Are We Doing Friendship Wrong?

Alex Chueh doesn’t want to join a book club to make friends. Or take a pottery class. Or show up to trivia night. Prerequisites for talking repel him. Instead, he wants to turn to anyone anywhere and strike up a conversation. Which is exactly what he’s done — over 1,000 times since 2022.

Faced with the uncertainty of postgraduate life and unsatisfied with conventional social offerings, Chueh set out to meet a new person every day. He calls the initiative the “strangers project” and recently started posting about his encounters on Substack.

The project’s logistics are straightforward. Every day, the 25-year-old Cambridge native goes up to a new person and asks them if they’d like to talk. Coffee shops are his venue of choice, but any public place works. He has introduced himself to people at airports, gas stations, pizzerias — even shooting ranges.

According to Chueh, around 70 to 80 percent of the strangers agree to a conversation once he’s explained the project. On average, the exchange that follows lasts 32 minutes. Often the people he meets don’t stay in touch, but sometimes they become his closest friends.

The project represents a radical departure from standard socializing — at least among adults. As kids, Chueh writes, social opportunities arise organically, but “many adults have internalized a different rule: no socializing without a valid reason.”

The vast majority of Americans report their closest friendships being situational, with connections made through school or work. As a result, people’s circles tend to grow increasingly homogenous as they age, especially when it comes to educational background.

Yet Chueh’s project suggests that there might be other ways of fostering human relationships, defined less by commonality and more by spontaneous connection.

Chueh describes his immediate goal in a simple phrase: to “feel closer to more people.” In his experience, talking to strangers has produced friendships more meaningful than any office happy hour or college housing assignment.

“If the basis of your friendship with someone is that you went to the same school, there’s a decent chance that within three or four years, your personalities might diverge,” he says. A more stable basis, he argues, is whether you actually like talking to someone — and, for Chueh, those people are typically hiding in some pretty random places.

Although Chueh went to the University of California, Los Angeles and now works remotely in healthcare software, few of his close friends share this profile. Katie Charpentier, for instance, teaches art classes to elementary schoolers. She met Chueh two years ago while working at a greeting card store.

Or take Caitlin Feltner, a battery systems engineer from Michigan. She was watching a college football screening in South Boston with her fiancé when Chueh introduced himself. They’ve been in touch ever since.

Over the years, the mission of the project has evolved from meeting a stranger a day to creating a network of unexpected friends. If you happen to be one of the hundreds of people Chueh has encountered, you’re likely to receive regular updates from his travels, as well as invitations to get-togethers in his Cambridge home. “Pizza night for old friends and new!” one text reads.

“It’s such a fun experience to get to know people totally out of my zone, like non-artsy people, science-based people, sportier people,” says Charpentier, who has attended several of Chueh’s hangouts.

Chueh has also taken the project on the road, talking to strangers as he made his way across the rural Midwest. Last year, he traveled the Deep South. “I planned the route very intentionally both times,” he explains, specifically seeking out areas that differ dramatically from Cambridge — such as counties with unique voting records or towns with high industrial employment.

His philosophy stems partly from a worry that graduates of elite colleges have siloed themselves off from the rest of the country. “I do think a lot of them would, if they were to go to a bar in Michigan or Minnesota, struggle to connect with the locals because they just don’t know how to talk to them,” he says.

Regardless of where the conversation takes place, be that in the Harvard Book Store or at a dive bar in Iowa, a few core principles guide Chueh’s conversations.

For one, he treats strangers as he would friends. This means practicing empathy and patience — as well as getting comfortable with silence. “When you’re with a friend and you’re on the couch and there’s a bout of silence, you don’t just get up and leave, do you?” he asks.

Chueh also makes a rule of never being the one to end the conversation. Instead, he likes to let an exchange run its natural course, even if it goes on for hours.

When I ask him if he ever finds himself bored by a stranger, he is quick to shake his head: “I think everyone has a repository of interesting thoughts, just some are much harder to access.”

The key, he believes, is to talk about things the other person finds interesting.“I like to have conversations where I can go deep into a specific topic that they enjoy,” he says. On his Substack, Chueh describes the power of replacing the classic “what do we have in common” mindset with a “what can I learn about you” framework, when meeting someone new.

Despite his visions for a different kind of socializing — one that is spontaneous and shamelessly curious, that doesn’t just happen in designated social spaces — Chueh avoids prescription. “I don’t want to invest my energy telling other people how to live,” he says.

Chueh’s friends sometimes ask him whether he’ll turn his experiences into a book, but he sees little value in commodifying the project. He’d prefer people to have their own unexpected interactions rather than reading about his. “That, to me, is more rewarding than anything else,” he says.

Towards the end of our conversation, I confess that I’ve always been reluctant to chat with strangers, avoiding the awkwardness of small talk when I can. He assures me that it’s an acquired skill. “It’s just like lifting,” he says. “If you lift five times a week, doesn’t matter how flabby you are when you start. You’ll get stronger.”