Earlier this week I ordered two coffees and an urgently, vitally important pistachio cookie from the counter of an empty café. On a cold but sunny New York afternoon, I took a seat near the window, dangerously close to a woman who posed a threat to the integrity of this cookie. Our table—it will soon become pertinent to know—was three or four unobstructed steps from the espresso machine, which was now humming and jiggling with its pleasing song.
After a few minutes of loose conversation about the plants and the view, the woman behind the counter called out our order, and I immediately wondered about the peculiar location for pickup: on the opposite end of the counter, a farther walk from the espresso machine than our table. This didn’t much matter, was more amusing than maddening, and resulted in one of those moments of eye contact across the table where you learn, wordlessly, that you’re not the only person who feels perplexed. Tossing our coffees onto the normal pickup spot in a crowded café would have been reasonable, but we were surrounded by empty chairs and the only people in the room. Was this apathy or idiocy? Either she didn’t care, which was certainly possible, or she didn’t notice, which was just as possible. Out in the world, I am, if nothing else, always curious about whether rudeness is the consequence of something personal about me or something personal about the other person. Because I generally keep the most disgruntled, unhinged voices inside my mind, I thanked the woman behind the counter with relatively genuine words and returned to the table with the coffees and the cookie, while she returned to swiping on her phone.
At least rudeness provides a subject for conversation. And there was agreement, whispering, amused agreement, that we had witnessed something peculiar. It’s easy to dismiss the small gestures, the daily interactions that soon turn into reflexes, which are actually, when you do the accounting, the majority of life. I’ll admit—as I did over this coffee—that it feels petty, childish, to linger on the subject of politeness, but what you experience in the world is guaranteed to trigger assumptions: about empathy, about perception, about kindness.
While I ate roughly forty-five percent of the pistachio cookie—which is, incidentally, an unjust and immoral split—the conversation veered toward whether society has advanced as far in politeness as it has in technology. This is a more complicated way of stating that poor service can kindle the philosophic mind. Technological improvement is easy to see—and I’m befuddled by people who are ignorant about how much the world has changed, those people who seem remarkably incurious about the differences between how they live today and how nearly everyone lived for thousands of years. By technology, I’m including the usual list, apps and airplanes and appliances, but I’m not forgetting penicillin, literacy, access to healthcare, which are all technologies that were once unimaginable. Especially if you dilate your focus and think in one-hundred or five-hundred-year timescales. Measuring this progress isn’t too difficult, but that measurement can appear insufficient when we fully evaluate a life.
Are we wiser? More empathic? Better at conversation? Has our ability—in other words—to use our minds kept pace with our ability to create technologies? Am I a more engaging, or attentive, or kindhearted, conversationalist over a coffee on a sunny New York afternoon than someone from the past? I certainly know more about the world and have the capacity to leverage information in a way that would astound an aristocrat from a century ago—but am I also more thoughtful and caring?
Based on what I’ve written so far you might be surprised to learn that I’m fairly optimistic on these questions. And you might also be surprised to learn that I’m not always confident about what answer I prefer for these questions, as it seems, sometimes, that certain skills atrophy as a consequence of technology, though that doesn’t necessarily imply the correct path: you can possess endless information at your fingertips, sure, but perhaps the cost is the quality of your memory—just as you can save yourself from labor and lengthy walks with a wheel, with the cost your natural strength.
Even the recent past is more violent, more coarse, more cutthroat, than most people appear to believe. What’s romanticized as more communal is often linked to isolated, tribal areas, where the feelings of connection are uncomfortably close to ethnic familiarity. I don’t judge the past based on the standards of the present, but if I think about general manners, violence, and care for strangers, there’s a shiver if I imagine life one or two hundred years ago, as the stranger in an unfamiliar town.
What I can state, without confidence, just grasping, is that I’m most intrigued by innovation that looks outward rather than inward, that propels you toward connection rather than isolation. That’s far too close to a banality for comfort, but it seems that efficiency is typically measured too narrowly—innovation can be exciting, shocking, groundbreaking, but does it drive us closer or farther? Am I more attuned to those around me? Has my capacity for empathy increased?
During our pleasant, meandering, beautifully inefficient conversation in the café—where, I’m inclined to add, the pistachio cookie didn’t meet my expectations, and I would be perfectly happy with some technological improvements on the recipe—a man with a backpack strolled through the front door, clearly arriving for his shift. The woman behind the counter spoke with enough thrust in her tone—importance, something—that I turned my head to listen.
“Did you hear?”
“No?”
“I was hit by a car. I think I sprained my ankle.”
I find it curious to note how often the past changes. How often I learn something that changes a memory, that provides context for a situation that I didn’t understand, or that I understood incorrectly, at an earlier time. A significant portion of my life seems to be spent scribbling out lines that I’ve already written, revising the pages that I thought were complete. It is an endless process of misunderstanding and understanding, even though at every moment along the way I still feel certain, certain that what I know, in this moment, must be right.
Fun read with lots of thought provoking 'insights.' I particularly liked the flow, ease of read. I do fear for our humanity with screens and tribal thinking replacing faces and conversations. But I also realize that lack of ability to see the future is likely a cause of my insecurity. Thanks for entertaining me while calling me out.
No doubt technology has improved our lives, from transportation and medicine to knowledge acquisition and convenience. So you’d think everyone would be, on balance, in a better mood than our forefathers who had so many more hardships. But I don’t know. The young women working in a nearby coffee shop are consistently sullen despite efforts to say hello and thank them (Others beside myself have noticed this). I thought it was the customer who was supposed to be thanked. Yes, we all have bad days. And I know these observations are anecdotal. But it feels like we’re becoming consumed in our little digital worlds, scrolling our devices, oblivious to the souls around us who might be yearning for a real conversation, connection…maybe even a shared cookie.