There’s a young guy in my house running a cable line, and I’m doing the thing I’m terrible at, which is trying to talk to him while he works. Small talk and I have never gotten along; I feel about it the way other people feel about public speaking. But he’s easy — twenty-four, maybe, quick, three steps ahead of every question — and he’s in school for engineering and doing this on the side, and somewhere around the router the small talk slips its leash and turns into a real conversation.

He tells me about the guys he works with. Some group had been out protesting that week — I’ll leave out which thing, it isn’t the point — and his coworkers had it settled by lunch. Idiots, all of them, obviously, pass the chips. He didn’t think they were idiots. He’d read about it. He had questions, and something past questions, a real wait, hold on sitting in his chest.

He didn’t say any of it.

I ask him why. He shrugs like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, because to him it is. Those are the guys I eat lunch with.

He isn’t upset about it. He isn’t looking for me to fix it or argue him out of it. He’s telling me the way you’d mention it looks like rain. The guys he eats lunch with think one thing, he thinks another, and the space between those two facts is an awkward Monday he’d rather not have, so he keeps his to himself and eats his sandwich.

I don’t blame his coworkers, and neither does he. They weren’t running him out of the room. They were doing the warmest, most human thing there is, which is sitting around agreeing with each other. It feels good. I know it feels good because I’ve done it my whole life.

I would have done what he did. I do do it. I have my own tables, my own rooms where I know the temperature before I open my mouth, and for years I’ve called my quiet in those rooms patience, or open-mindedness, or still making up my mind. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes I just don’t want the awkwardness, and patience is the kinder word for it.

What gets me is that he’s exactly the person you’d want to hear from. Curious, informed, not spoiling for a fight, honestly unsure. And the room taught him to keep it to himself. Nobody threatened him — it was quieter than that. It just turned out to be easier to swallow the thing than to say it.

He’s one kid at one lunch table. But I keep multiplying him — every quick, curious twenty-four-year-old in every break room, all of them going quiet for the same small reason — and the number gets big enough to scare me.

Here’s what he’s never seen, and what I didn’t see for a long time either.

Scott and I started Human Flourishing together less than a year ago. We came to it from almost nowhere in common — different life experiences, different instincts about how a thing should be built, different expectations, different beliefs, and a set of talents and blind spots that barely overlap. On paper we are the two guys at the lunch table who would have learned to stop talking.

We didn’t, and the reason isn’t that we’ve known each other long enough for it to get easy. It’s that the respect wasn’t up for negotiation from the start. So when we land in different places, and we land in different places constantly, neither of us has to spend the disagreement wondering whether the disagreement costs us anything. We just get to have it. Which means we’re running the experiment we keep writing about, on ourselves, most weeks.

That’s most of what makes this interesting. The idea that comes out the other side is better than what either of us walked in with — not because we split the difference, but because it got tested by someone who wasn’t performing agreement.

That’s what the guys at his lunch table are missing, and they don’t know it. They think the warmth is the prize. The warmth is nice. But everything they say to each other is untested, and they’ll never find out, because the one person in the room who might have told them is eating his sandwich.

I don’t know what he’ll do next time. I’m not sure what I’ll do, at my own tables. Probably nothing heroic — maybe just the small version, huh, I don’t actually see it that way — and then finding out that lunch goes on anyway.

That’s the only experiment I’ve got. One conversation, on purpose, somewhere a little uncomfortable. I keep meaning to try it.

He finished the line, by the way. Works great.