If someone I don’t know rings my doorbell trying to make a sale on something, I assume it’s a scam. It’s not because everyone who rings a doorbell is a scammer, but because there are enough of them that I’d rather shut off that entire avenue of approach.

That doesn’t mean I don’t buy anything. I just don’t buy things in that way.

It also doesn’t mean that I don’t open the door for strangers. Plenty of people are delivering packages or things someone in my house has specifically ordered. Or people need to do work on or around my property (utility pole, buried lines/pipes, neighbors’ trees/fences, etc.).

Understanding the generational shifts in social expectations is important. Bemoaning the loss of a particular type of interaction just because it’s the type you happened to experience before doesn’t actually say anything about the state of society.

Cold approaches by men to women sitting by themselves have basically gone away. There are a lot of reasons for this, including that we as a society have stopped being bored, to where the prospect of small talk with a stranger has changed from “better than nothing” to “worse than nothing” in just 20 years. But it has happened, and people need to adjust.