The stranger secret: how to talk to anyone – and why you should | Social etiquette

It started with two incidents on the same day. In a fairly empty train carriage, a stranger in her 70s approached me: “Do you mind if I sit here? Or did you want to be alone with your thoughts?” I weighed it up for a split second, conscious that I was, in effect, agreeing to a conversation: “No, of course I don’t mind. Sit down.”

She turned out to be an agreeable, kind woman who had had a difficult day. I didn’t have to say much: “I’m sorry to hear that.” “That’s tough for you.” She occasionally asked me questions about myself, which I dodged politely. I could tell she was only asking so the conversation would not be so one-sided. Some moments are for listening, not sharing. I sensed, without needing to know explicitly, that she was probably returning to an empty house and wanted to process the day out loud. I didn’t feel uncomfortable, as I knew I could duck out at any moment by saying I needed to get back to my phone messages. But instead we talked – or, rather, I listened – for most of the 50-minute journey. I registered that it was an unusual occurrence, this connection, but thought little more of it. A small part of me was glad this kind of thing still happens.

That evening, I ate at a restaurant with my family. As the waitress brought the bill, we chatted and I learned that she was from Seoul. She was shy and softly spoken. We talked gently about Korean food and what she missed about home. Once again, I thought little of this exchange.

As we walked home, my 15-year-old son asked: “Is it OK to talk to people in that way?” “What way?” He was asking about the boundaries when it comes to talking to someone about their home country.

This was a very good question. How do you know, generally, what the terms are of a conversation with a stranger? I realised that there is a sort of unwritten code you learn as you get older, which enables you to assess whether a conversation is a good idea or not. I thought about the woman who had approached me earlier. How did she know it was OK to talk to me? In the end, I replied to my son: “You don’t always know if it’s OK. Sometimes you have to take the risk and find out.”

Then it struck me. A lot of people have given up taking a chance on other people: that they might want to listen, that they might want to talk. But they have also given up taking a chance on themselves: that they might be able to navigate a conversation with someone new, cope with knockbacks and steer a path through any misunderstandings.

The disappearance of these kinds of interactions from day-to-day life – in pubs, restaurants, shops, queues, on public transport – is striking. I have been talking to people tangentially about this for the past 10 years, ever since I started researching my book, How to Own the Room, which came out in 2018 and went on to become a podcast. This project was supposed to be about public speaking and confidence. But I realised from people’s reactions to the topic – especially younger people – that their deepest anxiety lies elsewhere, in something much more banal and inexpressible. Forget “public speaking”. What a lot of people don’t like at all any more is “speaking to anyone in public”.

Many reasons are cited: state-of-the-art don’t-talk-to-me headphones, mobile phones and social media generally, the rise of working from home, the introduction of touchscreens in takeaway restaurants so you barely interact with a human, the death of third spaces, the pandemic. In the end, the biggest excuse becomes “social norm reinforcement”. This is the idea that if no one talks to you, you don’t talk to anyone either. A casual conversation in a waiting room where no one else is having a casual conversation suddenly sounds not very casual at all.

On an individual level, some people perfectly understandably cite neurodivergence, introversion, inability to tolerate eye contact or an intense loathing for small talk (especially about the weather) as reasons to avoid these conversations. It’s certainly true that this time six years ago – at the height of lockdown – it would have been rude and unsafe to start a chat, let alone sit next to someone on a train. But now? It can feel as if everyone is still adhering to the 2-metre rule, employing “the tech shield” or even “phantom phone use” (pretending that you need to be on your phone when you don’t).

This goes deeper than adolescent angst or personal preference. And possibly deeper than our overreliance on phones. We are losing a basic human skill. The ability to speak to others and understand them is being compromised.

Dr Jared Cooney Horvath, a teacher turned cognitive neuroscientist who focuses on speech, has warned that gen Z is the first generation in history to underperform the previous generation on cognitive measures. And Dr Rangan Chatterjee, a bestselling author and father of two teenagers, said in an interview this month: “I think we’re raising a generation of children who have low self-worth, who don’t know how to conduct conversations.”

It’s not only affecting young people. The psychologist Esther Perel calls it a “global relational recession”. She writes: “The point is not depth. The point is practice, the gentle strengthening of our social muscles.” On her YouTube channel she recently introduced the topic of Talking to Strangers in 2026.

Something that used to come naturally is now a subject of longing and fascination, as if it were a rare anthropological phenomenon. Videos are springing up on social media, cataloguing encounters with the unknown “other”: earnest, well-meaning, wholesome videos, under the categories “social anxiety”, “extrovert” and “talking to strangers”. Many have the unstated theme of “out and about in the big city”. Some are personal experiments, often extremely ill-advised ones. Can you challenge yourself to tell a joke to an entire train carriage? What happens if you go up to an older woman and tell her she looks beautiful? The (usually young) person doing the filming is often trying to improve themself in some way or attempting to “be braver” or “less socially anxious”. The camera acts as their accountability partner. The people they’re talking to are relegated to the role of “task to be ticked off the list”. Either that or there’s a push towards a Hallmark card effect: “Look, other people are not as horrible as you thought.” (Cue swell of trending motivational audio.)

The trouble with these social media experiments, of course, is that they are performative and individualistic. There’s an element of commodification: the encounter must be ripe for digital packaging. Often it’s not clear if the filming is consensual. The connections are one-way and border on the exploitative or manipulative. They are designed for individual personal growth or free, self-directed therapy (“this made me more confident”) and for clicks and voyeurism (“check out this person’s reaction”). The effect is to make “talking to absolutely anyone” seem even more alienating, fake and narcissistic. This has spawned a secondary genre of parody videos such as the comedian Al Nash’s “A cup of tea with a stranger – an amazing conversation!” In this clip, an irritating interviewer passes tea to a stranger on a park bench under the guise of “helping you with your loneliness”, only for the encounter to turn awkward when the stranger accidentally drops the cup and smashes it.

It’s only natural to fear rejection, humiliation, giving offence or overstepping a boundary when we initiate a conversation – or even when we respond to someone else’s attempt. But according to a study by the University of Virginia (Talking with strangers is surprisingly informative), we overstate these fears in our minds: “People tend to underestimate how much they’ll enjoy the conversation, feel connected to their conversation partner and be liked by their conversation partner.”

The key is to lower the stakes. Make it less of a big deal. Don’t focus on what could go wrong. Also, don’t focus on how amazing this could be. You are just saying, “It’s cold today, isn’t it?” You are not asking someone to join you on a quest for world peace. Similarly, if an approach is made towards you and you don’t want to respond, just be confident and clear either with your gestures (look down, don’t make eye contact) or with speech: “I can’t talk right now.”

In her work on kindness, the University of Sussex psychologist Gillian Sandstrom calls these conversational gambits “small, humanising acts”. It’s important to emphasise the “small” aspect. Sometimes I think people are overwhelmed by the “bigness” in their mind of the fear of interaction, and how disproportionate that seems next to the “smallness” of the pathetic reality. Don’t read too much into passing moments. Trust yourself to read social cues and work out how you stand in relation to them. Know yourself and your own personality. Not everyone wants to talk and not everyone wants to be talked to. And that’s OK. It can depend on the day and on your mood. Give yourself get-out-of-jail-free cards in these conversations. If someone doesn’t respond, assume they didn’t hear you or they’re having a bad day. If someone talks to you and you feel uncomfortable or you’re having a bad day, it is not your job to be kind or nice. If their attempt was well meant, they’ll get over it. We don’t need to avoid each other. But we also don’t have to be on niceness autopilot all the time.

In any case, our worst fears about these interactions are rarely realised. Last year, the team of Stanford psychologist Prof Jamil Zaki, the author of Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, put up posters around campus with messages about approachability and warmth. They found that what students most needed was permission – the reminder to “take a chance”. They concluded: “Too often, we’re sure that conversation and connection will exhaust us, or that we can’t count on others.” In our minds, we paint people (and ourselves) as profoundly disappointing. They – and we – are rarely that bad. And even if they are, it will make a good story to tell later to the people who are not strangers to you.

Is it going to change your life if you talk to someone in a shop about the prospect of rain? Probably not. But in light of the current state of the world, even the slightest possibility of brightening someone’s day is valuable. It’s certainly worth the punt. Perhaps the way they respond matters less than the fact that you retained your humanity enough to try something, to risk, to connect.

Small talk may not profoundly alter your life. But its absence will profoundly alter human life as we know it. We live in a world of intense and often unnecessary division. Small talk is a tiny, free and very possibly priceless reminder of our shared humanity. If we intentionally give up talking to strangers, if we purposely decide to give in to the phone shield, the consequences will be horrible. Arguably, we are already on the verge of doing this. Let’s back up and start a conversation before it’s too late.