"They were tiny gestures that said: I see you. I recognize you. I will make a little room for you here." YES! and Thank you! I was just thinking about this very same social (anti-social?) behavior the other day, when I had an entire conversation about cars with my Lyft driver, only to learn that he was ACTUALLY TALKING TO SOMEONE ELSE THROUGH HIS EARPHONES! It was so crazy, I just started laughing my head off when I finally figured it out. He must have thought that I was also talking to someone on my headphones (except I wasn't wearing any and I didn't have my phone out). I felt like I was in some sort of rom-com movie!
AHAHAHA! It's so embarrassing. Sometimes, when someone is sitting next to me or is in line, and talking to someone on the phone real loud, I'll join in. Like they'll say, "I was like literally dying." And I'll say, "I know! I was, too." Until they notice me and stop. I mean, if they don't mind me hearing their conversations, they shouldn't mind me participating, right?!
I join in all the time too, Cathy! If I'm on the street in New York, which is about 90% of my time, and something is going on (which is 100% of the time), I will engage everyone around in conversation about it to figure out what's going on and what should be done. Some people just clearly want to keep walking. But a group of teenage girls the other day were so sweet. And actually explained to me and really animated tunes exactly what had transpired and I think we all felt so "seen" at the end of it. They didn't even curtail their lingo for my old sake. It was a moment that showed the potential beauty in the opposite of the phenomenon that Leslie is talking about here.
I can totally picture this scene, Jane! It's a little novella, like when you play that game on the subway and imagine everyone's backstory. I think writers, especially, are always game for expanding the story. Our brains are always at work creating worlds and characters and drama!!!
(I need to email you. I'm coming to NYC for a few days in early February and would love to join you on the street and walk and walk and talk and talk!)
When I accidentally have a conversation with someone who’s talking to someone else on their phone, I remind myself that while I made a mistake, they’re the one who seems to be talking to themself in public. Makes me feel better about me.
I have double downed on talking to every cashier and delivery person and anyone with whom I make eye contact. Yesterday at CVS, some awful cover of “Only Wanna Be with You,” and I looked at the Coke delivery guy and said, “Why’d they do Hootie like this? “
There was a brief moment of confusion — like why is this woman talking to me — and then a big ol grin. “Yeah, this can’t be Hootie.”
We are the exact same person! I now talk to everybody and sometimes think that I'm coming off like an older lonely person who needs human interaction however she can get it. But I'm actually just interested in all of them and the situations and want to talk to all of them about the situations. It's amazing how close you can get with someone in a two sentence exchange!
Me too! I am also a huge eavesdropper. I will pause outside of an apartment door if there is a great conversation going on inside. Or pretend to be on my phone on a street corner if a couple is in the middle of a massive fight. I'm not proud of this behavior, but I sure am curious.
I've done this too, my home office/cat room faces the street and I'm always eavesdropping, NYC is the perfect place for this, I also feel a little guilty for doing it but can't help myself.....
I totally do this, too! I get a lot of weird looks. But I also have friends I met because one of us said something to the other in public. That includes two of my favorite people in the world.
It can happen; I've also noticed that people will talk to you more if you don't wear Airpods. I wrote another piece about being an Air pod resister which I never placed about this. I stumble upon the most interesting conversations because of this subtle signal that I'm open to listening.
That's such an interesting way of looking at it, because I do the exact opposite. I generally walk around with just one of my earphones in anyway so that I can hear traffic or anything I might need to hear at the same time as whatever I'm listening to. But then when I want to eavesdrop, I've turned the volume all the way down so that in my imagination, they think I'm listening to something other than them when I'm really listening to them. I feel like my method seems sneakier. And I guess mine is better for hearing stuff they don't want you to hear, and yours is better for hearing stuff directed at you that you may actually be expected to respond to, which is less my thing but much healthier probably.
I can’t wear AirPods—too big for my ears, and I get vestibular migraines that don’t behave with earbuds. When I’m working from cafes, I take my over-the-ear headphones in case I need to drown out noise. Otherwise, I’m aurally raw-dogging the world and talking to strangers.
AirPods will not stay in my ears either. They are too big and I also think my ears are sort of flat/shallow if that makes sense, so there’s nothing to hold them in there.
I love this article and I completely agree. My students (here they are again!) regularly act like the world is their living room, expecting to put their feet up, put their head down, wander around my classroom whenever the impulse strikes, and apply their makeup during class. It's beyond annoying and I have no idea how this became remotely acceptable. 🙄
The way you talk so bluntly about your students seriously cracks me up, like calling their behavior "beyond annoying." I just love it. Don't hold back, Alyssa!
I went back to grad school a few years ago, so the classroom was one of the first places I began to witness this behavior. It was atrocious, but also sort of sad because everyone was so self-absorbed that I feel they were missing out on an opportunity to connect with one another and learn from one another and isn't the whole point of education?
Oh gosh - that's one of the least annoying things that they do. At least they aren't yelling across the room when they're doing their makeup...usually. 🙄😑😖
Yes, I do think things have really changed. When I was growing up in Texas, women put on lipstick at a restaurant table. It was a hallmark of a Texas woman. When I traveled abroad, if I was lonely I’d do that and most people would look at me in disgust but if there was a Texas woman around she’d come up and say, “Hi Hon, where you from?” I did that all over Europe. It took me a few years to realize that sorry in Canada can mean a whole range of things, and when you say it because *someone ran into you* its purpose is social glue. I see you. I acknowledge we’re sharing this space and we’re all in this together. My kids think it’s hilarious that when I’m expressing that sort of sentiment I say Sore-ry, and when I’m sorry I say sorry.
My boys are Canadian. They say only Sore-ry and I have to take meaning from context. It’s not quite as wide a range as Bless Your Heart, but there are similarities.
Haha I totally get that qualifier, thank you. The range of sorry meanings sounds like it lies somewhere between Bless Your Heart (a 10) and No, but closer to Bless Your Heart.
Omg, "Bless your heart" is my absolute FAVORITE little social commentary. It can mean anything from "fuck you very much" to "I am so sorry for their loss". You can add adjectives to help make it clearer, i.e., "Bless his tiny heart" = "He's an ass with a tiny dick." When I can't call someone a dumb fuck out loud, "Bless your heart" is my go-to. Thank you to my Southern ancestors for that passive-aggressive little verbal weapon.
This takes it to a whole other level that I love SO much. I want a whole glossary of definitions of various derivations of bless your heart. My boss at the Northgate Mall in Durham, NC continually said "Bless your little heart" to tell me I wasn't a good waitress - I guess the "little" indicated the revenue I wasn't bringing in - but your translations are so much better and more precise. Thank you!
My great grandma Big Mama used it often to mean “dumb as a box of rocks” or “someone only his mama or Jesus could love.” She explained to me that when she said it to me she meant “your curls are cute today” or, actually, “bless your heart” and somehow I took her at her word.
I love that she clarified that for you. Growing up in the south, my heart was blessed many many times by people I knew and didn't know, but not one of them ever articulated for me what theirs specifically meant. Go Big Mama.
I only read the first sentence but I already love it enough to comment. It reminded me of a piece in the New Yorker “Parallel Play” by Tim Page. He has Asperger’s syndrome and he tells about deciding to read Miss Manners to sneer at it but then he got really good tips about how to interact with others and the logic behind manners that he actually found it life changing. It’s paywalled but a really amazing read. He talks about having Asperger’s being like not only missing the forest for the trees but missing the trees for the species of lichen on the bark, which has nothing to do with my comment but I found it brilliant as it sums up my life perfectly.
Jane, I dm’d you a chat where I ask my scientist nerd husband about eMFs and cancer and he says he had looked into it and that Cancer UK has done a study where they were unable to find evidence that the Bluetooth devices are harmful. He also claims “the radiation is non-ionizing and does not cause mutations. It is also very low frequency.” If that helps, I don’t actually really know what that statement implies because I am a different kind of nerd than him…
Anyway, brilliant first line and now back to reading the full piece!
I got your DM and that is so kind of you and your husband to even discuss it. I really like the information from him you shared with me. At one point, a friend of mine had suggested that earphones seemed less potentially dangerous than those AirPods because at least all of the activity wasn't happening right inside your head basically (I explain science so well!). So I feel safer using them, but I really like this information and it especially makes me feel better because my daughter does use AirPods. Thank you so so so much - you went above and beyond. And thanks to your hubby too.
I never thought anything of it until I was older! She also made me and my siblings keep our hands behind our backs in a store so we wouldn’t grab things.
I think Covid made our inside voices/actions acceptable outside. Did not the world… betray us, many thought?
But grouped with the rift in this country where both sides seemingly jump at the chance to out piss-off the other, younger generations who’ve grown up watching the people who instruct them to mind their manners regularly all-cap eviscerate strangers on the internet in full keyboard combat gear.. kids are being raised by hypocrites who tell them to do one thing, while blatantly doing another.
** not all people for clarity and common sense.
The world is rude now because there’s not much left that isn’t rude. GenX and millennials see we’ve been bamboozled - it was never study hard and work hard and you’ll be rich and successful. And so we’re angry that the weak have inherited the earth. The younger generations perhaps have decided to not even buy into our rhetoric, because look at what idiots that made us:
I was slammed yesterday and didn't get a chance to read this until now. I don't think it was Covid, per se, but that certainly didn't help. It was kind of the last nail in the coffin. I mean, remember when it was important to dress up before getting on an airplane, rather than showing up in your fucking pajamas?
As a little kid, I had an obsession with opening doors for people. Whenever we went out to eat, I'd slip away from the table (I was really good at not being noticed--like Kwai Chang caine walking the rice paper) then go outside and stand at the main entrance. Every time customers showed up at the door, I'd open it for them. Eventually, my mother would find me out there and tell me to come back inside.
As someone who had done WFH before Covid, I'd already learned the importance of behaving like I was working from home and not living at work. I maintained set start and end times, took an honest to God lunch break, and I WORE MY FUCKING PANTS.
But as someone who has worked in both restaurants and retail, I've also been much more attuned to the erosion of basic manners for a few decades. The main thing that always sticks out to me is how parents treat the world like it's their babysitter. 🙄
Maybe Congress needs to mandate that every person in this country spend six months enrolled in charm school. Imagine what would happen.
You tell such a vivid story and I love picturing little Andy opening that door over and over and over again! Thanks for that!
I personally love when anyone opens the door for me or waits at the back of the elevator to let me get out first. Both feel beyond polite in these days and I appreciate them even more now.
I grew up poor, so etiquette was actually a bred-into-us (or beat into us, depending on the day) thing that was inescapable. My family's view was manners are free, so we better have the best version of them in the neighborhood. I learned how to do everything from set a full table for an eight course dinner to curtseying and when it is appropriate to do so. The only time my back touched the back of a dinner chair was when I was pregnant, and I still hear the whistle of a knife handle swung towards my elbow when I see anyone's elbows on the table.
All that said, this age of .... extreme narcissism? malignant self-absorbtion? .... makes me wonder who raised these people. I would NEVER (seriously, NEVER EVER) behave in public like this. My mother is dead, and she'd still kill me for it. It is supremely disrespectful and disheartening. The description of it being like ghosts passing each other was exactly it, and it makes me sad for everyone involved.
Leslie — how did it feel to take these photos of you in the world with your devices, without jumping into the simulacrum of “look at me I’m in a cafe being reflective”
Such a good question. I asked Leslie about getting some pictures of the types of situations she was talking about, but it was understandably not that easy to get photos involving other people (even of someone's legs propped up on a table in a Starbucks, for example). So her friend took these pictures of her in the situation she was writing about instead. She can correct me here if I'm wrong, of course!
What an interesting take on charm schools of yore! “To notice other people.” Maybe that is the essence of charm.
I was a latchkey kid who went to after-school programs galore, public day care, at places like The Boys and Girls Club. One summer, when I was in my peak-Barbie period, the Club separated the girls and took us into a basketball gym to practice walking with the telephone books on our head! So funny to think now; we never dreamed of playing basketball.
When my mom got home from work that night, I demonstrated my “walking with a heavy book on my head” number, like I was about to win Miss America. She collapsed laughing. I think she was trying to imagine my future job interview . . .
This is beautiful. I especially loved this line, "When I walk through the world now it feels like stepping onto a surreal reality show where everyone is the main character and no one’s a neighbor." You're so right.
Living in suburban NJ, I don't encounter strangers like this as much as I did when I lived in New York. I see people mainly at events for toddlers and there's much more politeness and social recognition. You reminded me of the many years where I went to my local coffee shop (Gimme Coffee in Williamsburg, Brooklyn) every day because I didn't have wifi at my apartment, and it was part of my routine, great for people watching and delicious coffee, and I wound up getting to know the baristas because I saw them every day, and have random conversations.
Thank you for this! I love how you entered this story through the door of your etiquette training. And I completely agree: When we behave as the nucleus of our solipsistic atoms, we become...well...real assholes. Hopefully consideration toward others is not dead—it's just hibernating until we wake up and realize that we all need to fight back against the enshittification of our culture!
I commented elsewhere that I think this predates Covid, but the pandemic made it worse. I also think that, for at least the last five years (and for many, the last decade) have been so traumatic that a lot of people are in survival mode. It makes us self-centered and myopic, unable to notice others and their needs. The world has changed far more rapidly than our brains, and no one really knows how to act now.
But really, the speakerphone conversations should be a given. I travel a lot, and my least favorites are the Business Dudes at the gate, conducting Important Business via speakerphone while waiting to board. No one needs that.
Totally agree that the business dudes are the worst. Especially when you can tell they want people to overhear and be impressed by the ultimate importance of whatever Big Business they are discussing. At least twice, I have discovered that a guy doing this kind of bragging did not actually have anyone else on the other line. Swear.
"They were tiny gestures that said: I see you. I recognize you. I will make a little room for you here." YES! and Thank you! I was just thinking about this very same social (anti-social?) behavior the other day, when I had an entire conversation about cars with my Lyft driver, only to learn that he was ACTUALLY TALKING TO SOMEONE ELSE THROUGH HIS EARPHONES! It was so crazy, I just started laughing my head off when I finally figured it out. He must have thought that I was also talking to someone on my headphones (except I wasn't wearing any and I didn't have my phone out). I felt like I was in some sort of rom-com movie!
This has happened to me too! And I have mistakenly tied to hold a conversation with people only to realize they have had ear pods in....
Both of those things have happened to me also!
AHAHAHA! It's so embarrassing. Sometimes, when someone is sitting next to me or is in line, and talking to someone on the phone real loud, I'll join in. Like they'll say, "I was like literally dying." And I'll say, "I know! I was, too." Until they notice me and stop. I mean, if they don't mind me hearing their conversations, they shouldn't mind me participating, right?!
I join in all the time too, Cathy! If I'm on the street in New York, which is about 90% of my time, and something is going on (which is 100% of the time), I will engage everyone around in conversation about it to figure out what's going on and what should be done. Some people just clearly want to keep walking. But a group of teenage girls the other day were so sweet. And actually explained to me and really animated tunes exactly what had transpired and I think we all felt so "seen" at the end of it. They didn't even curtail their lingo for my old sake. It was a moment that showed the potential beauty in the opposite of the phenomenon that Leslie is talking about here.
I can totally picture this scene, Jane! It's a little novella, like when you play that game on the subway and imagine everyone's backstory. I think writers, especially, are always game for expanding the story. Our brains are always at work creating worlds and characters and drama!!!
(I need to email you. I'm coming to NYC for a few days in early February and would love to join you on the street and walk and walk and talk and talk!)
It's a plan! And Leslie, you are more than invited too, since you initiated this conversation today!
I would totally come!
Love moments like this
When I accidentally have a conversation with someone who’s talking to someone else on their phone, I remind myself that while I made a mistake, they’re the one who seems to be talking to themself in public. Makes me feel better about me.
Absolutely! Reframe that thinking!
I like that! I'm not the idiot. THEY'RE the idiot.
ABSOLUTELY
That is so fucking awesome.
I have double downed on talking to every cashier and delivery person and anyone with whom I make eye contact. Yesterday at CVS, some awful cover of “Only Wanna Be with You,” and I looked at the Coke delivery guy and said, “Why’d they do Hootie like this? “
There was a brief moment of confusion — like why is this woman talking to me — and then a big ol grin. “Yeah, this can’t be Hootie.”
We are the exact same person! I now talk to everybody and sometimes think that I'm coming off like an older lonely person who needs human interaction however she can get it. But I'm actually just interested in all of them and the situations and want to talk to all of them about the situations. It's amazing how close you can get with someone in a two sentence exchange!
I can't live without these types of exchanges! I'm perpetually curious about other people.
Me too! I am also a huge eavesdropper. I will pause outside of an apartment door if there is a great conversation going on inside. Or pretend to be on my phone on a street corner if a couple is in the middle of a massive fight. I'm not proud of this behavior, but I sure am curious.
Same.
I'm not at all surprised. Xox
I've done this too, my home office/cat room faces the street and I'm always eavesdropping, NYC is the perfect place for this, I also feel a little guilty for doing it but can't help myself.....
If you have few inhibitions, a big mouth and bigger ears , you can make any big city small —
In the best way
Well said and so true!
That's hilarious
I totally do this, too! I get a lot of weird looks. But I also have friends I met because one of us said something to the other in public. That includes two of my favorite people in the world.
It can happen; I've also noticed that people will talk to you more if you don't wear Airpods. I wrote another piece about being an Air pod resister which I never placed about this. I stumble upon the most interesting conversations because of this subtle signal that I'm open to listening.
That's such an interesting way of looking at it, because I do the exact opposite. I generally walk around with just one of my earphones in anyway so that I can hear traffic or anything I might need to hear at the same time as whatever I'm listening to. But then when I want to eavesdrop, I've turned the volume all the way down so that in my imagination, they think I'm listening to something other than them when I'm really listening to them. I feel like my method seems sneakier. And I guess mine is better for hearing stuff they don't want you to hear, and yours is better for hearing stuff directed at you that you may actually be expected to respond to, which is less my thing but much healthier probably.
I can’t wear AirPods—too big for my ears, and I get vestibular migraines that don’t behave with earbuds. When I’m working from cafes, I take my over-the-ear headphones in case I need to drown out noise. Otherwise, I’m aurally raw-dogging the world and talking to strangers.
Aurally raw dogging the world, yes!!
AirPods will not stay in my ears either. They are too big and I also think my ears are sort of flat/shallow if that makes sense, so there’s nothing to hold them in there.
🤣
I love this article and I completely agree. My students (here they are again!) regularly act like the world is their living room, expecting to put their feet up, put their head down, wander around my classroom whenever the impulse strikes, and apply their makeup during class. It's beyond annoying and I have no idea how this became remotely acceptable. 🙄
The way you talk so bluntly about your students seriously cracks me up, like calling their behavior "beyond annoying." I just love it. Don't hold back, Alyssa!
🤣
I went back to grad school a few years ago, so the classroom was one of the first places I began to witness this behavior. It was atrocious, but also sort of sad because everyone was so self-absorbed that I feel they were missing out on an opportunity to connect with one another and learn from one another and isn't the whole point of education?
💯
Maybe I'm naive but the applying makeup during class got me. Wow! What do you do when these things happen?
Oh gosh - that's one of the least annoying things that they do. At least they aren't yelling across the room when they're doing their makeup...usually. 🙄😑😖
Yes, I do think things have really changed. When I was growing up in Texas, women put on lipstick at a restaurant table. It was a hallmark of a Texas woman. When I traveled abroad, if I was lonely I’d do that and most people would look at me in disgust but if there was a Texas woman around she’d come up and say, “Hi Hon, where you from?” I did that all over Europe. It took me a few years to realize that sorry in Canada can mean a whole range of things, and when you say it because *someone ran into you* its purpose is social glue. I see you. I acknowledge we’re sharing this space and we’re all in this together. My kids think it’s hilarious that when I’m expressing that sort of sentiment I say Sore-ry, and when I’m sorry I say sorry.
That's FASCINATING! And I love that you utilize the two different pronunciations. Do your kids say it only the "Sorry" way, by the way?
My boys are Canadian. They say only Sore-ry and I have to take meaning from context. It’s not quite as wide a range as Bless Your Heart, but there are similarities.
Haha I totally get that qualifier, thank you. The range of sorry meanings sounds like it lies somewhere between Bless Your Heart (a 10) and No, but closer to Bless Your Heart.
Omg, "Bless your heart" is my absolute FAVORITE little social commentary. It can mean anything from "fuck you very much" to "I am so sorry for their loss". You can add adjectives to help make it clearer, i.e., "Bless his tiny heart" = "He's an ass with a tiny dick." When I can't call someone a dumb fuck out loud, "Bless your heart" is my go-to. Thank you to my Southern ancestors for that passive-aggressive little verbal weapon.
This takes it to a whole other level that I love SO much. I want a whole glossary of definitions of various derivations of bless your heart. My boss at the Northgate Mall in Durham, NC continually said "Bless your little heart" to tell me I wasn't a good waitress - I guess the "little" indicated the revenue I wasn't bringing in - but your translations are so much better and more precise. Thank you!
My great grandma Big Mama used it often to mean “dumb as a box of rocks” or “someone only his mama or Jesus could love.” She explained to me that when she said it to me she meant “your curls are cute today” or, actually, “bless your heart” and somehow I took her at her word.
I love that she clarified that for you. Growing up in the south, my heart was blessed many many times by people I knew and didn't know, but not one of them ever articulated for me what theirs specifically meant. Go Big Mama.
My situationship is Canadian, and my kid is 1/16th Canadian. I get Sore-ry.
I only read the first sentence but I already love it enough to comment. It reminded me of a piece in the New Yorker “Parallel Play” by Tim Page. He has Asperger’s syndrome and he tells about deciding to read Miss Manners to sneer at it but then he got really good tips about how to interact with others and the logic behind manners that he actually found it life changing. It’s paywalled but a really amazing read. He talks about having Asperger’s being like not only missing the forest for the trees but missing the trees for the species of lichen on the bark, which has nothing to do with my comment but I found it brilliant as it sums up my life perfectly.
Jane, I dm’d you a chat where I ask my scientist nerd husband about eMFs and cancer and he says he had looked into it and that Cancer UK has done a study where they were unable to find evidence that the Bluetooth devices are harmful. He also claims “the radiation is non-ionizing and does not cause mutations. It is also very low frequency.” If that helps, I don’t actually really know what that statement implies because I am a different kind of nerd than him…
Anyway, brilliant first line and now back to reading the full piece!
I got your DM and that is so kind of you and your husband to even discuss it. I really like the information from him you shared with me. At one point, a friend of mine had suggested that earphones seemed less potentially dangerous than those AirPods because at least all of the activity wasn't happening right inside your head basically (I explain science so well!). So I feel safer using them, but I really like this information and it especially makes me feel better because my daughter does use AirPods. Thank you so so so much - you went above and beyond. And thanks to your hubby too.
Things sure have changed here on Walton’s Mountain.
This reference makes me ancient. But it also reflects the time you’re referring to.
We are all soooo overstimulated and very few even realize the damage it’s doing.
I LOVE and truly appreciate that ancient reference! Goodnight John Boy!
My immigrant mom had me drop a little curtsy (really just a knee dip) and shake hands with her Swedish friends. She had great manners!
That's completely the opposite of how I was raised, and I love to visualize it.
I never thought anything of it until I was older! She also made me and my siblings keep our hands behind our backs in a store so we wouldn’t grab things.
That's so practical. I've never heard it before and I like it.
I think Covid made our inside voices/actions acceptable outside. Did not the world… betray us, many thought?
But grouped with the rift in this country where both sides seemingly jump at the chance to out piss-off the other, younger generations who’ve grown up watching the people who instruct them to mind their manners regularly all-cap eviscerate strangers on the internet in full keyboard combat gear.. kids are being raised by hypocrites who tell them to do one thing, while blatantly doing another.
** not all people for clarity and common sense.
The world is rude now because there’s not much left that isn’t rude. GenX and millennials see we’ve been bamboozled - it was never study hard and work hard and you’ll be rich and successful. And so we’re angry that the weak have inherited the earth. The younger generations perhaps have decided to not even buy into our rhetoric, because look at what idiots that made us:
Truth. Justice. The American Way.
🥲
True, it's difficult to find civility anywhere...
We love and. need you too. Yes, you and you too.
OH THANK YOU I will take it. And you too!!
Yes, this!! ❤️❤️
So sweet!
💯
I was slammed yesterday and didn't get a chance to read this until now. I don't think it was Covid, per se, but that certainly didn't help. It was kind of the last nail in the coffin. I mean, remember when it was important to dress up before getting on an airplane, rather than showing up in your fucking pajamas?
As a little kid, I had an obsession with opening doors for people. Whenever we went out to eat, I'd slip away from the table (I was really good at not being noticed--like Kwai Chang caine walking the rice paper) then go outside and stand at the main entrance. Every time customers showed up at the door, I'd open it for them. Eventually, my mother would find me out there and tell me to come back inside.
As someone who had done WFH before Covid, I'd already learned the importance of behaving like I was working from home and not living at work. I maintained set start and end times, took an honest to God lunch break, and I WORE MY FUCKING PANTS.
But as someone who has worked in both restaurants and retail, I've also been much more attuned to the erosion of basic manners for a few decades. The main thing that always sticks out to me is how parents treat the world like it's their babysitter. 🙄
Maybe Congress needs to mandate that every person in this country spend six months enrolled in charm school. Imagine what would happen.
You tell such a vivid story and I love picturing little Andy opening that door over and over and over again! Thanks for that!
I personally love when anyone opens the door for me or waits at the back of the elevator to let me get out first. Both feel beyond polite in these days and I appreciate them even more now.
Great idea! Charm school for everyone and what a charming anecdote about you as a kid!
I grew up poor, so etiquette was actually a bred-into-us (or beat into us, depending on the day) thing that was inescapable. My family's view was manners are free, so we better have the best version of them in the neighborhood. I learned how to do everything from set a full table for an eight course dinner to curtseying and when it is appropriate to do so. The only time my back touched the back of a dinner chair was when I was pregnant, and I still hear the whistle of a knife handle swung towards my elbow when I see anyone's elbows on the table.
All that said, this age of .... extreme narcissism? malignant self-absorbtion? .... makes me wonder who raised these people. I would NEVER (seriously, NEVER EVER) behave in public like this. My mother is dead, and she'd still kill me for it. It is supremely disrespectful and disheartening. The description of it being like ghosts passing each other was exactly it, and it makes me sad for everyone involved.
Leslie — how did it feel to take these photos of you in the world with your devices, without jumping into the simulacrum of “look at me I’m in a cafe being reflective”
Such a good question. I asked Leslie about getting some pictures of the types of situations she was talking about, but it was understandably not that easy to get photos involving other people (even of someone's legs propped up on a table in a Starbucks, for example). So her friend took these pictures of her in the situation she was writing about instead. She can correct me here if I'm wrong, of course!
Correct, and impossible to grab pics at the gym (especially mine)..
It felt odd because I usually go into cafes without any sort of devices (I don't even own a pair of airpods..
What an interesting take on charm schools of yore! “To notice other people.” Maybe that is the essence of charm.
I was a latchkey kid who went to after-school programs galore, public day care, at places like The Boys and Girls Club. One summer, when I was in my peak-Barbie period, the Club separated the girls and took us into a basketball gym to practice walking with the telephone books on our head! So funny to think now; we never dreamed of playing basketball.
When my mom got home from work that night, I demonstrated my “walking with a heavy book on my head” number, like I was about to win Miss America. She collapsed laughing. I think she was trying to imagine my future job interview . . .
Yes! The telephone book, but for me it was also one of my mom's encyclopedias. I'm adopted and a GenX but I had a mom who grew up in the 1930's.
This is beautiful. I especially loved this line, "When I walk through the world now it feels like stepping onto a surreal reality show where everyone is the main character and no one’s a neighbor." You're so right.
Living in suburban NJ, I don't encounter strangers like this as much as I did when I lived in New York. I see people mainly at events for toddlers and there's much more politeness and social recognition. You reminded me of the many years where I went to my local coffee shop (Gimme Coffee in Williamsburg, Brooklyn) every day because I didn't have wifi at my apartment, and it was part of my routine, great for people watching and delicious coffee, and I wound up getting to know the baristas because I saw them every day, and have random conversations.
Thank you for this! I love how you entered this story through the door of your etiquette training. And I completely agree: When we behave as the nucleus of our solipsistic atoms, we become...well...real assholes. Hopefully consideration toward others is not dead—it's just hibernating until we wake up and realize that we all need to fight back against the enshittification of our culture!
I commented elsewhere that I think this predates Covid, but the pandemic made it worse. I also think that, for at least the last five years (and for many, the last decade) have been so traumatic that a lot of people are in survival mode. It makes us self-centered and myopic, unable to notice others and their needs. The world has changed far more rapidly than our brains, and no one really knows how to act now.
But really, the speakerphone conversations should be a given. I travel a lot, and my least favorites are the Business Dudes at the gate, conducting Important Business via speakerphone while waiting to board. No one needs that.
Totally agree that the business dudes are the worst. Especially when you can tell they want people to overhear and be impressed by the ultimate importance of whatever Big Business they are discussing. At least twice, I have discovered that a guy doing this kind of bragging did not actually have anyone else on the other line. Swear.
I not only believe you, but I’m also not one bit surprised!