Discovering That Strangers Aren’t All That Strange

One of the great things about cities is that they make you feel as if, just round the next corner, you might meet someone new and strikingly different—someone you’d never come across in a smaller town. That’s the hope at least. One of the bad things about cities is that they all too often fail to live up to this promise. I was born in a city of 12 million people, London, where I still live. Even with roots here, I’ve experienced years of loneliness and disconnection, shuttling between work and a few hours snoozing in front of the TV, exhausted and tapped into a narrow, steadily atrophying social network.

That’s far from my only experience of the city, but in darker times it certainly felt as if everyone in the London street was rattling past me isolated in their own individual bell jar. I’m not alone in feeling this way: A survey of 20,000 Americans released this year by health insurance company Cigna found that almost 50 percent of respondents reported feelings of social isolation. A somewhat less comprehensive survey of Londoners in 2016 found that 55 percent of respondents said the city can “sometimes feel like a lonely place to live.” It seems that many of us feel this growing sense of social dislocation.