Entertaining the unknown depths of strangers counters the self-centered default setting.

Evidence

This makes room for the possibility, in Wallace’s examples, that the guy in the Hummer who just cut you off is maybe trying to rush a child to the hospital-”and he’s in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am-it is actually I who am in his way.” Or that the woman in front of you in line who just screamed at you is maybe not usually like this; maybe she’s going through a rough time. Whether this is actually true isn’t the point. Just considering the possibility makes room for the lived realities of other people, whose depths are the same as your own. This is a marked departure from the self-centered “default setting,” whose only option is to see people as inert beings who are in the way: But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 446

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names the ‘default setting’ (from Wallace) as the self-centered automatic reading that reduces others to obstacles; the alternative is making room for their depths.
• XREF: Connects to Buber’s I-It vs I-Thou relation that Odell cites at 448, and to the larger argument about attention as world-constitution. — connects to: Strangers met by chance can overturn habitual perspectives like tumbling stage panels — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 432