weak ties

A few years back, I lived in San Francisco during what felt like a golden age of technological optimism. The city was the bleeding edge of robotics, apps, and whatever came next. It was a privilege to regularly be among the first to experience the world's newest innovations—some of which you instantly knew would take off like wildfire, while others left you scratching your head.

One day, I spent my lunch break at a futuristic "fast food restaurant" - a metal wall with dozens of mystery doors containing customized, fresh lunches that had been hand-delivered by the arm of an automaton. I stood there in front of a recently installed ordering kiosk, a sleek tablet that promised me a 'seamless customer journey' as if I were a corporate investor who needed to be sheltered from the fact that this was a glorified vending machine. I could just punch in my order, and within seconds, a door would swing open with my meal.

It was, I'll admit, impressively efficient. I could acquire a serviceable oat milk latte and a pastry of questionable freshness without the bother of making eye contact with a single human being. Remarkable, sure. Progress? I had my reservations.

I know you've had a moment like this. Maybe you were on a customer service call, navigating an increasingly Kafkaesque phone tree, only to realize with genuine surprise that you'd prefer to speak with an actual human being—even one reading from a script in a call center halfway around the world. Or perhaps you found yourself in a checkout line at the grocery store, all self-service kiosks available, yet you chose to wait for the one staffed register because you wanted to exchange pleasantries about the weather with someone who knows you buy an unreasonable amount of La Croix every week. These are the small rebellions of the modern age: choosing the inefficiency, the friction, the human being.

My robot lunch was, ostensibly, another friction point smoothed away from the surface of daily life. And yet, I remember wondering, would I someday miss the friction? Would I miss the slightly awkward small talk with the barista about the misspelling of my wife’s name, or even just simple, mundane recognition of a familiar face? I think this has become an increasingly common sentiment of late, perhaps dating back at least four or five decades (if not forever). The modern Luddite argues that we are engineering the humanity out of our routines with breathtaking speed, only left to wonder why our days feel so thinly textured, so lacking in a certain kind of ballast. The social fabric, we are told, is simply being upgraded to a newer, faster, more private version.

And perhaps it is. For those living in an urban, even suburban world, the dense, geographically-bound communities of the past often feel like relics. Our lives are more transient, more fluid. We forge intense bonds in online forums dedicated to obscure hobbies, yet we might go years without learning the name of the person who shares a wall with us. I'm guilty of that, many times over.

It's tempting to frame it as a great unraveling. But I'm not so sure. What if it's simply the unfamiliar, transient foreignness of a new but better normal? To put it in metaphor: what if thriving in a world that is progressing isn't about trying to re-weave a blanket that no longer fits, but about learning the quiet, dignified art of spinning new threads?

It’s also tempting to immediately scale your beliefs on the “what do we do about all this technology?” debate into a political program, whether that means legislating a return to the past or designing some new, algorithm-driven utopia. But what I want to explore is not an argument for a party or a policy. It is an invitation to a personal practice, an exploration of how we, as individuals, can live with more dignity within the world as it is.

With that in mind, it's worth turning to a story from one of the very eras we tend to mythologize most. It is a story of the greatest generation, not of grand strategy or battlefield heroics, but of dirt, seeds, and the humble string bean. It's the story of the Victory Garden, and I think it contains a profound lesson for today's hungry 22-year-old facing a wall of robotically-assembled lunches.

To understand the Victory Garden, you have to imagine the atmosphere of 1942. The nation was fully immersed in a global war, and its entire industrial and agricultural might was being pivoted with breathtaking speed toward a single objective. Everything was rationed. The rubber from your tires, the gasoline in your tank, the sugar for your coffee—all were subordinate to the needs of the military.

Food was a weapon of war. Feeding millions of soldiers and allies required a logistical effort of unprecedented scale. Commercial canneries were now packing rations for troops, and the nation's railways were choked with tanks and munitions. On the home front, the government feared a critical food shortage.

Faced with this challenge, the Roosevelt administration made a remarkable bet on the American people. They didn't just ask for sacrifice; they asked for effort. Through a massive public relations campaign, they issued a call to arms that was, in fact, a call to spades. They asked citizens to dig up their lawns, their flowerbeds, and even, improbably, their public parks, and to plant gardens.

The response was nothing short of astonishing. This was a voluntary mobilization that swept the nation. From the White House lawn, where Eleanor Roosevelt gamely wielded a trowel for the cameras, to the rooftops of New York City, Americans started digging. The famously manicured Boston Common was carved into allotments, a sight that must have horrified the Kennedys and generations of city fathers. By 1944, an estimated 20 million Victory Gardens were flourishing, producing over 40 percent of all the fresh fruits and vegetables consumed in the United States that year. It was, by any measure, an extraordinary mobilization—though one imagines the tonnage of inedible zucchini also reached unprecedented levels.

But the true legacy of the Victory Garden wasn't the tonnage of tomatoes. It was an invisible harvest of social connection. The war was a vast, impersonal force, but a garden is intensely personal. It gave people a tangible task in the face of a pervasive, abstract anxiety. And you rarely did that task alone. The conversations that bloomed over back fences were practical, purposeful exchanges about pests and surplus zucchini. Sociologists, who have a knack for giving fancy names to things we already know, call these "weak ties."

A weak tie isn't your best friend; it's the mail carrier you greet by name, the owner of the local hardware store, the fellow commuter you nod to every morning. These relationships seem incidental, but they are the threads that weave a neighborhood into a community. The Victory Garden was a massive engine for creating them, grounding them in the shared, often comical, struggle of trying to grow a decent carrot. (My sources tell me it's harder than it looks.) The dignity of the gardeners came not just from contributing to the war effort, but from becoming, in a small way, useful to the people immediately around them.

There is a story about Fred Rogers, the GOAT of intentionality and most other virtues, that illustrates this beautifully. Once, while traveling to Boston for a dinner with a television executive, Rogers and an intern were picked up by a limousine. When they arrived at the executive's home, the driver asked what time he should return. Instead of dismissing him, Rogers invited the driver to join them for dinner, and he gratefully accepted. (The executive's wife, however, was probably less thrilled, possibly cursing Rogers’ name at cocktail parties for years thereafter.)  After dinner, Rogers sat in the front seat with the driver, a man named Billy, and they talked. They kept talking. Billy eventually invited Rogers to his parents' house, where Rogers played piano and neighbors spontaneously gathered. Years later, when Rogers learned Billy was dying in the hospital, he called to say goodbye. This was not a photo opportunity or a campaign stop. It was simply a man choosing to see another person, to create connection where the script of social convention said none was required.

This is the lesson we have overlooked. Yes, of course we despise small talk—nothing numbs the soul quite like discussing traffic patterns with your dentist—but I think most of us subconsciously mourn a world that automatically generated these weak ties, the interactions that make us feel human. 

Today, their cultivation must be intentional. And this brings us to the necessary dose of skepticism. It is a romantic, and frankly silly, notion to think that if we all just learn our barista's name, the world's great problems will melt away. Grand societal change requires a different, tougher kind of work. Your friendly nod to the bus driver will not solve climate change.

But this practice of finding and leaning into our "weak ties" will transform something else. It will transform us.

The true and achievable promise of this endeavor is not a revolution in our society, but a revolution in our own, personal experience of daily life. Choosing to engage in this work gives a dignity, first and foremost, to ourselves.

Yeah, it feels weird, because it is weird. But it bestows a small sense of agency in a world of vast, impersonal forces. We are buffeted by economic trends and political crises we feel powerless to affect. There's a helplessness there that is a primary source of modern anxiety.

But you are not powerless to thank the cashier. You are not powerless to ask your doorman about his weekend and actually listen to the answer. These actions are affirmations of your own agency. They are declarations that you are not merely a passive consumer of services, but an active participant in the human ecosystem. Each nod, each small extension of recognition, is a seed planted. You are creating a small pocket of warmth and humanity, and the primary beneficiary of that warmth is you. It changes the texture of your day, replacing sterile transactions with moments of connection. It leads to a richness in our own lives that stems from finding this shared humanity, again and again, right in front of us.

The great story of the Victory Gardens is that they demonstrated a national character in the sum of millions of small, local actions. In some ways, our own character, our own resilience, will not be forged in grand gestures, but in the deliberate work of tending to the weak ties that bind us to the people we encounter every day.

The world changes, and progress advances. It doesn’t always mean we need to bring back the past. Instead, find your plot. It isn’t in your backyard; it’s in the daily path you walk through the world. The people you encounter on that path are the ecosystem you are called to steward.

So yes, order your lunch from the robot. Use the kiosk. Embrace the efficiency that technology offers. But then—and this is the work—turn around and acknowledge the person standing beside you in that sleek, frictionless space. Learn the name of the delivery driver. Thank the custodian who empties the trash from those automated cubbies.

Living in the future doesn't have to be lonely just because it's efficient.

This is not about rejecting progress or pining for a world that cannot return. It is about understanding that every technological advancement that removes the friction of human interaction also removes an opportunity—and that we must actively create new ones to replace what was lost. The automation will continue. The algorithms will keep optimizing. But your humanity, your capacity to see and be seen, to acknowledge and be acknowledged—that remains entirely within your control.

I think back to that day, standing before that wall of robotic lunch boxes in San Francisco, and I realize now what I was really mourning. It wasn't the loss of the barista. It was the fear that I might lose the habit of looking for the barista, the instinct to seek out the human being somewhere in the transaction.

The Victory Garden succeeded because it fed the troops, as well as a nation behind them. But, unexpectedly, it also fed the human need to be useful, to be connected, to tend something beyond ourselves. Your garden is not a plot of soil. It is the deliberately cultivated habit of noticing the people who share your world and choosing, again and again, to treat them as if they matter—because they do.

Do not do it to change the world. Do it to change your world. Learn their names. Acknowledge their presence. Plant your seeds in every sterile transaction, every automated interaction, every place where friction has been engineered away. Progress gave us the robot, but humanity is what we do with the time it saves us.

John

Thanks for reading The Mayfly Letter.

Your support allows me to continue doing something I truly love.

John Conrad