Everywhere, we carefully organise co-presence, at school, at work, at conferences, on the metro, and the bond, for its part, happens at the coffee break and in the corridors, when it happens at all. I call the “relational wasteland” these possible bonds, between people who are already gathered together, that nobody is responsible for cultivating. We have a highly elaborate culture of non-connection, and none of connection; what holds us back, in my view, is a fear of abundance, which psychologists have shown to be misleading.
A highly elaborate culture of non-connection
A person taking the metro in Paris crosses paths with thousands of other people in a single day, and speaks to none of them. The sociologist Erving Goffman described precisely what happens at that moment, in Behavior in Public Places (1963). He calls civil inattention the ritual by which two strangers who pass each other exchange a glance just long enough to signal that they have noticed the other’s presence, then look away to signal that they mean them no harm. Goffman compares this gesture to dimming one’s headlights. It is a form of politeness, learned from childhood, regulated down to the smallest gesture, and the slightest breach of it, a gaze that lingers, a word spoken without invitation, is immediately felt as a threat. So in matters of connection we have an extremely refined culture, but it serves to avoid creating any.
This culture of non-connection is not confined to public transport. In a classroom, thirty pupils spend six hours a day together, and the day is organised so that they do not talk to each other; bonds are formed in the playground, in the corridors, in the canteen. In a company, dozens or hundreds of people work under the same roof, and the bonds that last are formed at the coffee machine. At a conference, three hundred professionals from the same sector follow a timed programme, and everyone knows that the useful encounters, if there are any, will happen during the breaks. Everywhere, co-presence is carefully organised, by rules, timetables, assigned seats, agendas, and the bond is left to the gaps, that is to chance, to the boldness of a few, and to whatever time remains.
I propose to call the relational wasteland the whole set of possible bonds between people who already share a place and a time, and for which nobody is responsible. A wasteland is full of life, but of a life that nobody cultivates, and that is why it frightens us. The word came to me as a continuation of The Land We Cultivate, where I compared the ownership of computing power to the ownership of land; here, the land is made of bonds, and it belongs to no one. And I thus give a name to the gesture I described in Formalizing the informal, which consists in taking the gap as the object of the work, instead of leaving it to chance.
The fear of abundance
We say we have no time, that it takes an effort we cannot make, that we do not know how to approach people. I believe these are limits we set ourselves, and that behind these limits there is a fear, the fear of being overwhelmed by a boundless abundance. Georg Simmel gave the reason for it as early as 1903, in The Metropolis and Mental Life, with regard to the reserve of city dwellers. If every encounter in the big city had to provoke in us as many inner reactions as in the small town, where one knows almost everyone one meets, he writes, “one would be completely atomized internally”. Reserve is therefore a protection against atomisation, and Simmel adds that it comes with a slight aversion, ready to turn to hostility at the slightest contact that comes too close. He also notes that nowhere does one feel so lonely and lost as in the crowd of the big city. The same mechanism is at work in a conference hall or in a company, where, by protecting ourselves from excess, we also manufacture our own solitude among so many people.
Yet this fear misleads us, and psychologists have measured it. Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder published in 2014, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, a series of nine experiments carried out on Chicago’s commuter trains and buses, under the title “Mistakenly Seeking Solitude”. They asked randomly selected travellers either to strike up a conversation with the stranger sitting next to them, or to speak to no one, or to make the journey as usual. The people who had talked said they had had a markedly more pleasant journey than those in the other two groups, without feeling any less productive. Other travellers were asked to predict what they would feel in each of the three situations, and a large majority predicted the opposite, silence seeming preferable to them. The same people underestimated how much others would want to talk to them, and took the silence of others as proof of their lack of interest. Epley and Schroeder also observe that the pleasure did not depend on the person met, since the participants had not chosen their neighbour and the conversation did them good whoever it was with.
What I take from this research is that we dread the person sitting opposite us less than the conversation we imagine having with them, and that we are always mistaken in the same direction. I described in A priori and the presence of others how our preconceptions about someone we do not know gradually come undone when we meet them. I sometimes tell myself that in the street there is little chance of meeting people who interest me. In fact, I have no idea. On social networks, we are shown people sorted according to our tastes; on the metro, nobody sorts, and nothing says that this absence of sorting is a loss.
Jobs found thanks to people we see once a year
The sociologist Mark Granovetter surveyed 282 managers and technicians in the Boston suburbs who had just changed jobs, and asked those who had found their position through a contact how often they saw that contact. The results, published in “The Strength of Weak Ties” (1973), run counter to common intuition: 16.7% saw their contact often, 55.6% occasionally, and 27.8% rarely, that is to say once a year or less. It is through weak ties, former colleagues, friends of friends, people met once, that information most often passes. Granovetter explains this by the shape of networks, in which the people we have strong ties with know one another and know the same things we do, whereas our weak ties are bridges to other groups, where information circulates that our own circle does not have.
I find in this research something to ease a discomfort I feel. At conferences, some approaches are self-interested, and people come to me because I might have a job, a commission, a contact to give. Granovetter shows that this circulation is real, and that it passes precisely through the ties we maintain little. But jobs are only the visible part of what passes through these ties. Through them also circulate ways of seeing, and projects that did not exist before the conversation. The people we talk with shape our lives, far beyond what they can procure for us.
Here I join what the biologist Olivier Hamant says of living things, which I developed in Robustness, antifragility, resilience: what allows us to hold on despite fluctuations is redundancy and margins. A person alone is fragile, and becomes robust as they form bonds of trust, friendships, cooperations, because each of these bonds is one more resource in hard times. Serge Tisseron calls co-resilience the fact that the capacity of a person, a group or a territory to overcome a disaster depends on that of all the others, and I described in Building Co-Resilience how we can train for it. This robustness is drawn from the relational wasteland, and the wasteland is a non-rival good, in the sense I proposed in Non-rival emancipation, since the bond I form is taken from no one, and makes others possible.
Two hundred and twenty people talking to each other
Whenever I facilitate a group, whatever it is, I make sure that the people talk to one another, meet, and go through personal and collective experiences. I do this because I know how much it builds, and because a meeting of more than ten people, if one is not careful, is co-presence without connection: a stage, rows of chairs, a programme, and the wasteland left to the coffee break. On 2 September 2026, in Laval, I facilitated the back-to-work gathering of the 220 staff members of the city’s culture department, the only moment of the year when these people, who work on different sites and in different jobs, all cross paths. Each of them spoke at least twice, in pairs that kept changing, and 80 written contributions were shared online; I recounted this morning in A new season with 220 voices. The whole set-up rests on one decision: to consider that the bond between these 220 people is the object of the morning, and not its by-product.
It is this decision that is missing almost everywhere, because nobody is responsible for taking it. The teacher is responsible for the curriculum, the chair of the meeting for the agenda, the conference organiser for the speakers and the timing. The bond appears in nobody’s job description, and so it happens in the gaps, between the people who dare, who already know each other, or who have something to gain.
Nine trillion euros flowing through the blood
There are nevertheless people who cultivate their wasteland, and they do so methodically. Pierre Bourdieu, in a short text from 1980, “Le capital social. Notes provisoires” (Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 31), describes a person’s network of relationships as the product of a work of establishment and upkeep, which produces and reproduces lasting and useful connections. This work of sociability requires time, skill and money, and Bourdieu observes that the dominant classes take care of it by manufacturing the occasions, places and practices where one meets only one’s peers; one thinks of the debutante rallies, the clubs, the right schools. Cultivating one’s ties is therefore a class privilege: those who already have capital deliberately organise their encounters, while the others rely on chance meetings in corridors.
The same asymmetry is found in inheritance. Senator Alexandre Ouizille, who coordinated a report for the Fondation Jean-Jaurès published at the end of 2024, estimates there with Théo Iberrakene and Boris Julien-Vauzelle at more than 9,000 billion euros the wealth that the baby-boom generation will pass on to its heirs between 2025 and 2040, the largest transfer of wealth in France’s contemporary history. The economists of the Conseil d’analyse économique have shown that the share of inheritance in household wealth has risen from 35% in the 1970s to 60% today, and the Banque de France finds that 10% of households hold more than half of all wealth. This wealth flows through the blood, since the law reserves a share of the estate for the children, and it will therefore go, for the most part, to the children of those who own the most. Many will receive far more than they need, others will receive nothing, and nothing connects them.
Yet anthropologists have long described societies in which sharing passes through bonds other than blood. Carol Stack lived from 1968 to 1971 in a poor Black neighbourhood of a Midwestern city, which she calls The Flats, and she recounts in All Our Kin (1974) how the families there survived thanks to permanent networks of exchange, in which money, food, clothing and childcare circulated between relatives, neighbours and friends, and in which people with no blood tie at all became full members of the family, through the services given and received. Kath Weston named “chosen families” (Families We Choose, 1991) the support networks that gay men and lesbians in San Francisco had built alongside their family of origin, or in its place. Claude Lévi-Strauss already distinguished, in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), between descent, which comes from birth, and alliance, which is contracted. Kinship, everywhere, is also made of something other than blood.
I have no ready-made solution for making 9,000 billion euros flow differently. But I notice that sharing follows the bond. We share with the people we count as our own, and blood kinship is, for most of us, the only one we have cultivated. If bonds of trust were formed in the wasteland, between people who will inherit and people who will not, between people who have more than they need and people who do not have enough to live on, part of the sharing would come from the people themselves, as it did from the inhabitants of The Flats. What is to be cultivated, in my view, are alliances, that is to say kinships that are chosen and that commit us. They will not replace taxation, but they begin where we already are, in the classroom, in the company, in the conference hall and on the metro, with people we cross paths with every day without speaking to them.
