Listening before deciding

Driving a taxi means meeting thousands of people a year. They get in with an address and ten, twenty, sometimes forty minutes ahead of them. Almost always they carry a story that is invisible at first glance.

The curt man in the suit riding to the airport is on his way to a funeral. The woman who talks without pause hasn't spoken to anyone since the day before yesterday. The teenager who seems indifferent is working a third shift that week. I have been wrong about people so many times that I've stopped trusting my first read.

That is what listening has done to me: it has made me humbler. Not quieter, but more careful about deciding before I know.

One conversation stays with me. A middle-aged man sat in front and said, fairly early on, that people like me did not belong in Sweden. He didn't shout it. He meant it.

My first impulse was the ordinary one. But we had forty minutes left, and anger gets you nowhere in forty minutes. So I asked why he thought that. He told me. About a workplace that closed, a town that changed faster than he could follow, a feeling that nobody asked him anything anymore.

When we arrived I offered him a coffee. We sat another half hour. He did not change his political opinion — not then, and probably not later either. But before he left he said something I have carried since: that his opinion of me had changed.

That mattered. Not because I won anything, but because he could no longer think about "people like me" without also thinking about a person he had sat and talked with. Abstractions are easy to dislike. Names are harder.

Society grows more polarised when we stop talking to those we disagree with. It isn't the opinions that push us furthest apart, it's the silence between them. If you never meet anyone who thinks differently, they become an idea — and ideas can be simplified as much as you like.

Meaningful conversations don't always change minds immediately. Mostly they don't. But they plant a seed of reflection that can grow long after you've parted, in a kitchen, a week later, when nobody is watching.

I think this holds as much in everyday life as in politics. Curiosity is stronger than assumption for a simple reason: the assumption is finished, curiosity gathers new information. One closes, the other opens.

And disagreeing is not the same as disrespecting. We can hold entirely different views on taxes, migration and schools and still treat each other as people. A democracy can handle disagreement. It handles poorly the moment people stop talking.

I don't believe a better society begins when everyone thinks alike. I believe it begins when more people are willing to listen before they decide.