Come Together

Today, an acquaintance in my biodiversity class asked me something quite out of the blue, and then apologetically qualified it as a "random question".

I answered it and quickly added that she needn't worry, because it's good to ask random questions. If you allow social interaction to take its own course, there are many things you'll never find out about people.

See, I subscribe to the view that the human world is eminently artificial and unnatural. I could go on forever about why and in what ways this is so, but suffice it to say, this artifice often breeds a subconscious sense of alienation, which in turn manifests itself as loneliness.

And because this loneliness has unnatural origins, the best way to combat it is through equally unnatural means. Today, these means include instant messaging, networking sites (Friendster, Hi5) and blogging. As contrived forms of interaction as they are, they nonetheless gain back valuable social ground which is lost to the other things which now monopolise our time, such as work.

If not for them, I would never know that someone I know shares the same favourite few books as me, or has a similar worldview, or that he / she has this hobby and has done this and that in her lifetime. These nuggets, as pedestrian as they are, may never come up in a thousand meals eaten together, or in a decade in the same office or classroom.

They may be appreciated in and of themselves, or they may be footholds to deeper, more meaningful things.

Another way to get there, of course, is to ask random questions from time to time, and be open to random questions yourself. A question doesn't have to be truth-or-dare quality to be 'random'; it just has to be out of whatever context you're in, eliciting trivia that you wouldn't otherwise know.

So if you know me, just shoot.