The Terrifying, Necessary Art of Showing Up

There is a moment, just before you walk into a room full of strangers, when every reasonable instinct in your body tells you to leave. To check your phone. To remember a thing you forgot to do at home. To develop, suddenly and convincingly, a mild headache.

We have gotten very good at honoring that instinct.

The smartphone didn't create social anxiety — but it gave it an infrastructure. A whole parallel world where you could be present without being present, connected without being vulnerable, seen without being seen. You could curate the version of yourself that got to meet people. Edit before sending. Disappear without explanation. And for a while, this felt like freedom.

It was not freedom. It was practice, at scale, for never having to show up.

Here's what's interesting about the people who grew up before all this — not the boomers exactly, but the tail end of Gen X, the ones who were teenagers in the mid-eighties and early nineties, when the only way to make a friend was to physically be somewhere and say something to someone's face. Those people learned something that's harder to learn now: that vulnerability is not a weakness to be managed, it's a muscle to be used. You built it by using it badly, repeatedly, in public, with consequences. You got rejected and you survived. You said something awkward and you learned to recover. You cultivated charisma the old-fashioned way — through embarrassing repetition — or you spent your adolescence on the periphery and eventually found your people anyway, because there was no alternative to eventually finding your people.

The alternative didn't exist yet.

Now it does. And we've mistaken it for a solution.

I am not going to tell you that talking to strangers is easy. It isn't. I am not going to tell you that the fear is irrational. For many people, in many contexts, it's entirely rational — we live in a time of atomization, of eroded third places, of cities full of people who pass each other like ghosts and go home to scroll through the lives of people they've never met. The fear has evidence behind it.

But here's what I've noticed: the fear is loudest just before. In the moment itself — in the actual conversation, the actual eye contact, the actual exchange of something real — it tends to go quiet. Not always. Not for everyone. But often enough that it's worth noting.

There is a particular kind of beauty that only exists in unmediated human contact. In the slight awkwardness of two people figuring out what they have in common. In the moment when a conversation turns and you realize you're talking to someone who sees something you see. In the vulnerability of having shown up at all — having said, in effect, I am a person who would like to know another person.

That is a brave and underrated thing to admit.

Chickenlist exists because I believe that admission deserves a place to land.

Not an app that gamifies it. Not an algorithm that pre-approves your compatibility. Just a listing, a story, a person — and the slightly terrifying act of reaching out to them. The chicken list, in sales, is the list of contacts you're too afraid to call. I thought that was the right name for a place where people stop being afraid.

Or at least decide to call anyway.