Stephen Barkley
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I care about strangers when they’re abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they’re literally in front of me. They seem like unnamed characters in a poorly written novel about myself, which was poorly written by me.
—Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat (New York, NY: Scribner, 2013), 2.
An interesting quote. I wonder if this phenomenon might be some sort of natural defense mechanism with survival benefits. But that doesn’t explain why we care about strangers in the abstract! Something to ponder.