In Defense of Saying Hello
· Time
On my daily walks through Silicon Valley, I’ve noticed something small but persistent: if a hello happens, I am almost always the one who initiates it.
It’s not that people are unfriendly. Quite the opposite—this is a place full of thoughtful, driven, often generous people. But they are also, like me, frequently elsewhere: in their heads, in their work, in the quiet urgency of whatever problem they are trying to solve.
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I know the look because I wear it myself. I’ve been told, more than once, that someone passed me on the levee and I didn’t even register their presence. Recently, someone asked if it had been me, walking and absentmindedly doing what could only be described as a hand jive. It was. I was listening to the Grease soundtrack.
And yet, even in that inward state, I find myself drawn to say hello.
I learned it from my parents. They spent decades in a Southern California town where they were, for a long time, the only Chinese family for miles. It would have been easy, in that kind of isolation, to keep to themselves. But they didn’t. They are, by nature, greeters. To this day, well into their eighties and nineties, they will strike up conversations with strangers: an Uber driver, a cashier, the person standing next to them in line.
The conversations begin simply: “How are you? How long have you been driving?” But sometimes they unfold into something more—stories exchanged, small intimacies offered without obligation. My parents would never describe this as “seeing” someone, not in the language we use now. But that is what they are doing. They are acknowledging another person’s existence, briefly but sincerely.
It’s a habit that feels, lately, less common.
I don’t pretend to know exactly why. There are obvious explanations: people are busy, preoccupied, cautious. In a densely populated place like New York City, if you stopped to greet every passerby, you would never get down the street. And there are good reasons to be guarded. But I’m not thinking about crowded sidewalks or moments that feel unsafe. I’m thinking about the quieter, in-between spaces. An after-dinner stroll. Standing in line for coffee. A passing moment where a greeting could happen and doesn’t.
Recently, I’ve spent time in a smaller city about an hour away, where the pace is slower and the culture feels just slightly shifted. There, people do say hello. Sometimes they do more than that: they pause, or they comment on the weather. They tell you your dog is beautiful (even when it isn’t your dog at all). Once, a woman stopped mid-step to inform me, very earnestly, that I was “rocking those bangs,” which, at this stage of life—when bangs are less a hairstyle than a high-stakes gamble—I accepted gratefully.
It is not dramatic. But it is noticeable. You begin to feel, over the course of a day, that you are moving through a place where people register one another.
It made me think about how community is actually built—not in grand gestures, but in brief, passing moments. Not through declarations, but through accumulation: small acknowledgments threaded over time into something that can hold weight.
While writing my recent novel, I became fascinated by mycelium networks: vast underground systems through which fungi connect entire forests, allowing trees to exchange nutrients and information. A forest, it turns out, is not a collection of individual organisms but a network: interdependent, communicative, sustained by invisible connections.
I’ve started to wonder if we’ve underestimated the human equivalent.
A hello is not a conversation. It is not a commitment. It is, at most, a few seconds of eye contact and a word. But it is also a signal that says: I recognize you. You are not invisible to me. In isolation, it seems trivial. In aggregate, it begins to look like infrastructure—the social equivalent of roots beneath the surface, holding something together that we might not notice until it’s gone.
Online, it can feel as though we are surrounded by hostility. Social media amplifies the loudest voices—the sharpest, the angriest, the most certain. It creates the impression of a world defined by conflict, where every interaction carries the potential for escalation.
But when I close my laptop and go outside, I’m reminded that most people are not like that. Most people are ordinary, occupied with what to make for dinner, an email they forgot to send, something they said three days ago that won’t quite leave their heads. They are moving through their lives in ways that are benign, sometimes more generous than we tend to assume.
But connection doesn’t happen on its own. If we don’t practice even the smallest acts of acknowledgment, they begin to disappear.
Have we become more fearful of one another? Or simply more practiced at looking past one another and avoiding eye contact?
I still take my walks. I am still, often, lost in thought, occasionally embarrassing myself with choreography only I can hear. But I try, when I surface, to look up. To notice who is passing. To say hello, even when it feels unnecessary, even when it feels slightly awkward.
A hello is a small risk. It is also a small act of faith—that the person passing you is not a threat, but a neighbor you haven’t met yet.
Lately, it feels like a risk worth taking.