Stranger Dinners! Strange, right?

Stranger Dinners. At first, you think of it meaning a dinner that is not like the others. This is exactly right, but take it more literal. Literally having dinner with strangers. Strange idea, right?

Arianna Davolos wrote about her crazy new idea in Share or Die. Arianna just wanted to get out of college into the real world to have freedom. As an artist, she wanted to talk to people and experience things outside her university and just spend her time doing what she loved, making art.

She soon found out that people don’t have time for art in the real world. With people constantly working to pay their rent, it’s not something most people take the time to appreciate. She found that school hadn’t prepared her for what lied ahead.

This hit me. We always say that college prepares us for the real world, but is that always true? Of course, it all depends on the person, but, for some people, it’s not exactly what they need.

After a while of working part time at a frame shop and working on projects in her free time at home, she wondered, “Is this what everyone else is doing?”

“Is this it?”

            This is when she decided to start having Stranger Dinners. She maybe did it out of loneliness, she doesn’t know. She just wanted to find out about other people’s lives. She wanted to know more about the big world she was living in. She thought of sharing ideas and perspectives with everyone, not just people close to you. She wanted to find out what life was like.

She found that everyone stumbles his or her way through life. Sometimes people catch breaks and sometimes they don’t. Some people are happy and some aren’t. It’s just how life goes.

            I really liked this part. When you’re down in the dumps, everyone’s life seems better than yours, but is it really? You really don’t think about how life is just life. Stuff happens, and then you die. Everyone is just trying to make the best life they can, facing, and potentially overcoming, all obstacles they can. And sometimes it just doesn’t work out. But sometimes it does!

            The Internet. Isolation from face-to-face communication. We can know everything about a random person we follow on Twitter, and vice versa, but we don’t really communicate. We broadcast our lives through social media.

            Arianna started to have Stranger Potlucks, to interact with people face-to-face, other than her friends and family. She wanted to act as though they “have the world in common”. She wants to create in person relationships with people that they normally would not occur with. She wants to find out about people’s lives.

            When I first read about this idea, I was a little skeptical. Inviting strangers over to your house? Seems a bit dangerous. But once I read more, I really opened up to the idea. There are strangers all over social media that we interact with like it’s nothing, only because they can’t see us. We’re hiding behind our phones or our laptops. It’s safe that way. But why not try something new? Find out about other people’s lives. What their struggles, fears, motivations, and triumphs are. Who knows? You might learn something that could change your life.