The Attempt at Connection, Mistaken for a Transaction

I was walking through the arts district in my town not long ago, past a public space where someone was setting up a barbecue for an event later that evening. I said hello, asked when things would get started. He laughed, but the laugh came wrapped around a small warning anyway, something about the last visitor who'd gotten angry there wasn't food ready yet, another impatient stranger. Kind enough, but already braced.

A few minutes later I passed a gallery I didn't know, part of a partnership program I'm involved with. Two men were outside, one working on a car, both smiling as I walked up. I asked if it was a gallery. Yes, one said. Then, not unkindly at first: who are you, and why do you want to know? I explained I work in the creative space, live nearby, was glad to have stumbled onto the place. I offered my card. He offered his own and told me the real way to learn about them was the website. Best of luck to you, he said, in a tone that made clear the conversation was already over.

Two strangers, ten minutes apart, on the same short walk. Both reaching for the same quiet assumption before I'd said more than a sentence or two: this person wants something from me.

The Default Nobody Chose

I don't think either man was wrong to be careful. I think they were both running the only operating system most of us were ever given.

For most of human history, encountering someone new happened inside a web you already belonged to. Strangers were rare, and curiosity toward them cost very little, because the surrounding relationships kept everyone reasonably safe. Civilization scaled us far past that. Most of the people we pass in a day now have no shared history with us at all, no web holding the interaction steady. So a new default had to be installed in its place, quietly, generations ago: assume an angle until someone proves otherwise.

You can watch that default do its work in real time. Every new encounter gets quietly sorted the same way: assume transaction, not the attempt at connection it actually was. When I asked to know the gallery, the actual, human way to answer that would have been to just keep talking with me. Instead the answer pointed me toward a website, an institution standing in for the relationship that was already happening, right there, in front of both of us.

I wasn't running an angle. I was glad to have found something I cared about and someone who might share that, which is really just another way of saying I was reaching for connection, not preparing to ask him for anything. But that doesn't have anywhere to land inside a frame that assumes transaction first. It just bounces off, mistaken for one more person wanting something.

What if the outcome he was really guarding against was never in the room at all, and what he missed instead was a simple bid for connection?

This idea runs alongside Chapter 2 of The Lens That Changes Everything, on institutions quietly replacing relationships as civilization's shortcut. If it's the kind of thing that stays with you, Being Jonas Wilder brings it into the room, live