New York has always been a paradox for me. I’ve always claimed belonging without ever really wanting to belong. I grew up in the suburbs but always introduce myself as a New Yorker. I've always taken pleasure in my visits to the city while keeping fairly certain that I’d never call it home. When I’m there I emulate the habits of New Yorkers even though I don’t enjoy any of them: keeping pace with rushing bodies on broad avenues, archetypically avoiding gazes on the subway, always looking like I’m moving with backbreaking purpose even when I’m completely lost. These are "New York things" to me, and my aptitude at them has always been a source of strange pride.
When I left for college almost five years ago I wasn't sure I'd ever be back in New York for good. Too big, too much noise, not neighborly enough, easy to lose yourself, hard to get away. Here was a place whose vastness and volume was matched only by its people's desire to be isolated; islands; invulnerable. Here in this metropolis of 8 million I thought I’d found Earth's epicenter of being alone. I couldn't help but feel both charmed and totally repulsed by the concrete and steel exterior of New York and its people. Here was a place that I loved, but wasn't sure I could ever be a part of.
Most of the important people from the first 22 years of my life have ended up in New York: childhood friends, college friends, family. I never considered moving back after college, in part because I thought I’d be too comfortable. Still, I seem to go back every chance I get.
On my most recent trip earlier this month I found myself on the subway shuttle between Grand Central and Times Square. This particular subway line is a graphic designer's erotic fantasy and a cultural critic's recurring nightmare. Every car is adorned with a single advertisement that takes the shape of the subway car itself: images fold over every seat edge, enclose every windowsill and span every inch of ceiling.
I saw this phenomenon for the first time a few of summers ago when I rode the shuttle every day on my way to some already-forgotten internship. An ad for Mad Men – which I believe is a show on television – rendered the subway’s interior into the interior of Grand Central Station.
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I remember feeling totally floored by the amount of design talent it must have taken to create such a thorough piece of art. I remember also feeling totally unsettled that the ad industry had found its next ingenious method to break through the immunity to advertising that New Yorkers develop living in a city where ads outnumber pigeons. That statistic is made up, and also maybe true.
This time the shuttle was filled with something even more curious: a full-car advertisement for Doritos and Mountain Dew. Together. Joined in matrimony from the depths of some perverse diabetic nightmare. My mind flashed to a conference room full of buddy-buddy ad execs in seersuckers and fedoras somewhere high above Madison Avenue scheming ways to sell their products:
Dorito Joe: “Jeez guys, it’s been a tough month for Doritos. People are just too thirsty to eat our product right now.”
Dan Dewey: “Yeah! Summertime is the pits for Mountain Dew sales. People need something that’s refreshing and substantial, and our product just isn’t dew-ing it. No pun intended!”
Dorito Joe: “Gah... I just wish... I wish there was some way we could… Wait a minute!”
This is how I imagine most ad campaigns are born.
As a matter of survival I cling to the belief that humans will always like looking at other humans more than we like looking at billboards and posters. It’s unfortunate that the largest and most well financed industrial project in all of human existence is dedicated to making the opposite come true, and I try to fight that project in small ways whenever possible.
People Watching is one great way to fight the Great Advertising Project. It’s also my favorite idle activity in New York, especially while riding subways. You see every kind of person on the subway in New York. The only people you won’t see are the ultra-rich, claustrophobes, and people for whom the subway is difficult to access. Everyone else is fair game.
There’s just so much to wonder about on the subway. Where are those tourists in matching neon shirts from? What book is everyone reading and would they recommend it? Whom does that child belong to? People Watching is also a good way to forget about yourself for a little while, which is among the healthiest things that I don’t do enough.
Sitting there in the shuttle trying hard to forget about myself for a few minutes and trying even harder to ignore the Dew-ritos ad, I had an epiphany: I only look at certain people.
I only look at certain people.
I twirled the thought around in my head, like trying a new flavor of double-churned ice cream. I was surprised at how such a simple truth could escape my notice for years. It was like discovering a limb whose weight you’ve always carried but never realized was there. I felt liberated, like I’d had some glorious insight into how my mind worked.
I started to piece together who I looked at the most: cute children (which to me is pretty much all children), people with unusual physical features or attire, and people whom I find attractive.
Then I started feeling really ashamed. I wasn’t just looking at certain people and not at others. I was assigning value to them, all of them, without even realizing. Some people are worth me looking at and wondering about, and others aren’t.
A habit like this can be useful, and it can also become dangerous. The world throws a million pieces of information at us a day, and our minds need to filter through it somehow to avoid getting totally overwhelmed. The problem comes when we get stuck on certain filters. We enter into cycles in which everything we see affirms what we already believe. In these times we learn very little, and become closed off to all the details that make the world complicated and interesting.
I think back to a year ago when I began serving my Americorps term at a K-8 public charter school. I had big issues with the public school system: overemphasis on testing, learning confined to classrooms, the school system’s role in maintaining historical inequities. I felt uneasy about serving in a school, and felt skepticism towards people who chose to make careers in public education. You’d have to be pretty uncritical and somewhat oblivious to support such a broken system, I thought.
It took me months to realize that I shared a workplace with some of the most thoughtful, passionate, and giving people I’d ever met. Many of them agree with me that parts of the school system are broken, but they’re resolved to create a school that isn’t. With their guidance I've seen that an open-enrollment public charter school can prioritize critical thinking, social and emotional development, and outside-the-classroom learning. I didn’t have an eye for these details at first, and instead I fixed on a few narrow conclusions based on what I thought I knew.
On this trip back I started to think more on some of the conclusions I had drawn about New York and why I couldn’t be happy there. Living in New Orleans has intensified my feeling that New York is too fast, too crowded, too unfriendly. If you walk too quickly in New Orleans, on the other hand, people may begin to worry about you. It's not unusual to say hello to a stranger here, or to strike up a conversation. Not everyone has somewhere to go at all times. Sometimes people just sit outside their homes for hours with family or friends, or even alone.
But in my certainty I was missing a crucial detail: New Orleans is about one-sixteenth the size of New York. You can find Saints tickets on Stubhub for $60 because there aren’t 8 million other people looking for the same ticket. At most there are a few hundred thousand.
In New Orleans you rarely walk by more than a couple of people at a time. You can walk around your neighborhood all day and not see more than a few dozen people. To travel any substantial distance in Manhattan on foot you have to navigate through a veritable ocean of humans. Think about how quickly you’d get discouraged if you attempted to make eye contact or say “hi” to everyone you walked by.
So of course New Yorkers avoid eye contact. Of course they wear headphones at all times, read a book on the bus or wear sunglasses on cloudy days. Any genuine attempt at small-town neighborliness would be completely exhausting. New Yorkers have to close themselves off a bit to keep their daily commutes from becoming staggering feats of human contact.
Here was a shade of New York I’d never seen. It’s not that people are unfriendly or lonely or constantly desiring of privacy. It’s that people develop habits out of necessity. We all make our worlds as small or as large as we need to function in them. We carve out corners to exist in and then fight like hell to keep our worlds at a scale that works for us. We do this to avoid becoming overwhelmed by the sheer volume of people, sensory experiences, and filter-penetrating full-subway advertisements.
Perhaps this is sometimes why people join gangs or churches, or why they leave their homes for other places. These things give our world focus and scale. Without them the world would just feel too small or too large.
Perhaps this is also why my mind trained itself only to look at certain people. It keeps things simple. It’s much easier for me to spend a day ogling at babies and attractive women than it is to spend a day trying to contemplate the fullness of everyone’s humanity.
We all need easy days. We all need time to shut our minds down, or to be closed off and stubborn and certain. But I think it’s important that once in a while we remember to ask: what are we missing? Where haven’t we been? What aren’t we seeing? Who are we walking by?
On my last day in New York I decided to conduct an experiment. I told myself that I would try to notice everyone, especially the people who don’t usually grab my attention. And not only that, I would try to give them all value. I’d give them a description that complicated my perception of them a little bit. Here are some highlights:
“Encyclopedic knowledge of igneous rocks.”
“Employee of the month in June.”
“Plays a mean alto sax.”
“Plays a crummy alto sax but works damn hard at it.”
“Never misses son’s soccer practice.”
“Helps old women cross streets.”
“Speaks seven languages fluently, has broken hearts in six.”
“Just really, really kind.”
And some less cheery ones:
“Angry because just lost job.”
“Tired from staying up all night with spouse with terminal illness.”
“Significant other feeds low self-esteem.”
Predictably I got really overwhelmed really quickly. There were just too many people, and I was working against 23 years of conditioning.
But even a few minutes of this completely transformed my day. I felt more hopeful, happier, more open. I started noticing more people, and then I started noticing more of everything: contours of tree branches, heights and shapes of skyscrapers, the rhythm of cars playing along the street. New York seemed even more impossibly vivid.
Late that night I made my way back to catch a train home from Grand Central Station, my favorite building in the world. Sometimes I leave extra time on my trips to New York just so I can walk around a bit and stare at the constellations painted on the ceiling or the ridges in the tan stones that form decorative shapes on the walls.
I love being there around rush hour. I stand off to the side and watch people run across in every direction, avoiding a thousand devastating collisions every minute. It amazes me how many people walk through the main concourse without ever looking up, without taking a moment to remember that their commute takes them through this stunning edifice with a million beautiful edges to consider.
I love being there around rush hour. I stand off to the side and watch people run across in every direction, avoiding a thousand devastating collisions every minute. It amazes me how many people walk through the main concourse without ever looking up, without taking a moment to remember that their commute takes them through this stunning edifice with a million beautiful edges to consider.
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| Look at all those edges. http://www.thingstoseenyc.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/grand-central-2.jpg |
I thought I had considered many of those edges, but that night the building revealed itself to me in a way that it never had. I noticed light fixtures and wall colorations and designs in the marble that I'd never seen before. I was moved to tears by the cohesive and overwhelming beauty of the place.
I knew that the euphoria of that evening would fade, and it has. Even as I felt it I realized that it’s easy to be vulnerable towards the world when you’re in a comfortable, familiar place and you don’t have to worry about work or errands or bills. I realized that it’s easier to see new details when you get a break from focusing on old, ongoing details.
I thought that maybe I could carry a little of this with me, try to channel it every day in small ways. Maybe I could learn to see better, to become a more cognizant observer. I promised myself to notice things more; to notice the particulars in plants, buildings, and clouds; to notice at least one stranger every day and imagine some detail that gives them value. Maybe some days I’ll even gather the courage to talk to them, to go beyond just imagining.
I boarded my train home and said goodbye to New York for a while, goodbye to its honks and shouts, to its glass towers and black asphalt, to its abrasiveness and its charms. Staring out from the train's window onto New York's singular landscape I thought to myself, “Maybe I could be happy here.”
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