People do not smile at other people in New York. Maybe it's because NYC residents are said to be the unhappiest people in the country. Or maybe it's a learned behavior. New York was also voted the rudest city, after all. Maybe it's a side effect of exhaustion: NYC-dwellers are known for being overworked and ambitious, and are always moving at a fast pace; we're probably just too tired to acknowledge — let alone converse with — the thousands of strangers that we pass by each day. Whatever the reason, there's no place that this cold NYC attitude is more evident than on the subways, which inspired us to hang these signs all over the train stations:
Each morning, I dread starting my day underground, sandwiched in a between dozens of people who wear a lifeless expression I like to call the “subway face.” It’s like a “poker face” but with a bit more exhaustion, depression, and anger. People can also be downright rude on the subway, especially on the morning commute. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen pregnant ladies or elderly people board the train and no one that's sitting offers their seat to them. I'd like to think we New Yorkers are kind deep down, but the subway strips somehow manage to strip all humanity from us.
This one's weird for me because, living in Indiana, smiling at strangers is pretty routine.
As Midwesterners, when we catch ourselves making eye contact with a stranger by accident, we usually smile unless it's been a particularly rough day. We wave and say 'Have a good day!' If it's friends or people we're familiar with, at least a 'Hey, how are you?' is requisite. And, so help you, if we run into people we're very friendly with, it'll eat up at least ten minutes of catching up. The pace is a lot slower and I like it better that way; my father grew up in LA, and I'd way rather be in a small town in the Midwest any day.
We have the opposite problem: in the Midwest, we instinctively think of our own unhappiness as an imposition upon others. So when someone asks us 'How are you?' or 'How's it going?' we instinctively respond 'Fine'. But this month hasn't been fine for me. Among other things, a close friend of mine passed away. I'm still grieving. I haven't wanted to lie and say that I've been 'Fine', but I also haven't wanted to data-dump people about my friend dying.
Instead, these days, I say 'Getting better'. Sometimes we're not fine and that's OK. I'm not fine, but I'm optimistic that I will be again one day. We can find ways to be honest without imposing our hurt feelings onto others.
Big smiles to you... love this website :-)
I've found myself bouncing out of bed each morning looking forward to all of these weird experiments we've been doing, especially compared to the year prior where I found myself walking through the same routine: wake up, go to work, shut off my brain in the evening by consuming culture, repeat. It's been a while now since the last time I felt this inspired to do out-of-the-ordinary shit and constantly make stuff.
Tim and I have been preparing for step 12, when we are going to attempt to do something larger than ourselves. Can we actually use our tools as designers to start a larger dialogue now that we've gone through these steps confronting our own selfishness and apathy? Can design be used as a tool to advocate change? While I am often pessimistic, these last steps of kindness have shown me that it's often the small things that can make a big difference. At the very least, it never hurts to try. As I said before, all of life is an experiment.
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