When we are young, many of us are told to ‘never talk to strangers’, that associating with older people that we don’t know is dangerous and essentially that strangers are out to get us. While this is a useful idea to impart to a young child, many of us carry something similar to this idea into adulthood. We are suspicious of everyone and anyone in a public setting, often thinking that they will steal our belongings or otherwise present a problem. We stand silently with our noses in our phones if we get stuck in a long line. Many people are afraid to so much as make eye contact with the numerous other people on any form of public transportation they may have to take.

These are slightly over dramatic scenarios, yes, but for many, they aren’t that far from reality. It is also true that many will claim some form or another of social anxiety or that they simply wouldn’t know what to say, but I have yet to meet a single person on a train or plane that actually cares what a person leads with, and very few that are anything less than polite and conversational.

The way I see it, acknowledging that I have had to travel alone and therefore entertain myself on public transportation from a very young age, planes and trains present a unique opportunity to interact with people in a way that is effectively removed from both of your lives. There is no way that you will ever see this person again after all. It is also a chance to interact with people that you would have never crossed paths with any other way.

I recently spent a train ride conversing with a woman only a few years older than myself who had dropped out of high school after getting pregnant who was in the process of working toward her GED while raising her child. Or there was the Florida cop that I met in the hot tub of a Disney resort that told me about how, prior to meeting his wife, he had essentially been a career criminal in New Jersey and how he thinks that living that way makes him better at his job now. These are conversations I would never have had with people that I will never see again that were only possible because we happened to share an area and got to talking.

But one would still wouldn’t be amiss in asking what the point of doing something like this is. After all, I have only really described my own reasoning for conversing with strangers as a means of entertaining myself. And for what it’s worth that is mostly true. But I would argue that, while it is often noticed more in hindsight, that I often get more out of each conversation than just a distraction from a boring trip or quiet evening.

The cop in the hot tub, while he couldn’t have known this at the time, reaffirmed my wanting to pursue a career as a journalist by showing me just how interesting interviewing someone can be. The young lady on the train exposed me to a way of thinking and living that I very seldom encounter in my own life. Believe it or not, people are interesting. This is especially true when they aren’t necessarily trying to be.