Image Transcription
(A 4Chan “green-text” titled “The elderly is wise”, with a black-and-white portrait photograph of an elderly woman staring into the camera)
Be me, lonely guy in Britain
Get in the public transport to get back home
Sit next to a lovely old lady who smiled at me
Have a little talk
She tells me really interesting stuff and we have some laughs together
She tells that this day se would’ve been celebrating his brother’s birthday but he is gone
We keep talking
She tells me a heartwarming advise:
‘I could stay indoors and think about bad things, instead, I decide to go outside, see things, smile at people, they smile back at me, there is no point of being sad and angry at home’
Actually I feel like if I listened some sort of prophet
She gets to her stop and leaves, we say Happy Christmas to each other
Elderly deserve respect, I’ll probably join as a volunteer to some kind of organisation that helps them.
I’ve walked down the streets of Philadelphia on a Sunday morning - much less crowded than public transportation - and said good morning to people I passed. Even then, only half of them even gave a greeting in turn. There may be more friends, clubs, and hobby groups available in cities, which is certainly a nice thing, but there’s a loss in the friendliness of people on the street because there are so many of them. To each their own.
Just because someone gives you a head nod on the street doesn’t mean they’re a friendly person. They’re just doing it because that’s what they learned to do in the same way that the guy who doesn’t respond did.
I’m talking verbal replies, not head nods. I don’t remember any head nods.
I would say there’s a pretty big correlation there because friendliness is the quality of being willing to engage in conversations with people (even brief ones) and potentially make friends. If you’re not even willing to reply to a simple greeting, that’s understandable, and someone who does that may still be friendly in other contexts, but they’re not friendly to strangers on the street, and that’s what I’m referring to. I’m not trying to throw shade or anything; it’s an understandable learned response. It’s just that city life is a different culture than suburban/rural life, and different sorts of people are going to prefer each.
When I see an overfliendly guy saying hello and trying to initiate a small talk with everyone I instantly think that they are either making fun of it or that something is wrong with them. Politeness and openness have their own social cues and when someone just decides to do something for just one day on their life, just because “today say hello people” then it sticks out. You cannot draw conclusions out of it. I would simply just ignore them and look the other way. That doesn’t mean that I would also ignore someone who would truly wanted something
Yeah, that’s what I mean. In the city, it’s against the cultural grain and doesn’t work. In a small town, it’s normal.