A Crack in the Wall
by Ruba Zeidan
There was a time when finding your way in a strange place required another person.
You'd stand on a street corner with a badly folded map, and eventually you'd admit defeat and pick someone. A woman with shopping bags. A man waiting for a bus. Someone sitting outside a café. "Excuse me, do you know how I get to…?"
Sometimes they knew. Sometimes they sent you, with total confidence, in exactly the wrong direction. Sometimes they walked part of the way with you. And once in a while, for reasons that had nothing to do with geography, a conversation started.
It feels almost quaint now. I can land in a city I've never seen and cross it without speaking to a soul. My phone tells me which train to take, where to turn, where to eat, what to order and whether strangers liked it before me.
I'm grateful for that, honestly. I have no wish to go back to standing in the rain because someone promised the hotel was "five minutes that way" when it was twenty minutes the other way.
But every convenience takes something with it, and lately I've been wondering whether one of the things we've quietly lost is: the stranger.
Not strangers themselves; they're everywhere, filling airports and cafés and waiting rooms. What's disappearing is our need to talk to them.
We used to ask strangers which bus went downtown, whether the seat was free, what they were eating because it looked better than what we'd ordered. We borrowed pens. We handed strangers our phones and asked them to take a photo. We turned to the person beside us when a queue stopped moving and asked what on earth was going on. None of it mattered much. I suspect that was the point.
Almost every relationship we have now comes with a label: friend, colleague, relative, follower, contact, match. The stranger had no label at all. For a few minutes, two people who owed each other nothing had to work out a tiny piece of the world together.
Technology has made most of those small negotiations unnecessary. Maps replaced directions. Reviews replaced recommendations. Self-checkout replaced the chat at the till. QR codes replaced asking for the menu. And headphones let us move through crowds while saying, politely, silently, but clearly, “not now”.
Even waiting has changed. There used to be something slightly exposed about waiting alone at a bus stop or in a doctor's office. You had to look somewhere, and sometimes your eyes landed on another person. Now there's always somewhere safer to look: down.
I'm as guilty as anyone. The moment a friend gets up from the table, my hand is already on my phone, as if ten seconds of sitting alone in a restaurant were a problem that needed solving. We've become more connected to people who aren't there, and a little less available to the ones who are.
I don't think this has made us antisocial. People remain stubbornly curious about one another. But we've become very good at deciding who gets access to us. We choose whom to follow, whose opinions to hear, whose photos to see. Algorithms learn with unsettling precision which people, jokes and outrages will keep us scrolling.
The stranger is the opposite of an algorithm. Nobody selected them for us. They might be older, poorer, richer, politically unbearable, unexpectedly funny, fascinating or simply dull. They haven't been optimised for compatibility, and maybe that's why some of those encounters stay with us.
Travel reminds me of this. I don't remember the journeys where my phone delivered me flawlessly to the door. I remember the old man who insisted on explaining a route in a language I barely spoke. The woman who pointed at a dish on the menu because she'd caught me staring at it. The passenger beside me on a plane who began with one harmless comment and, forty minutes later, was telling me the whole quiet history of a marriage.
I knew almost nothing about these people, and I never saw most of them again. That was part of what made it lovely. There's a strange freedom in talking to someone who has no previous version of you in their head. Friends know your stories, family knows your history, colleagues know your role. A stranger knows only the person in front of them. Then one of you gets off the train, and that's that. No follow-up, no obligation.
We tend to dismiss these brief connections because they don't lead anywhere. They don't become friendships or grow our networks; often we don't even swap names. But a life made only of close relationships would be oddly airless. Strangers remind us that the world is bigger than our own circle, and they ask of us something that has gone a little out of fashion: trusting someone before we know anything about them.
Not much trust. Just enough to ask, "Is this the right platform?" Just enough to say, "Would you mind watching my bag for a second?" Just enough to take a restaurant tip from someone whose only qualification is having eaten there yesterday. These are microscopic acts of trust, and I've come to think a society is partly built out of them. You can feel it in places where a lift ride still turns into a chat, and you can feel its absence in places where speaking to someone you don't know seems to break an unwritten rule.
I don't want to romanticise inconvenience. I'll keep using maps and reading reviews and ordering taxis on an app instead of waving hopefully at traffic. I'll probably keep reaching for my phone when I'm left alone at a table.
But I'd like to keep a little permeability. Not forced friendliness, and certainly not the exhausting idea that we owe everyone our attention. Just a small crack in the wall between our lives and the lives passing beside us.
Because maybe the stranger was never only someone who gave us directions. Maybe they reminded us that the world is full of people we didn't choose, can't curate and may never fully understand.
And that every now and then, it does us good to ask one of them the way.
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