"Most People Are Lonely and Just Want to Be Heard."

How asking one question changed how I saw the strangers in my life.

I love asking people questions.

For most of this past year, my favorite question to ask was, “What’s the best thing that’s happened to you this past week?”

After a particularly moving session at the Braver Angels national convention, I started asking people, “What’s something beautiful in your life right now?” That question earned blank stares more often than not, so I shifted to something that I thought was more intuitive to understand: “What’s the best thing in your life right now?”

I ask this question of almost everyone I meet. The person at the grocery store who’s checking me out. The line chef making my Qdoba or Chipotle. Corrections officers and the inmates I work with in prison. Bosses and random people on the street.

The breadth of answers I’ve gotten has been completely humbling.

People have told me about their lives. One person, a world traveler who worked as a line chef at Garbonzo’s, told me how excited he was to visit a new country next month. People have told me about their children, about their relationships, about going off to college and finding new roommates.

Not all of the answers are happy. Asked what the best thing that happened to her last week was, one line chef at Qdoba said, “Nothing. My husband just died.” I was honored she chose to confide that in me as a perfect stranger, and I felt incredibly blessed when circumstances lined up so that my wife and I could listen to her story and pray with her.

Another person told me that his friend had just committed suicide. Someone else said that they had just had to leave a friend group that was in danger of getting them in trouble.

All of these answers—all of these stories—convince me of two things.

1) There’s no such thing as a boring person.

We all have gems inside of us, if our interlocutor is willing to dig. We all have hidden worlds, worlds which fascinate us and excite us, world that terrify us and make us cry. There’s no such thing as an ordinary human being.

(Of course, there can be people who come across as ordinary. But I attribute this to a lack of skill on my end: if I was able to build more trust with them, they’d open up more about the deeper and most fascinating parts of themselves).

It all reminds me of that Neil Gaiman quote:

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them... All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”

2) Most people are lonely

I love asking these questions of retail workers especially. Retail workers tend to be invisible in our society, which I think is a profoundly un-Christian way to treat the men and women who make so much of our world run. They’re also at the bottom of what the popular TV show How I Met Your Mother calls the “chain of screaming” (essentially: when we’re having a bad day, we take it out on people who can’t fight back). From the responses I’ve gotten, I think relatively few customers treat retail workers like they’re human.

But it’s not just folks in retail. I think a lot about the woman who told me that her husband died, or the man who told me that his friend committed suicide. They didn’t have to open up. Neither one really knew me.

I thought for a long time that they must have other people they could have confided in. But maybe they didn’t. Our society’s atomistically individualistic, and according to a 2023 report from Pew, 8% of Americans (roughly 27 million of us) report having no close friends.

Even if these people did have close friends, their pain was still boiling over such that they felt the need to confide that pain in a perfect stranger.

I think there’s something about modern life that can feel profoundly difficult. So many people are overworked and close to burnout. So many people are struggling to make ends meet or to find their purpose or to find a sense of belonging. So many people are suffering intense pain that’s compounded by the fact that, in our busy and phone-addicted society, we so rarely take the time to truly listen to each other.

It all reminds me of something that a friend of mine who’s a spiritual director told me years ago: “Most of us are lonely and just want to be heard.”

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