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I just love people that I don't know yet. Here I am sitting this coffee shop, listening through the unwrapped, and I see people that I want to know.
Some of the real life people I now know best and that know me best were strangers a year ago. They didn't exist to me, nor I too them. We wouldn't have talked. But now we are knit together—young, old, rich, poor, black, white, introvert, extrovert—we are knit together at the heart: linked by our humanity and desire to connect.
Wish you were here. I'd buy your coffee.
Dec 19, 2024
Related Recs
every table taken at your favorite coffee shop, but you wanted to sit and read? find a stranger who's not taking up their whole table and who looks nice and ask if you can sit at their table. 99% of the time they'll say yes unless they're waiting on someone. maybe you'll sit together in complete silence the whole time. sometimes tho, you'll sit with someone who sees what you're reading and you have a great discussion about it.
it's really a win win situation. you get a seat in the crowded cafe and possibly you'll leave knowing a lil bit more about the community you live in. maybe you'll even make a friend!
(p.s. this pic isn't a stranger, it's my dad, but he'd be a great stranger to sit with at a coffee shop, i promise.)
Mar 3, 2025
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TLDR: there are friends everywhere for those with eyes to see
I think one consequence of urbanism is a sense of alienation or otherness from one’s neighbors, and especially from strangers. the average person you pass on the street is assumed to have little in common with you with which to establish a mutual connection. maybe this is a consequence of me living in the south, but i’ve been finding that most people are happy to start a light conversation in public.
ive been making a practice of being in public spaces with a posture of openness to interaction. no earbuds in, making light convo with people like service workers that goes beyond the transaction, striking up convos with people who are sharing a space i’m in, etc. most recently I stopped on a park bench at a skatepark during a bike ride and struck up a convo with a skater who beefed a trick and was describing in great detail how it happened and his history with skating. shout out cole I hope your collar bone isn’t broken.
these aren’t the same as a deep, intentional community that one has with close friends/peers (that comes from seeking out, plugging in, and showing up consistently), but seeing everyone around you as a possibility for human connection until proven otherwise makes one feel less lonely. there’s an intentionality in having a posture of openness to connection that can become a self fulfilling prophecy. it’s easy nowadays to feel like we live in social archipelagos, with our own clusters of friends and loved ones with little connecting each group to each other and little connection to others everywhere around us. but your average person is just as interesting and worth getting to know as anyone else. be curious, be cordial, and start integrating casual momentary connections into your life to tide you over between the deeper relationships in your life you might not have access to all the time
May 4, 2025
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over the past two years i’ve gotten quite good at speaking to new people, and in the past six months i’ve made it one of my favorite traits. i tell people i love their hair when i’m behind them at line at the shops. i befriended an older lady on the train home from work, we laughed and exchanged stories on the crowded rush hour car. i built a relationship with the lady at sandwich place near my work, to the point where she calls out my nickname (veggie melt) when i walk in, and gave me a free sandwich the day i lost my wallet. i draw her pictures every time, and the other day she offered me freelance illustration work as a result. there is so much beauty and possibility around us, so many stories we can unlock by talking to strangers. when im old and withered, i will mark my years by how many little threads i’ve woven into my life, how many gold links i’ve started by an innocuous interaction with somebody i simply hadn’t known yet.
Feb 26, 2024
Top Recs from @mattshawsome
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this is worthy of celebration: the lack of video—autoplay video, noisy inane video, panicky video, algorithmic, dumb video, rabbit hole video, any video—on pi.fyi is a good thing
Oct 5, 2024
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this is going to hurt — A LOT — but it's getting to the point where there's no other option
Mar 11, 2025