August 18th, 2009
I got back recently from an 8-week research internship in Idaho, working on artificial neural networks. Like my 3-month study in Japan, my reasons for going had nothing to do with meeting people, but like Japan the other students are what I most remember. Unlike in routine life where everyone has their established groups and limited motivation to branch out, here everyone is a stranger, and since almost everyone likes to interact with people they don’t stay that way for long. When I went to Japan, I hadn’t had the experience of getting to know so many new people since junior high, and it really kind of blew me mind. We obviously all shared some kind of large interest in Japan, and I thought having less in common with the Idaho students might make a large difference, but it didn’t much. These kinds of things make me wish we didn’t normally live such cloistered social lives, but with few exceptions, c’est la vie.
It’s interesting to think back to first meeting the other students, getting first impressions, running through the conventional where-are-you-from and what’s-your-major, etc. This is the level on which we know most of the people we interact with in life. And yet most of those first impressions weren’t very accurate, and they necessarily all did an abysmal job of representing those people’s depth and complexity.
I love to think back to first meetings and imagine telling the past me all the things I would learn about a person, all the things we would do, and how surprised past me would be. We each have people who’ve radically affected our lives, who’ve become fixtures and critical elements of our stories. With the exception of some family, those grand arching interactions all began with a “Hi, how are you?” or a “Hey, what’s up?”. The tip-of-the-iceberg cliche just doesn’t cut it.
Back at home, I feel like I know those other students relatively well. There’s sure to be much more to learn, things that only years of friendship might uncover, but those 2 months made a world of difference from being strangers. I care about them, their lives and their futures, but I don’t actually think those people are exceptional. I can’t find any good reason to believe that a great many of the people I see or meet for a short time aren’t just as interesting and enjoyable and able to be missed, if one gets to know them.
There are currently 6,778,285,580 people on earth, according to the estimate by the U.S. Census Bureau. Yes, some of those people are basically assholes. And there are some exceptional people who are just as trite and uninteresting as they first appear, who do not merely hide or repress their depth so much as they utterly lack it. But unless you’re a real misanthrope, there are billions of people on this world that with time and a common language you’d come to appreciate and enjoy. Millions upon millions of potential friends, kept from being so only by lack of social and physical proximity. A million years, lived as we live them now, would not be enough to know them all†. And each and every one of those intricate and valuable lives would be lost in an existential disaster‡.
† If we assume conservatively that friendship can be shared with 1 in 14 people, that leaves about 500 million such people. If you got to know one a day (really know, not just learn a few facts about), this would take you more than 1,369,863 years.
‡ Or possibly have so few survivors that the human race will be unable to maintain its numbers, or be repressed by an immortal totalitarianism, etc