5 days ago
6
October 2, 2025 — 5:00am
I got along famously with my shipmates. Then we started talking politics.
Sailing a river cruise on my own, I buddy up with another solo traveller. There’s a married couple with whom she and I get along famously, so the four of us begin to sit together for meals.
We discover we all have the same raucous sense of humour, a love of life, food, and travel. We’re all interested in what makes people and places tick.
Soon, however, the conversation turns to politics, and I quickly discover that’s where our similarities end. All three of my dinner dates are diametrically opposed to me in matters of the ballot box. And feeding our preferences are wildly disparate philosophies.
Maybe it is the force of numbers, but I find myself staying schtum while the other three at the table express their political views unfettered.
It’s not like some situations I’ve found myself in, where a person is on a soap box, dominating the conversation, barking out their opinion as if it’s more important than everybody else’s.
This is more an assumption that we are all on the same page. And for various reasons – chief of which is keeping the peace – I let that happen. I don’t acquiesce. I don’t lie. I just don’t say anything. But I do go to bed feeling a bit uncomfortable. And disappointed in myself.
Nick Enfield, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, says those feelings are normal.
“You’ve only got a certain number of minutes in the day in which you can allocate your attention,” he says. “And you want to enjoy your holiday, but your attention is being sucked away, and you’re sitting there, sort of trapped.”
Enfield says it’s a problem that’s existed “ever since language was invented”. But he acknowledges it’s a critical problem in our increasingly polarised world.
How, then, do we survive such situations with our dignity, sense of self, and sanity intact? Especially those of us on group tours and cruises where we’re more likely to be spending time with people whose views are not the same as ours and our friendship groups?
One way is to think of such encounters as learning opportunities. “It’s an opportunity to study people that you don’t usually get to talk to,” says Enfield.
“You might have a gut reaction that says, ‘I hate this type of person’, or ‘I don’t like what they’re saying’. But the thing about free speech, and people saying what’s on their mind and possibly offending others, is that it’s actually useful to hear things that people really think.
“You’re getting intelligence on the state of the world when you’re listening to people. One might also say, just walk away. But these are real people who think, vote and teach your children. You should want to know who’s out there.”
Another strategy he suggests is to try and steer the conversation.
“Even people who are saying things you don’t like are multifaceted. They’ve got all sorts of depths to them. They’ve lived a life. They’ve seen things you haven’t seen. So, if you can get away from stuff that’s annoying, you should, without too much work, be able to find a topic that’s interesting where they’re talking about something that they know from their experience, not opinion.”
That could be sailing, or reading, or CPR training, or butterflies or … the realm of human experience is the limit.
I must confess, I am usually one of those tempted to bring up the latest headlines about international affairs. I do try to pick my audience, but I’ve been the culprit.
Enfield suggests most of us probably have been at one point or another. But these days, with society becoming more fragmented, he says approaching every group dinner with strangers with “generous curiosity” is the way forward. He also suggests, “being mindful and remembering that there are a lot of topics that are not the current politics of the day”.
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