Imagine — you’ve stepped outside of your friend Oscar’s place to have a cigarette, you’re squatting outside of his apartment building when you hear an “Excuse Me?” You lift your head up to a girl in what looks like her mid 20s parked in front of the building, hat with pom poms on her head, a nervous look in her eyes. You straighten your legs and walk over to the window, say “What’s Up?” She tells you she’s sorry, she doesn’t usually do this, isn’t usually so pathetic, but she’s had a horrible day and would just like someone to talk with. You tell her of course, ask her what’s been on her mind. She stutters a little bit, tells you that she wants to talk but has a delivery, so if you wouldn’t mind just getting into the car. Now it’s your turn to stutter, looking at the ground going “UmUmUm,” weighing the likelihood that this is a human trafficking scheme. Fixing your gaze back on her, you take five seconds to decide that she not only seems honest, but desperate. Desperately honest. Windows down, door unlocked and show me the Doordash delivery. In one blink it appears, and in another you’re in the passenger seat. All buckled up!
An hour and a half later, she drops me back off in front of my friend’s apartment and I begin to dream of the Ideal World. My friends ask me where I went, what I was doing. I tell them I just spent the last 90 minutes listening to this girl talk about how in the nine months she’s lived in the city she has yet to make a single friend, has no idea how to go about finding connection or community. All her family is in India, where she spent the first 24 years of her life. “No one wants to talk” is what she told me, “and who wants to be lonely like this?”
I don’t dream in picture, but begin with a question — Whatever happened to the agora? Going out with an openness, if not a willingness and intent, to engage with the public? The public used to be regarded as a sacred place, our tether to the world at large, an opportunity for active and passive interaction with community on neutral ground. Public spaces provided the feeling of inclusiveness and belonging without the rigidity or exclusiveness of club or organization membership. Sociologist Roy Oldenburg gives these environments the title of “Third Places.” Whereas the two primary social environments of work and home come with certain expectations as to behavior and expression of identity, “third places” allow people to put aside their concerns and simply enjoy the company and conversation around them.
It seems like the self segregation of modern societies makes us feel so self-sufficient that many people feel it pointless to talk to their fellow citizens. And, of course, if others are considered so expendable, why spend time on them? When people approach us in public, our sociocultural reflex seems to be to assume they are either a threat to our safety or a threat to our comfort. Our aversion to strangers surpasses the very legitimate concern around safety, and I think somewhere along the line we conflated safety with comfort. And what is this comfort composed of? It seems to be defined by how isolated we can be from the shared time and space that constitute our environment, how deeply we can play into this narrative of Me Myself and I versus the World. We objectify people and life at large, make it our own personal and inanimate background, condition ourselves to value “convenience” which makes you, you sir trying to grab my attention, nothing more than a fly to swat at.
Individualism of this kind is accepted and promoted within modern culture (or lack thereof) as it aligns with capitalist interests and plans. Increased privatization makes spaces less accessible to the majority of people as spending money is practically a requirement when going out. Cities run by mayors like mine — I hate you Eric Adams — allocate their resources to policing and surveillance while slashing the parks, schools and libraries’ budgets. These power structures do not encourage you to look at or engage with others, and instead continuously facilitate social stratification and overly exaggerated concern with one’s self. We all need to be aware of the way in which we unconsciously integrate these attitudes into our own ways of interpreting and engaging. People will argue for their detached mindset, claim others just want something from them or that there’s nothing to “gain” from the interaction. This is nothing more than an internalization of the apathy that grounds and propels our society forward. Gain is usually measured in terms of social climbing, virtue signaling or some other perceived form of long term and continuous benefits to Ego. We can’t assert our own will, our own desires or feel confident in ourselves without negating or minimizing the personhood of others — the wants of others are “problematic” in a way that our own never seem to be. I like to think Immanuel Kant would have more pity than anger for this absolutely pathetic moral situation — is it not weakness to feel threatened by others’ ability to set ends, to reduce them to a mere means?
Whether it is casual commuter conversation or getting glued to the park bench, I believe that there is a lot to gain in consciously choosing to share space. There is value in transitory moments and brief connection. When we lack an awareness of our openness to sharing life with people, let alone interest in their lives, we isolate ourselves from reality as it actually is, and I have to, I stubbornly believe there is so much to receive from and give to reality. I believe in training the gut, knowing what an actual threat looks like so that I do not miss out on nourishment. At the end of the day, we all complain about the fact that we’re bound by the subjective nature of consciousness — how is interacting with people not a perfect way of mitigating that problem? And really, who is anyone to ignore an “Excuse Me?”
Kyriaki Yozzo is a junior majoring in philosophy, politics and law.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece which represents the views of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the Staff Editorial.