Daylan’s second blind-spot for Destin, framed in the loneliness-epidemic context:
“When me and you are out eating lunch, people are willing to cross this enormous social barrier to just come and say hello. That’s huge. And it never like registers to you how big of a sacrifice someone’s making walking across a restaurant to talk to a stranger because it happens to you all the time. … It’s never been harder in human history than it is right now for a person to walk up to a stranger.”
The structure of the blind spot:
- The influential person experiences approaches frequently, so each one feels routine.
- The approacher experiences the approach once, after rehearsing it, after deciding it’s worth the social risk.
- The cost is real on the approacher’s side and asymptotically zero on the receiver’s side.
- The receiver, judging by their own felt experience, concludes the approach was small.
This is a structural cousin of 2026-04-10-asymmetry-of-exposure-in-worship: the side that does the thing constantly stops feeling what the side that does it once feels. In worship, the leader stops feeling the song. Here, the public figure stops feeling the social chasm.
The implication is not modesty performance. It is recalibration. If you carry influence — pastoral, platform, positional — your own sense of “that interaction was nothing special” is unreliable evidence about what it cost the other person. The data on loneliness (2026-04-11-loneliness-is-hypervigilance-state) sharpens this: stranger-approach cost in 2026 is at a historic high, and the people most likely to receive approaches are least likely to feel that cost.
Pastoral implication: the parishioner who comes up after service to ask one small question may have rehearsed it for weeks. Treat the approach itself as a gift, regardless of the content.
Sermon potential: what stewardship of influence actually looks like at small scale — not platform management, but recognizing the social courage you’re being handed every time someone crosses the room.