Picture this: you’re standing on the bus at 8 a.m. bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived, drowning out the world with your headphones, and feeling intense hatred for the human race in its entirety, when you stumble and fall into the lap of a stranger.
The worst day ever, right? Or is it? Because chances are that person will laugh a bit, and help you up, and you’ll both go on with your lives.
Esther Kim is a Yale sociologist who spent two years travelling on Greyhound buses and observing human behaviour on public transit. Her conclusion was that we don’t talk to each other on the bus mainly because of uncertainty and fear.
But for all the animosity we might feel towards strangers on public transit, when it comes down to it our fear is mostly unfounded.
Think about all the times someone’s offered you a seat when you had a lot of groceries, or picked up the keys you’ve dropped.
If there is an unspoken code that we don’t interact with each other verbally on the bus, there also seems to be an unspoken code of simple kindness.
The fact that all of these people who don’t really want to socialize with each other can still be together in this public space and help each other out when necessary can actually affirm your faith in humanity in a small way.
The bus forces everyone to step out of their comfort zone and acknowledge strangers not as ominous threats, but as fellow human beings—and that’s not such a terrible thing after all.
