The Stories I Never Thought About

I love diversity. Not the acceptance kind. The kind I go looking for.

This has been on my mind for a while. It took a summer holiday abroad to turn it into something I needed to write down.

The noise around the world

Right now the world is loud. The media, the public, everyone with an opinion is raising their voice about diversity, inclusion, and equity. Some are defending it. Some are tired of it. Some are angry about it. There are many reasons for this, and I am not the best person to explain them.

What I can say is that this, like everything else, is a balance between two sides. Each side arrives with its own baseline, its own past, its own personality. Nobody comes to the table empty. The argument is rarely about diversity itself. It is about what each side carries into the room.

I wrote about the quiet layer a few months ago. About how empathy toward people you do not know is supposed to be the default, and how that default is fading in places that swore it never would. This post is not about that fight. It is about the part underneath it, the part I feel in my own life.

What the holidays did

Holidays do something to me that the rest of the year cannot. They take me out of my systems. No commute. No calendar. No home lab humming in the next room. Just time, and a place where I do not know how things work.

That last part is what I love.

I do not know how the bread is bought. I do not know when people eat, or why dinner takes three hours, or what the small gesture at the door means. I have to watch. I have to ask. I have to be a little bit lost, in a way I never allow myself to be at home.

And in that state, the stories arrive. The person who runs the small place we ate at twice, and how they ended up there. The family at the next table with a ritual I did not recognize. The way strangers treat my kids, differently from how strangers treat them at home. Not better. Not worse. Different. Each one is a story I never thought about, from a life I would never have imagined on my own.

This is the thing I keep coming back to. I do not enjoy diversity because I have been told it is the right thing to enjoy. I enjoy it the way I enjoy a new problem in the lab. It pulls me in. It asks me to understand something I did not understand yesterday.

The hidden little details

I love the hidden little details. The things that make a culture unique and that nobody prints on the postcard. How people greet. How they argue. What they consider rude. What they consider generous. What they fear, what they hope for, what they tell their children at night.

In the past decades, access to all of this has exploded. I can read about any culture, any history, any tradition, from my sofa. For a long time now, not knowing how other people live has been a choice, not a limitation.

But reading about it is not the same as sitting in it.

A screen gives me the facts. A table gives me the person. The facts tell me what people do. The person tells me why, and the why is always more interesting than I expected. The why is where the story lives.

What the studies found

I went looking for whether any of this holds up beyond my own feeling. Some of it does. Some of it humbled me.

A study by William Maddux and Adam Galinsky, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that people who had lived abroad were measurably more creative. They solved insight problems others could not. They found hidden solutions in negotiations. But the effect came from living abroad, not traveling abroad. What mattered was adaptation, the degree to which people had actually adjusted themselves to the local culture. Two weeks of holiday does not make me more creative. The study is clear about that, and I believe it.

A later study by Jiyin Cao, Galinsky, and Maddux looked at something different: trust. They found that the breadth of foreign experience, the number of different countries a person had visited, increased generalized trust toward strangers. Not how long they had been away. How many different places. And the mechanism was the part that stayed with me. People who focused on the differences between the countries they visited became more trusting. People who focused on the similarities did not.

The differences. Not the shared humanity. The differences.

That matches what I feel. When I look for what makes a place the same as home, I learn nothing. When I look for what makes it different, I come back trusting people more, not less.

Katherine Phillips spent decades studying this in teams and summarized it in Scientific American. Diverse groups solve problems better, but not because they are more comfortable. They are less comfortable. People in diverse groups prepare harder, expect disagreement, and consider more alternatives, before a single word is exchanged. In one experiment, racially mixed juries considered more facts and made fewer errors than homogeneous ones, and the improvement came from the majority members changing their own behavior in the presence of difference. She compared the discomfort of diversity to the discomfort of exercise. The pain is the mechanism.

Back at the table

So this is where the holidays left me.

I do not want to tolerate the people who are different from me. Tolerance is a low bar. It is what you offer to something you would rather not have around. I want the difference. I want the story I have not heard, the tradition I did not know existed, the small detail that reframes something I thought I understood.

At work, the best conversations I have are the ones where someone from a different country explains why something obvious to me is not obvious to them. At home, I want my kids to grow up finding that interesting instead of threatening. In the world, I am watching that instinct get harder to hold, and I want to hold it anyway.

The holidays did not teach me this. They reminded me. They put me back in a room where I did not know how things worked, and I remembered that I love that room.

The stories I never thought about are the ones I want to keep finding.