Accidental Community
Strangers, Neck Pain, and the Breadth of Being Human
I finally caved and started going to physical therapy for my neck (#millennialexperiences). My therapist is an Indian uncle male who drives in at 7 AM to beat Connecticut traffic, loves talking about his son, and — presumably because I’m also Indian — periodically asks how often I visit my parents.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve fallen into a routine there. Same room. Same time. Same group of strangers. We vary in age, gender, color, and ailment. Although I’ve never spoken to them directly, I’ve pieced together who they are from overhearing their conversations: the cyclist with knee issues, the middle-aged woman with the stubborn shoulder, the grandfather who worked in construction and hurt his hip.
One session, the woman asked my therapist about his weekend. He mentioned celebrating Diwali with his family. I expected a quick “Oh, nice,” and silence. Instead, she leaned in. She asked what it meant, how he celebrated. He explained the festival of lights — the diyas, the prayers to Lord Rama, the same rituals I had done that prior weekend with my own family.
I thought the conversation would stop there. But she said, “That’s beautiful!” and asked about the festival’s origin story. As they talked, I realized — uncomfortably — that I was surprised by her genuine curiosity. Then, I was surprised by my own cynicism. I hadn’t expected a stranger to be so interested in another culture, let alone appreciate its beauty.
The idea of two strangers having a meaningful conversation about something personal — with no shared agenda — felt, embarrassingly, out of touch with my daily reality. I talk to strangers all the time — the barista, the Uber driver — but rarely beyond surface-level niceties. Deeper conversations happen with the same people: my husband, family, close friends (all roughly my age), coworkers. People whose lives look a lot like mine.
For many of us, the structure of our jobs and hence, lives means that meeting connecting with different people — people whose lives differ meaningfully from our own — requires going out of our way. I listen, engrossed, as my friends who are doctors or teachers share deeply human stories from their work days. Meanwhile, my routine of home → office → home feels… lacking in the breadth of human experience.
At the same time, I’m overwhelmed by the illusion of connection online. I know too much about strangers on the internet. Social media creates a warped sense of “connection” without the nourishment that human interactions are supposed to offer. I watch a distant cousin’s wedding reel or a video about a new mom’s struggles and feel nothing close to the high of my barista saying she liked my outfit this morning (!).
This feeling isn’t just anecdotal. The narrowing of social worlds — where we mostly interact with people who live, think, and operate like us — is known as social homogeneity. In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam writes about how Americans have gradually disengaged from civic and community life — the “third places” beyond home and work where diverse interactions once happened naturally. Without those spaces, our exposure to other ways of living shrinks.
It’s not surprising, then, that the random group at physical therapy is probably the most diverse set of people I’ve been around in a long time. Their stories — of working in construction, picking up grandchildren, learning English — feel simultaneously real and far removed from mine. I have little in common with them. But when my therapist suggested acupuncture for my neck and I hesitated, everyone chimed in encouragingly. They each shared how they’d done it, how it had helped. In that moment, the space was briefly alive with connection.
We are often advised to take a break from physical walls — be outdoors, in nature, in spaces bigger than our problems. Yet we seldom hear the same advice for our social walls: to step outside the familiar confines of our human interactions.
Modern life — in all its work-centric, digital glory — quietly shrinks our worlds, robbing us of exposure to the breadth of human experience, appreciation of new perspectives, and empathy that can come from total strangers. It robs us of the emotional and intellectual nourishment that comes from witnessing lives different from our own.
The irony hit me while finishing this post. My husband mentioned that you can now use Uber Courier to return unwanted Black Friday purchases. Earlier that day, dropping off packages at UPS and Amazon was the only reason I’d stepped outside — seen a face that wasn’t his, spoken to someone that wasn’t him. The errand itself didn’t matter. The interactions did.
No thank you. I’ll drop off my own packages.