ride shares, airplanes.
Cal Newport introduced me to the idea of the adjacent possible in his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, an idea which he defines as ‘the space just beyond the cutting edge of relevant skills.’ He borrows the concept from the work of American medical doctor and theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman, who proposed the original biological theory in 2002. Kauffman’s idea is that biological evolution happens incrementally, and those incremental steps are pre-determined by what’s possible at the margins. Author Steven Johnson, building on the work of Kauffman, wrote a book in 2010 titled Where Good Ideas Come From. He borrows Kauffman’s scientific theory of the adjacent possible and applies it to the evolution of ideas broadly. “Where do good ideas come from?” he asks. “From what’s already around us,” he answers, by combining existing things in new ways. So how does the adjacent possible apply to meeting strangers?
“When Johnson adopted the term,” writes Newport, “he shifted it from complex chemicals [of theoretical biology] to cultural and scientific innovations.” What I attempted to do when I adopted the term was shift it from cultural and scientific innovations to relationships. My hypothesis was that by increasing the number of people I knew I would directly increase the number of ideas I would engage and the number of possibilities I would encounter. My margins grew, my boundaries expanded, and as a result the adjacent possible expanded as well. I was touching more things in life by touching more people. I wasn’t increasing possibilities. I was increasing the likelihood of possibilities.
The question of whether I keep in touch with these people isn’t the right one. Meeting them is what matters. Sure, I received a number of business cards—enough that I bought one of those Rolodexes invented in the 1950s—but it doesn’t mean I’m reaching out to them weekly. Instead, now we have context for one another. There’s a connection. It may be a weak connection, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less valuable. In fact, just the opposite is true.
In 1973, Mark Granovetter authored a paper called “The Strength of Weak Ties,” which maintains that it’s more often our arms-length relationships which deliver economic value (e.g. employment opportunities, promotions, increased wages) rather than our close personal and professional relationships. A recent experiment from Stanford, MIT, Harvard and LinkedIn and a team of researchers co-led by Erik Brynjolfsson validated this finding in a five-year experiment with 20 million LinkedIn users, showing that weaker connections delivered increased professional mobility. But I'm not interested in a new job. I'm interested in something bigger.
The term social capital started gaining traction in the late 20th century. Then, in 2000, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam published the sociological classic Bowling Alone. Putnam divides social capital, or "the relative value of our relationships", into two types—“bridging” and “bonding”. Put simply, bonding social capital is what ties dense communities together, whereas bridging social capital creates ties to new communities. Putnam points out that bridging social capital is best for ‘linkage to external assets and for information diffusion’. In other words, bridging social capital opens us up to new ideas and information while bonding social capital reinforces closed systems. Dense social networks often become pools for the incest of ideas. He summarizes this in an easy to access metaphor:
On a trip to Washington, D.C., I walk down M Street on a Wednesday afternoon smoking a cigar. The sky is clear. The air is crisp. D.C.’s notorious humidity has yet to begin its summer reign of oppression. Birds fly overhead in the baby-blue sky or sing from the tops of just-budding branches. I pass all sorts of strangers, people in their own world: a man in a black jacket who hasn’t fully committed to growing a mustache or a woman in a yellow blouse and All-Birds who loudly shares her side of a phone conversation with the world, the rest of it lost to her AirPods.
I walk into the Aloha Poke Company on 19th Street just south of Dupont Circle. A worker, Isaac, is stocking the refrigerator with sodas and sparkling water. His father served 25 years in the Air Force, and he moved around quite a bit: Hawaii, Japan, Texas, Florida, Germany, and now Washington, D.C. He wears a smile. A big smile. One tooth might have been just a little chipped, and when I ask him how he is, his black eyes grow brighter. “I’m doing great,” he says.
“Great?” I retort, “Most people think the world is going to shit.”
He doesn’t miss a beat. “Most people are too busy listening to the noise to acknowledge the reality.”
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It’s easy to remain in the rut of our routines, to converge on the comfort of our communities, to fraternize in the familiarity of our friends. It’s hard to get outside of ourselves and meet the other. Ultimately, it’s not ideas or possibilities that matter. It’s about people. People are the bridge to these other things in the world.
It’s been seven months since our initial meeting in the Target parking lot. And he stands me up.
We’re supposed to go to lunch, and I show up at his motel at 11:30am. He never comes out, so I leave. I’d been burned enough as a Marine Corps Officer not to take it personally. He’s 17. He’s been on his own since 14, and he’s practically homeless. So I end up texting him two hours later, and we agree on another attempt at 4:30pm that same day.
I drive back to the motel. He shows up this time, and we drive to a Chick-Fil-A, coincidentally, in the exact same parking lot where I met him seven months before. He comes trotting down the stairs in a beanie, a black buff, an oversized black Champion sweatshirt, black sweatpants, and white tennis shoes. No gloves. It’s 20 degrees below freezing outside, and I see that his hands are filthy. Dirt in the cracks and under the fingernails. He still has the same catfish mustache. The same wide-set eyes. The same ingenuous smile. His hair is pulled back in a bun. If there’s any change at all, it just looks like his teeth haven’t been brushed in quite a while.
“What do you want?” I ask when we get inside the Chick-Fil-A. Just a sandwich and a root beer, no ice. “It’s too cold outside for ice,” he says. “Do you want fries?” I ask. “No, no thank you.” So we put in our order and sit down. “You don’t like fries?” I ask him. He says he thinks he’s burned out on them. “When you live outside”, his term for homelessness, “people bring you lots of McDonald’s, so you eat lots of burgers and fries. And I just really can’t stand the taste of 'em anymore.”
We talk about his uncle, who just moved to Denver from Salt Lake City and gives him food stamps from time to time to keep him fed. He tells me that he saw his parents over Thanksgiving. “Really?” I ask, surprised. “Yes, they’re living outside now, too, and I saw them at a bus stop on Federal.” He tells me that he got a laptop and his rent at the motel is $360 per week, but that it comes with all utilities included, plus internet, so he started online high school courses in the evening. He’s actually talked to a guidance counselor about re-enrolling, but he can’t take the time off work to go back to school so he hopes he can finish high school online.
“Where are you working?” I ask. He has a full-time construction job now, with 40 hours a week and time off. “But we aren’t working right now because of all the snow, and I still need money to cover the rent, so I have to pick up extra money shoveling snow with a job I found on Craig’s List.” I didn’t even know people still used Craig’s List. He was out from 9pm the previous evening until 2am that morning shoveling snow, which is why he overslept and missed our lunch.
On our way back to the motel I ask him where he sees himself in twenty years, what he wants his life to look like. “I want to have the things I need,” he says without hesitation. “An apartment. A warm bed. Food. I just want to have the basics.”
I see Joseph a third time.
Matt Hartley
15 Minute Read
Volume 2. Issue 1.
The Adjacent People
What I discovered about myself, other people, relationships, and conversation in my attempt to meet someone new every single day of 2022.
by Jean-Luc Currie
20 Minute Read | February 2023 | Volume 2, Issue 2
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