Have you ever walked up to total strangers and asked them if they were “living their bliss”? Well, two summers ago, I embarked on a week-long self-actualization program that had me do just this. It was as weird, altruistic and expensive as it sounds, but to be honest, it changed my life. Talking to strangers, or rather, “friends we haven’t met yet,” in this way was one of the most rewarding (albeit creepy) things I’ve ever done.

Our assignment was to go into a public place, find someone who looked receptive and sit down and chat with them about what was important in his/her life. No agenda, just friendly conversation. Warning: people do not take well to this. During the course of my conversation with a very nice man who turned out to be a photojournalist (Coincidence? My group leaders thought not), I was repeatedly asked if I was 1) a proselyte, or 2) a salesperson. I don’t think I ever convinced this guy I was normal, but he gave me the link to his website, so I am confident I didn’t give off a stalker vibe.

This is fortunate because in three weeks, I’ll be entering the real world and starting to think about meeting strangers­­-something I’m convinced our generation doesn’t know how to do. After living in this college town for three years, we don’t see many people we don’t know. When I go some place where I shouldn’t know anyone, I usually end up being familiar with at least half of the people there. The power of LinkedIn, Facebook and the Northwestern directory (used sparingly, I promise) make it very difficult for me not to know something about the people I may not have met but see everyday.

It often works the other way around, too. A friend of mine was accepted to a summer program less than a month ago, and there is already a Facebook group for it. She has become “friends” with or checked out so many of her future associates that you could hardly call them “strangers.” As cool as social media is, most people just use it to connect to the worlds they are soon to enter or already exist in.

In situations like these, you’re bound to connect through fewer than six degrees of separation (sorry Kevin Bacon). You never hear “we met on Facebook” the way we did with Myspace. So my question is, where did the real strangers go and how do we meet them?

Luckily for me, there are lots of other people who want to connect with “people they haven’t met yet” who are sane, hygienic and gainfully employed. Drinking with Strangers, an incorporated non-profit and for-charity meet up group on meetup.com, brings total strangers together for bar nights and other events simply for the sake of having fun. Meetup.com is an international site designed to organize themed meet-ups for friends and strangers centered around anything from puppetry to Dungeons and Dragons (both are in Chicago, if you’re interested). Stranger Dinner in San Francisco is a more intimate project that uses extended friend-of-a-friend networks to set up dinner for six strangers and encourages a show-and-tell kind of interaction over a potluck dinner.

As alienating as moving to a new city can be, it seems if food, hobbies or alcohol are involved, there’s always a solid way to meet people outside of your circles. But this doesn’t quite solve the problem of turning that “dude with a beard” you see at Starbucks every morning into a new best friend. To meet truly random people like that, you might just have to up the creep factor and ask them about their bliss.

Alex Hollander is a Medill senior. She can be reached at [email protected].