"You Can't Miss It" - Danny’s Substack
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"You Can't Miss It"<br>A brief tribute to the strangers we no longer need.
Danny<br>Jun 01, 2026
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We were somewhere on the long drive down I-75, sometime in the late nineties, when my mother gave up on the map. It was one of those gas-station maps the size of a tablecloth, creased into a shape it would never hold again, and from the back seat I watched her turn it and turn it, as if the right angle might reveal where we were. My father began to suspect the exit was already behind us. So he did what you did back then: took the next exit, pulled into a gas station, rolled down the window, and asked a stranger pumping gas if they knew the way.<br>It is worth being precise about what that small transaction contained, because no one at the time would have dignified it with a description. You had to single out a person, approach them cold, and manage the brief awkwardness of needing something from someone who owed you nothing. You read their face to judge whether they knew the answer and whether to trust them.<br>“Drive east a mile and turn left at the church,” they would say… “You can’t miss it!”<br>You thanked them.<br>There are people thirty years old now who have never once done this and never will. You were lost, so you spoke to a stranger.<br>I do not want to pretend the encounters were precious. A great many were friction and nothing more. Anyone who felt the small dread of having to flag down a clerk knew that the relief of not having to was real and not to be sneered at. The interactions could seem, today, like a tax long since abolished.<br>One of the first sentences I was ever taught in French class was how to ask a stranger the time, quelle heure est-il, a question that is almost nonsensical now, since there is a clock on every surface I own.<br>The same phone retired others on its way in: you no longer asked a clerk if you could use the phone behind the counter to call your friend and say you were running late. When the video stores closed you stopped asking the teenager at the register what was actually worth renting, because the machine that now delivered the movie had opinions about it too.<br>“Do you have change for a five?” I have only asked to kids selling lemonade in my neighborhood.<br>Soon the car that comes when you tap a screen will pull up with no one in the front seat, retiring even the small talk you may have felt you owed an Uber driver.<br>Without ever calling it practice, ordinary life used to put you through your reps: the man at the pump, the woman behind the counter, the stranger in the next seat. You became fluent in strangers the way you become fluent in any language you are made to speak before you are old enough to be self-conscious about it. We used to actually ask, “Who is this?” on the phone.<br>Every one of these removals is genuinely more convenient, and every one removes a reason to speak to a person you did not choose. They can so plainly be viewed as an improvement that objecting to any one of them sounds absurd.<br>But talking to strangers takes effort now because it has become rare, and it has become rare because almost nothing in a well-equipped modern day requires it. We did not decide to stop speaking to one another. We accepted, a hundred separate times, a slightly faster way of not having to.<br>The directions were never really the point. Being lost produced the conversation, and the conversation produced the fluency, and none of it was anything anyone set out to keep. We have become very good at eliminating inefficiences. No one is confused anymore. We can each get exactly what we need without needing anyone else, which is an achievement at least, of some sort.<br>The machines know where everything is now, and the only thing harder to find than it used to be is a reason to ask a stranger anything at all.<br>Which is, I think, a sad thing, even if none of us could say precisely what it is we miss.<br>Danny’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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