A stranger asked me to have a conversation; here's why I'm glad I agreed

I was sitting in a Starbucks the other day, typing away on the laptop open in front of me, pausing to look out the window and watch the cars roll by every few minutes, when a young guy walked over and just started talking to me.

Him: “Do you mind if I talk to you a bit? Would you like to have a conversation?”

Me: “Um, sure. Have a seat. Are you working on a project or something? Writing something?”

Him: “No. I’m just trying to talk to more people. I used to be really socially awkward, so a few years ago I decided that I should just talk to people when I have a few extra minutes.”

I thought it was a fantastic idea and said as much; then I asked if he came up with it on his own. He said that he had.

I told him that back in the 1930s the psychologist Albert Ellis did a similar thing for a similar reason. Basically Ellis — then a very shy young man in his 20s — would go to the park and talk to every single woman he saw. All ages, shapes, and sizes. He reported that it helped him immensely, essentially curing him of his crippling social anxiety.

I brought up Ellis not to undercut the creativity of his idea but to underscore the fact that he was on to something very real. Great minds think alike, you know.

I asked him if he thought it had helped him, and he, like Ellis, confirmed that it certainly had. Stop me if you've heard this

He told me he was Catholic and was waiting for a Jehovah’s Witness who was meeting him for a debate. I didn’t ask him how exactly they set this debate or how they crossed paths, but I can only imagine that they were discussing theology online and decided to continue their argument IRL.

It really sounds like a good start to a joke, doesn’t it? A Catholic and a Jehovah’s Witness walk into a Starbucks for a theological debate.

I talked with him for about 15 minutes. He told me he was 18 and that he was in middle school during COVID, to which I responded, with my palm holding my forehead, “My God, you are so young and I am so old.” We talked a lot about his experiences speaking with people. How some were more open and others less so, and how he thought other people in his generation would benefit from doing something similar.

I told him that I think the Zoomers’ emotions were calibrated differently from their elders' due to technology and the social isolation it has brought along with it. He agreed.

He also shared a theory about how we perceive one another in our technological age. He explained that in his opinion we tend to project the most extreme views onto those with whom we disagree before we even interact, with the result that we adjust our own views to be more extreme. Everyone is constantly doing this, which is why communication gets worse and worse.

I found this compelling. I had never thought of it that way, and while I need to ponder it more to know if I really agree or not, I think there must be some truth to it. I also think, due to his age, he has a more personal insight into his generation’s sense of the world than I. He is a native to his strange world, while I am only a documentarian noting the ways of these peculiar people we call Zoomers.

I like talking to people. Truthfully, I like doing the listening more than the talking. It might be because I’m a writer and always looking for inspiration, or maybe it’s because I’m perpetually curious about everyone and everything. Whatever it is, I like sitting there, just listening, taking in what they have to share, trying to figure them out. If you ask people about themselves, they will just talk and talk, and you can learn about all these other corners in all these other lives.

Our world can feel very internal these days with the internet and all the text-based interaction we suffer through. It’s easy to feel alone and estranged from everyone else. In our day and age, sitting and talking with someone you’ll probably never see again is oddly refreshing. It just feels good.

I really enjoyed my time talking with Zoomer Albert Ellis. I was fairly uninspired when he sat down, and our discussion was invigorating in a way that only human interaction can be. I learned something about the Zoomers and their social struggles as seen through his eyes. And it was heartening to see this young guy trying to better himself in the real world. Perhaps the kids — or at least some of them — are all right.

After a few minutes, a big black truck pulled up and a slender guy in his 40s with graying hair hopped out. The Zoomer across from me concluded that this must be his debate partner and said goodbye. He met him outside on the patio, where they sat at a black table, across from one another, for quite some time. I went back to my work, writing. Every few minutes I glanced out the window to see the a spirited theological debate, politely raging, IRL.

Yours sounds like a fascinating story.

Sorry for the length of this, but I think you'll get it before it's done.

It was a grind. I worked on boats and went to school for eight years until I got into college (Harvey Mudd in Claremont). Arrived there $4000 short of affording the first year. Lived in my car for the second semester.

Frankly, I'm too wild and crazy to the the engineer I became, but then I didn't become an engineer to be one; I wanted to understand tangibly how wealth is created because I saw a serious social problem developing as the Japanese were killing us in manufacturing. I was fired twice and then executed a turnaround for a division of a Fortune 200 company.

Now I live in the mountains above Silicon Valley having done research in restoration ecology no one had even contemplated, currently studying and writing about the guy who precipitated our social meltdown and comparing that to a novel interpretation of the Hebrew Torah from a pastoralist's perspective.

Everything in my life was necessary for me to understand what I'm working on, from my dad's career in municipal finance and bonds, my parents' divorces, going through private Catholic school, after school daycare at the Jewish Community Center, and at Church as an Episcopalian. Through the drug craze of San Francisco, to being homeless. Then clawing my way back in analyzing the wreckage of my life in EST. Then Mudd and the jobs. Then marriage to a woman who actually understands and can tolerate me. I was the first author of a local Agenda 21 Biodiversity and Ecosystem Management document. When I quit my last job to home school the girls and write that first book, I became free as an intellectual to research the causes of our economic decline having been a project manager.

In doing so, I learned of the globalist project and decided to take my family "the other way." We joined a Messianic Jewish congregation. There I discovered the original purpose of the Biblical Sabbath for the Land. That became the second book and is an element of current research, as it exposes an entirely novel way to see the antediluvian Torah. It was too radical for the congregation to handle it.

Out of that book came documentation of our restoration project. That is the third book. Then, after my beloved daughter and FReeper NattieShea, was turned into a childless leftist harpie by Stanford, I embarked upon the fourth book I'm working on now about the guy who engineered that social meltdown, whom I regard as the most influential person of the 20th Century. Virtually nobody has ever heard of him.

I'm the luckiest researcher alive to have made so many unprecedented discoveries along the way. It's been amazing.

It's a challenge before G_d to finish this work before I die, to trust Christ to keep me alive that long. If I become famous, I'm surrounded with leftists who would gladly do me in for it, despite that I've created a way for us all to get out of this witless conflict, to allow reality to teach us how we must conduct ourselves to keep the planet alive. It has taught me to drop much of the anger at what they've done in the interest of healing. Reality on the land is a better teacher than I am anyway.

Yes, it changed the community but not to the degree that I desired.

I don’t like that sort of thing and the entire time I was doing the first one entirely by myself, I kept thinking that some people would take over and I could get back to my reading and privacy, but I ended up having to finish it alone,

The second year people did step in but they are happy with any bodies they can get, which means people from other communities and parts of town, outsiders, and not those hard to drag out of their homes people whose doors I kept going to until I could see them in person and give them my flier and sell them on attending, it is better than nothing, but not as good, focused, and purposeful as it could be.

My real purpose was to focus on the loners living alone, the drinkers and stoners who come home and flip on the TV, I knew the normal family people would show up and I wanted everyone to see each other’s faces so that they would nod or wave at each other in the future, the first year did work but it took a lot of door knocking and selling on my part, and other people don’t understand that sort of intimate and labor intensive effort, and don’t even seem to understand the reason for it.

At least the community event still takes place every year now, and it did stir a lot of volunteerism and connections for some of the more social people, people are a touch more aware of each other.

Something else I did when I saw there were no Christmas lights here was to start making a big deal with outdoor Christmas lights, it worked, and now I see a lot of houses with Christmas lights, and more every year, it started spreading, this year I made a huge production with outside July 4th lights and led flags for July 4th, trying to get people to get ready for the national birthday next year.

It is amazing how people start expressing themselves when someone steps in to break the ice and clear the path, the good people start living freer and bolder.

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