When is it appropriate to approach someone you don't know?

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Me too, I wish people kept to themselves less, because while I don't do it much anymore, I know for a fact I didn't.

I may be caught by suprise when people do it, but that's only because I'm not used to it because people do it so little.

I rode to and from school every day on this bus, so it was easy to scope out the 'locals' or frequent patrons who would use the bus almost every day.

I did naturally feel more comfortable talking to young adult men rather than women and didn't begin conversations with any women, but either way it was very fun to go out of my comfort zone and just politely ask a question to someone who I thought would know the answer (e.g. asking an Indian man about the culture/language, or a university student about uni life).

I have found foreigners do tend to be more welcoming than locals, as people from other nations understand our culture less, but even when speaking to immigrants who actually told me they've been here for a few years or other Australian males, the conversations for the most part actually weren't that awkward and I came across as quite normal. At the end if they were satisfying conversations I'd feel happier and uplifted.

Kind of ironic aside from a few mates I had who rode the bus rarely, I almost never actually spoke to other students unless approached first.

I don't start a conversation with anybody in real life unless I absolutely have to, once every possible alternative fails, and it's going to stay this way. You know when the conversation starts, not when it'll end or how it will, which, to me, basically means what pieces of my personal freedom and privacy I'll be compelled to relinquish and in what particular ways I'll be encouraging someone who used to leave me alone to start bullying me.

I'm sorry. I hate bullying too. I even dealt with it today, in the form of a bogus job interview that supposedly only I knew about. And the same thing happened a couple of weeks ago. I had a great first interview, and came in for the second one, and the guy told me he had no idea what I was talking about, and I would need to "get with" the first guy again. This is a day at the office for me. So, avoiding people is not the answer because I can't just stay unemployed.