I recently finished Nikki Erlick’s novel The Measure, a story about what happens when every person on the planet receives a box revealing the exact length of their life. It’s a book about mortality, choice, and how we treat one another when the stakes feel impossibly high. But the line that stopped me wasn’t about life or death. It was about a playground.
In the final chapter, the narrator watches children make friends in a matter of minutes, shrieking with delight on a yellow slide, and marvels at “how children could forge such instant, honest connections, only to thrive on division as adults.”
That observation hit close to home for me, not just as someone who thinks about connection for a living, but as a human being who has watched it happen in real time. Children don’t qualify each other before they play. They don’t scan for titles or industries or mutual contacts. They just show up, open and curious, and say the kid equivalent of “Want to play?” No agenda. No calculation. Just presence and willingness.
I’m not sure exactly when we lose that. But somewhere along the way, most of us start sorting. We size people up based on what they can offer, what they’ve accomplished, or how similar they are to us. In the novel, society fractures over something as simple as the length of a string. People with short strings are treated as dangerous, broken, less than. It takes years before “Live Like Your String Is Short” becomes a badge of courage rather than a mark of shame.
We don’t need a fictional box to recognize that pattern. We draw lines between ourselves and the people we perceive as different all the time, sometimes without even realizing it. And yet most of us also remember what it felt like to be a kid on that slide, to connect without conditions.
The thing I keep coming back to is that the instinct never actually leaves us. It just gets buried under years of habits and assumptions. I’ve seen it resurface in the most unlikely rooms, between the most unlikely people, when someone simply leads with curiosity instead of credentials. It doesn’t take a grand gesture. Sometimes it just takes a genuine question and the willingness to listen to the answer.
Happy Networking!