The Loss of Serendipity
How modern social constructs stifle spontaneous human interaction
A few months past, a close friend of mine, through a series of unfortunate events, lost access to all forms of modern communication. His cell phone and laptop both bit the dust at the same time and, for one reason or another, he was unable to replace them for about a week. As it happened, my wife and I were in my friend’s neck-of-the-woods, but, of course, we had no way of contacting him. I was fairly certain that he was not busy so we stopped by his house to see if he wanted to join us for the afternoon. His car was in the driveway, but when I knocked on his front door there was no answer. Feeling certain he was home, and encouraged by my wife that “it isn’t weird,” I crept around the back of the house to his bedroom window. In true Romeo and Juliet style, I began tossing pebbles at his window. Lo and behold, he was home. Upon hearing the clatter of the stones, he popped his head out of his window with a surprised but joyful exclamation. He was delighted to see us and we were delighted to discover him at home. As it turned out, he was free, and so we spent the rest of the day perusing an autumn market, and finished off the day with an unplanned bottle of wine on his patio.
What made this unassuming vignette stand out in my mind was that the encounter with my friend was spontaneous. Spontaneity carries with it a very real and human joy and yet it has become increasingly rare in our society. That rarity is due to the fact that we have lost the social contexts for spontaneous human interaction. There are at least two ways in which we have lost these social contexts. The first, as my story demonstrates, is due to the ease of communication. There is no longer a social need to find our friends and family without having first organized how we will meet. Because the need is gone, our behavior conforms to the path of least resistance: it is comforting to know beforehand if a friend is free.
The second reason spontaneity does not bubble up in our society frequently is due to a lack of physical proximity to others. Spontaneity occurs when one encounters another human physically. For this to happen, one must be in a social setting where coming upon the other unexpectedly is possible. We have lost physical proximity to others because, most obviously, we now live at a distance from those we consider our “community.” This physical separation of the community, in turn, means that the integrated social structures that once existed—where spontaneous interactions were not only commonplace but expected—have dissolved.
First, living at a distance from your community makes spontaneous interaction difficult. For example, it is difficult to pop by and see if a friend is home if they live a twenty-minute drive away. It is also less likely that you will unexpectedly bump into a friend as you go about your daily life because of the sheer distance and increased number of establishments between you and your friend. You might run into a friend at a coffee shop if it is a five-minute walk from both of your houses, but not if there are ten coffee shops within the twenty-minute drive between your houses.
Second, we have lost those physical spaces in which the necessities of daily life would place us in physical proximity to others. These physical spaces include, what has come to be called, “third spaces,” but also those institutions of business where one would encounter the neighbor. Third spaces are simply public spaces which are not one’s home or work: churches, coffee shops, or pubs. For many of us, church is still a place where one might bump into a friend but modern attempts at third spaces suffer from that faceless corporatism and resulting economies of scale which make it nearly impossible to run into someone you know (or even get to know others who frequent the place). The local pub has become the Buffalo Wild Wings. No longer do men socialize at the barbershop. And the coffee shop is barely more than a drive through.
Nor do we need to be in physical spaces to do our business. Until recently, the necessities of daily life required us to be in spaces with others. Institutions in which we did our business were physical spaces incorporated into a particular community—the post office, the bank, or the train station. The need to be present in these spaces placed us in settings with others who lived in immediate vicinity to us. These spaces no longer exist, at least not in the same way they once did. There is no need to enter a bank anymore. The app performs all the functions a teller can. The post office is a cold wasteland of marble and granite. How many grocery cashiers do we know or are we more familiar with the voice of the self-check-out machine?
So what if we have lost the social contexts for spontaneous interaction? At this juncture one might be ready to respond that there are good associated with the changes that have brought this about, and I would certainly agree. However, I would argue that a world without spontaneity, a world in which all of our social interactions are planned and coordinated in advance, is a world in which we come to conceive of our social reality as constructed and not as given. We do not receive a social order; we make our own. This, I believe, marks a seismic shift in how we conceive of our relation to our social world. That thesis is beyond the scope of this paper, but the loss of spontaneity is anecdotal of this shift in our social imaginary.
We cannot be spontaneous because we never happen to be with others unless we have already made plans. Because social interactions do not occur “naturally” we must artificially create them, which has been made easier by modern technology. See e.g., SMS messaging. Thus, we tend to relate to our social interactions as something which our will alone created.
In fact, one vice of modernity is a certain cynicism towards spontaneous human interaction. We find it imposing, as if we have a right to go about our day, according to our plan, without interruption by those around us. We find it rude if someone tries to strike up a conversation with us uninvited. In the past, spontaneity occurred both with those we knew and those we might come to know. Now, however, spontaneous interaction with a stranger is seen as an imposition. How common is it to hear that oft repeated complaint of the annoying neighbor on a flight who just had to talk the whole trip while we were trying to watch a movie or read a book? The veil of self-autonomy dare not be pierced; only on our own terms will we suffer to commune with the other.
An attitude of spontaneity is the very antithesis of this modern view. The serendipitous moment requires us to forget the self in the joy of the other. It is, by definition, a moment when our plan is frustrated and yet the result is better than our plan ever envisioned. It is true that, had my friend’s phone been in proper working order that day, we would probably have still met up and had a jolly good time. Still, there was a certain quality to our interactions which texts could never facilitate. My friend experienced a unique joy upon suddenly discovering his friend there solely because that friend wanted to see him. The unexpectedness, the very lack of a plan made on our terms, breaks in upon us, penetrates us, and allows the joy of the other to break forth. To be spontaneous you must take your social world as you find it and be glad that it is what you have found it to be!
Joy, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, is caused by love because every lover rejoices in being united with their beloved. To experience joy in the unexpected interaction with the other, then, requires us to love the other. The modern social imaginary, however, treats the neighbor not as an object of our will, but an obstacle. The irony is that as we strive to be the primogenitors of our own social lives, our lives become lonelier and less joyful. Because joy requires love of the other, a social existence predicated on self-determination becomes vapid and sterile. The spontaneous moment is just one example of when the surrender of self (and it is a playful kind of surrender) opens us to true joy.