People at the grocery store, on the bus, on the sidewalk waiting for the walk sign, at the movie theater, at a music concert, etc…
If they are are not talking to each other and ignore each other, can you assume they don’t know each other and never seen the people around them ever before in their life?
Not necessarily - it could just as easily be assumed they are married to one another. I often observe in restaurants dining companions not speaking throughout an entire meal. You never know.
There’s an inverse correlation between city size and likelihood of being strangers in public.
I recognized someone as I walked by her today, but didn’t greet her although we had brief eye contact. I’m almost sure we met sometime in the past, so I guess you can’t assume anything in that regards.
No: everybody else in the world knows every other person, and the minute you leave they all start talking about you.
Shh!
Sometimes it bugs me and I just engage the person in conversation.
A couple days ago I saw a guy I recognized grabbing a coffee in the same office building as my workplace. I guessed I must know him from work*, so I went and said hi.
Turns out that I had merely seen him (not even spoken to him) at a meetup event. So the situation was a little awkward, and back in my youth I would have felt embarrassed.
I understand why not everyone would go talk to someone just because they recognize them.
Interesting story:
Back in the days when I was still eating fast food, there was this one lady that always took my order (I went there on work days for lunch). During all that time we never really talked besides maybe the standard: How ya do’n / do’n fine bit.
One day I stopped by a bar for happy hour. I sat down, ordered my drink, and just happened to look to my left as the girl to my left just happened to look my direction. It was her! We both paused for a second as our brains were trying to process who exactly it was we were looking at, and as soon as it came to us, we both just sort of instinctively hugged.
After we pulled apart, we shared a rather awkward moment as it dawned on us, we didn’t really know each other. She was that lady from Wendy’s and I was that guy that comes in for lunch. Don’t ask us for names because we couldn’t give them to ya’ to save our lives.
We laughed it off though and managed to strike up a pleasant conversation.
We are struggling with confusion, disillusionment too.
A stranger’s just a friend you haven’t met - The Simpsons “Streetcar”
I will talk to anyone anywhere about anything.
Dubious. You’ve probably already seen a lot of strangers you randomly pass by in the streets.
I realized that when I noticed that from time to time, I was seeing in various random places in Paris a guy who was horribly disfigured (I’m pretty certain he was a specific person whose accident had been quite widely reported at the time). Given his appearance, you couldn’t not notice and recognize him, contrarily to random strangers. So, I assumed that even in a city that large, I probably repeatedly cross the path of people “I’ve never seen in my life”. Not having an “idiot savant” level of face recognition (in fact, I’m extremely bad at remembering faces and even more so at associating them with names)(*), I just don’t remember and recognize them.
(*) Some people are amazingly talented at that. I remember a seller in an optician shop who remembered my only visit in her shop a year or so before, and even could point at the kind of glasses I was interested in (but didn’t buy) at the time. After I enquired, she told me that she can remember pretty much all the customers she interacts with. Couldn’t vouch for this statement not to be exagerated, but at least it proved to be true in my case.
As others have said, its all over the map.
Most people’s lives consist of a lot of routine and some hunk of non-routine. Whenever two people are both in their routines and those routines intersect, they’ll probably have interacted before. Like Grrr! and his Wendy’s clerk.
But when either person is out of their routine then the odds are that everybody is a stranger to one another. And the farther out of their routine the more that’s true. When I’m in a city hundreds of miles from home I’m a stranger to 100% of the folks I encounter on the sidewalk. But I may know the life details of the hotel clerk because I stay there frequently & chat sometimes.
There is a term for the people you see every day but don’t really know: intimate strangers.
I have dozens of intimate strangers that I see every day on my route to and from work, or walking around my neighborhood. Some of them I’ve seen for more than 20 years. I notice if they change their hairstyle or get a new coat.
My current favorite is “Bruce”. I call him Bruce because he looks a little like the actor Bruce McGill. For the past few months, he has been sitting outside a coffee shop that I pass every morning, in deep conversation with a second, younger man. I look for him as I pass by, and always notice if he’s not there (although that’s only happened two or three times since I first noticed him).
Although I live in a large city, I have a lot of routines and habits, so when I’m in public I’m very likely to see people I know. I have one friend who can’t walk down any street in the city without greeting some old friend, colleague or neighbor. It feels like she knows everyone here.
That quote predates The Simpsons. It was originated by William Butler Yeats, who said, “There are no strangers, only friends you have not met yet,” and appropriated by Will Rogers, who said, “A stranger is just a friend I haven’t met yet.”
Well, duh…The Simpsons were the first to put it to music.
