Earlier this year, the NYT posted a "Well" series on talking to strangers. There's an introduction to the series/course where editors interviewed the journalists. One of the journalists worked with Dr. Bob Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Harvard's happiness study’s fourth director, to develop the Well challenge. (He wrote a book called "The Good Life"). There were a couple of gems...
What was the most unexpected thing you learned?
DUNN I remember one researcher telling me that you can learn something when you’re talking to strangers. You’re getting outside of your normal world and you’re learning about other people, other cultures, other everything. She said that she was talking to somebody and learned that people ride ostriches. You are never going to learn something like that unless you talk to some stranger on the bus, right? You’re going to live your whole life without knowing that people ride ostriches. That, to me, is a compromised life.
How would you describe your social fitness now?
DUNN Honestly, it is so much better. Dr. Waldinger said that everyone you know can be stores of buried treasure. I thought about that at Christmas. He suggested taking someone you don’t know very well, but who you like, on a walk. So I took my teenage niece for a long walk. I learned things about her that I never knew. She’s kind of shy, and she asked me questions away from the group that she said she always wanted to ask me but felt self-conscious about. I found my buried treasure in my niece. People are an unlimited resource when it comes to happiness.
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