There is a peculiar intimacy in not knowing someone. When connection is stripped of the biographical details that usually define a person, such as their name, their history, and their face, what truly remains is something both purer and more precarious. Both John Green’s essay and the game we played this week, Journey, explore this paradox, suggesting that identity is not only unnecessary for connection, but may sometimes obstruct it. Yet this same anonymity raises an uncomfortable question: when we connect with someone we cannot truly know, are we reaching toward them, or only toward ourselves?
In Journey, the case for identity-less connection is made almost entirely through design. I was placed in a vast, wordless desert alongside a stranger whose appearance mirrors my own. Both of us wore identical robes, erasing any marker of difference between me and my companion before I could ever take a single step together. We could not speak to each other. We could not exchange names. We could not even choose to stay together, as my nameless companion might (and did) vanish between sessions, replaced by someone else entirely, and I would never know the difference. In fact, there was one instance where I believe a portal was activated because two players, me and another anonymous player, had to be in the same place at the same time to open the portal. By conventional logic, this should produce indifference. Instead, it reliably produces the opposite. I felt invested in the momentary companionship that I was able to create with this player, as we worked toward a common goal. Thus, I believe that what the game seems to argue is that what creates connection is not knowledge of a person, but shared experience and presence. Identity, in this reading, is noise. When we strip it away, the signal of two beings moving through the same world at the same time is all the stronger.
Green’s essay arrives at a similar place through a very different route. His connection to the burned child is built on almost nothing: one night, a trauma bay, a windowless family room, and a name. He does not know the boy’s personality or the boy’s life story. He knows only that he suffered, and that Green was present for it. Yet this sliver of shared reality lodges itself so deeply in Green, so much so that he prays for this child every single night for over a decade. He carries him the way one might carry someone they love. The connection is real in every meaningful sense: it shapes his decisions, haunts his sleep, redirects the entire course of his life away from the ministry. None of that required him to know who the boy really was.
This game led to me thinking of another moment in my life where the shared presence of someone being there for me and with me transcended the need for me to know who they are. During the winter quarter of my sophomore year, I was in CS 107, truly in the trenches with a notoriously difficult assignment called Secure Vault (but lovingly called ‘Binary Bomb’ by students). I was extremely stuck on the last part of the assignment, and the due date was the next day. As a last resort, I made a post on Fizz, of all places, saying: “Daha 107 help?” Now, I fully did not expect anything out of this post. So now, imagine my absolute disbelief when a very kind person in the form of an anonymous Fizz user actually replied to my post and then quite some time answering my questions and DMing to help me understand how to solve the last level of Binary Bomb. I kept asking this person questions, thinking “Oh man, this is when they ghost me.” But the conversation continued for over two hours!
Playing this game really tied back to this particular moment in my life because kindness and companionship can appear in one’s life as an unnamed moment of kindness. But that moment ends up becoming so incredibly valuable. The person who helped me on Fizz was, and still is, anonymous. So I do not know who helped me to this day. But I never forgot them because this moment and the game reminded me that anonymity does not diminish an act of care; if anything, it purifies it, because when I cannot know who is helping me, I cannot doubt that they are doing it simply because they wanted to.
I think this is what Green finds, too, in the end. The boy on Facebook does not know he was prayed for. The anonymous Fizz user does not know they are being written about right now. The companion in Journey does not know they were being waited for during different twists and turns throughout the game. In each case, the connection was entirely real to one person and entirely invisible to the other. What all three of these moments share is that the connection was sustained not by mutual recognition, but by the decision of one person to remain present for another. Perhaps that is the most honest definition of connection: not something two people build together, but something one person quietly chooses to offer, with no guarantee it will ever be received or returned.
