It's a strange world.
We can tell you what a celebrity had for breakfast, who broke up with whom, which influencer is holidaying in Greece, and what complete strangers think about politics, relationships or whether pineapple belongs on pizza. Yet many of us know almost nothing about the people sitting beside us every day.
The bloke at work might have climbed Mount Everest. The woman waiting behind us in the supermarket queue may have crossed an ocean under sail. The quiet neighbour down the street could have survived cancer, built a business, raised five children or spent years volunteering overseas.
We simply don't know.
Not because those stories don't exist, but because we rarely ask.
Somehow we've become experts on strangers and beginners with the people around us. That has always struck me as backwards.
During my travels I gradually realised that people are stories. Not profiles, brands or carefully managed online identities, but stories. The trouble is that most of those stories remain untold because very few conversations ever move beyond the surface.
Perhaps the world's most underused word isn't "hello". It's the second hello - the one that leads to another question.
Most greetings today are little more than social rituals.
"How are you?"
"Good."
"How about you?"
"Good."
Conversation complete.
Nobody learns anything because nobody expected to.
Yet almost every memorable conversation I've ever had started with someone becoming genuinely curious about another person. The remarkable thing wasn't that those people had extraordinary lives. It was that they were willing to share them once someone showed enough interest to ask.
One of the reasons I wrote No, I Won't Buy You a Drink! was because I wanted to share the sort of story the person sitting next to me could have known all along. Not because my experiences are more remarkable than anyone else's, but because I've come to believe that almost everyone is carrying a story worth hearing if we're prepared to slow down long enough to listen.
Somewhere along the way we also became very good at introducing ourselves through packaging. We lead with job titles, profile photos, achievements and carefully selected highlights before allowing people to discover who we really are. Perhaps that's one reason genuine connection sometimes feels harder than it should.
I often wonder what would happen if we became as curious about the people in front of us as we are about the people on our screens. Imagine if asking thoughtful questions became more fashionable than collecting followers, or if "What have you learned?" became a more common question than "What do you do?" I suspect we'd discover that the most interesting people in our lives were never hiding from us at all. We simply hadn't taken the time to notice them.
Looking back, that's probably one of the greatest gifts travel gave me. It taught me that remarkable stories aren't found only in books, documentaries or social media. They're sitting across the table, standing in line, walking past us in the street and living quietly next door.
Every meaningful conversation begins in exactly the same place - with two strangers deciding to stop being strangers.
Perhaps that was always one of the real hopes behind my memoir. Not simply that people would read my story, but that somewhere along the way it might encourage them to ask somebody else about theirs.
Topics:
#HumanBehaviour #HumanConnection #Observation #Authenticity #Conversation #AustralianAuthor #DJGifford #Memoir #NoIWontBuyYouADrink #Curiosity