It was decades ago now, but it’s still one of the most oddly memorable conversations of my life.On a long, slow train rattling north, with nothing to do but watch the rain, the guy sitting opposite began persistently trying to talk to me. Like most young women who have learned the hard way to be wary of strangers pestering for attention, I was standoffish. But curiosity took over when he said, bluntly, that he wasn’t remotely interested in picking anyone up; he was just bored, and liked talking.
So that’s what we did, for hours and hours, since he turned out to be very good at it. When the train eventually pulled in, we didn’t swap numbers – it was a conversation strictly of its time – but I still think about it occasionally on long, boring journeys, before getting a phone out and scrolling silently like everyone else. It’s a rare person who can cheerfully bust the social taboo about talking to strangers without any trace of entitlement or sinister intent, but life would be more interesting if more of us knew how to do it.
And that’s why I can’t be as cynical as I probably should be about a campaign launched this week to heal bitter national divides by encouraging Britons to talk to each other. The call for a “decade of reconnection” after years of polarisation got a predictable pasting on social media, where some saw a veiled demand for remainers to surrender and stop fighting Brexit.
But that’s missing the broader point of a campaign backed by the likes of Glastonbury organiser Emily Eavis, who successfully brings together thousands of strangers in a muddy field every year, and an assortment of religious, cultural and political names as well as the heads of the leave and remain campaigns.
All anyone is being asked to do is to start a conversation they wouldn’t otherwise have had – maybe with a friend from whom they’ve drifted apart or a neighbour they don’t know – on the grounds that even tiny social overtures can have a surprisingly big impact on how we feel.
Obviously, it takes more than a bit of small talk over garden fences to unite a nation fragmented now by so much more than politics. More people live alone than did so a generation ago, and the rise in freelancing means more of us work alone too. We socialise increasingly through screens, firing off texts instead of bothering to call, while social media platforms designed to bring people together have unwittingly given loudhailers to those who would divide us.
Worldwide, populations have shifted from small communities where people know each other into anonymous big cities. Without ever meaning to do so, humans have built a world that can feel cold, lonely and fragmented. But behind this depressingly familiar story of atomisation lies growing evidence that our desire to connect isn’t dead after all.
Millennials may be endlessly accused of burying their heads in their phones, but they are also driving a surge in collective experiences, from festival-going (up 23% in the year to 2018, according to UK Music) to the surprise return of political rallies under Jeremy Corbyn. Even pubs are bouncing back, with numbers rising for the first time in a decade.
Podcasts are no longer just a solitary pleasure, enjoyed with headphones firmly plugged in, but sociable live events recorded in front of a crowd. Freelancers sick of typing alone in their kitchens all day have spawned a vast hidden network of Facebook communities for trading gossip, encouragement and help in chasing invoices, sometimes spilling over into real life meet-ups. A campaign arguing that people are happier when they do things with and for each other may well be pushing at a surprisingly open door.
True, the “tube chat” campaign of a few years back flopped in its attempts to make Londoners talk to each other on public transport. But even city dwellers who would normally die rather than make eye contact with strangers still happily consent to being kettled in vast numbers by the Thames for the New Year’s Eve fireworks. They would get a far better view at home on the telly – it’s not really about the fireworks, but being part of something communal.
Meanwhile, there’s a whole other country out there in which it is positively rude not to chat to bus drivers or to wish a happy 2020 to anyone you pass on a New Year’s Day walk to the pub. When we first moved to the sticks I found all that mildly unnerving, but with time it has become comforting; the same can be true in otherwise struggling small towns where a sense of community lingers.
And if all this sounds fluffy, the reason the Blair and Cameron governments wrestled in different ways with the idea of increasing so-called social capital is that fostering goodwill and mutual trust within communities has surprising benefits in the real economy. The behavioural economist David Halpern, who advised both prime ministers on promoting pro-social behaviour, used to argue that high social trust is a more powerful predictor of national prosperity even than skill levels. Low trust, however, is destructive. What’s the point of paying your share, reducing your carbon footprint or generally being a good citizen if you don’t believe others are doing the same?
Where everyone has struggled, of course, is in turning appealing theories of social capital into practical policies that actually work – and there’s no guarantee that this latest attempt to reconnect will succeed where others have abruptly fizzled out. But if there’s ever a moment to suspend cynical disbelief, it’s after a burnt-out decade that millions of us would rather not repeat. Wherever my temporary train friend is now, I hope he’s still talking.
• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
