Between Oxford & London Part 2: New York Chimes In
I was at a café with my family recently, and I asked my aunt “If you could go anywhere in the world and take your people with you, where would you go?”. For any native Londoner, there are one of two answers: “I’d stay here and probably buy a house” or “I’d get as far as I can from this place”. I’m the latter, and so was my aunt. “Nobody makes eye contact with you”, she said, “and sometimes you’re just having a really shit day and you want someone to give you a little smile so you can go about your day. Sometimes I’m that person and I have a shit day and I want someone to give me a smile, but in London everyone just stares at the floor *Cue intense agreement from my mum and sister*”.
In my last piece I spoke about the hustle and bustle of London, and how we spend so much time rushing from A to B that we forget to enjoy the beauty of the journey we’re privileged to take. Part of what that rush culture entails is a lack of engagement with the people around you. If you’ve ever taken the tube, you’ll know what I mean. Try to strike a conversation up with a stranger. You’ll be met with a semi-nervous glance and a white person smile as they readjust their newspaper or emphasise whatever they’re doing. Try to strike up a conversation on the street and you’ve gotta be crazy. You’re either one of those people trying to get donations to stop knife crime or one of the people who those donations are meant to help. But that’s exactly it. People in London always assume that you want something when you try to speak to them. It’s tied up in the commercial nature of the financial capital; most people who talk to you randomly do want something here. Still, there are circumstances which many of us feel warrant some genuinely human interaction and it just doesn’t come.
I remember one time I went to a coffee shop in Oxford, and as I busily said hello to the barista he looked me in the eye and said the most meaningful “How are you?”. It was so meaningful it makes me want to record this article because words on the page just don’t do it justice. I looked to him from the menu with a startled face. His question put warmness in my heart, and immediately prompted me to reflect on how I’ve been doing in the past little while. I can still remember the moment vividly over a year on, and I went to thank him a few months ago because it really changed how I look at greeting people. When we ask people how they are, it’s not that we don’t care, but we often aren’t asking the question in its most full sense and really listening to their response. We just wait for them to deflect their question back at us and give a shorthand answer for what we really mean. Many cultures are like that — For example, the French have their greeting “Ca va? — et toi? — Ouais” Which translates to “How are you? — and you? Yeah”. Platitudes like this are a part of our culture, because they mitigate awkwardness to show politeness and ultimately win favour. But they degrade our capacity for genuine interaction when they become not only the default, but our only means of interacting with strangers. Sometimes its nice to go to your friend and look them in the eye and not just ask, but really ask them how they are. To look someone in the eye when they stop you on the street and respond to their question. To engage with that person who makes random small talk with you and actually make something nice of it. That last one is something my Dad does really well and is something I’m grateful to have learnt from him. He is an excellent communicator, and loves having little wholesome conversations with the cashier at the supermarket, or his mechanic, or even the person he’s on the phone to when sorting something out with the bank. My mum and aunt can chat to some random mum and their kid for a good 30 minutes in the shop using their true Irish waffle. It goes a long way, and when it’s with people you see often that it starts to build a sense of community.
Let me explain what I mean. I can go to that same Gail’s in Oxford and whenever that guy (we’ll call him Tom, GDPR init) is working there, I can say hey to him and have a bit of a catch up. For the duration that I sit in the shop, I will feel welcome. When I leave, Tom & I look at each other, wave, and deliver that hearty “Take care mate, see you soon” that lets me know I’m welcome back there at any time. That’s what comes from meaningful engagement. I think we can afford to be more like this with everyone we meet, but where it is felt the most is in that circle of people who you don’t see often or have a reason to know too well but they’re cool. People at the gym, baristas, mechanics, receptionists etc. If you’re always staring at the floor and rushing, you don’t engage with these people meaningfully and in doing so you consistently lose out on the one thing that matters most to virtually all of us — human interaction. We all want to feel acknowledged, like we matter. But that doesn’t happen until we acknowledge people and treat them like they matter.
When I visited New York last month, I was astounded by how open the culture felt. People wouldn’t think twice about interacting with you if they felt like it. One day I was at the subway station typing on my phone as I was checking if the passing train was mine. This guy in a hi-vis came up to me and said “You think you nice like that ’cause you typing without looking, huh?”. At first I felt mildly offended that the brother had gone out of his way to comment on my life. But then I realised that he wasn’t coming at me; he was just having a laugh. We laughed together about it and continued the joke, he helped me to find the right train, and we wished one another a good day as we went on. It dawned on me at this point that in New York it’s perfectly normal to interact with randomers as if they’re your friends. People don’t think twice about striking up a conversation for conversation’s sake, and that’s beautiful. New Yorkers were also very inviting. I was out front of our apartment having a smoke one day, and our neighbours were entering the front door. One of the ladies said “Hey, neighbour!” and invited me and my flatmates in for some wine and pizza. We got to know each other, laughed, shared culture, and they invited us to the pub that weekend to help us feel more welcome. Whenever I went home, I knew who the people in my building were and didn’t have to worry about awkward chats. These were new friends. It was, in fact, rare that anyone I had a decently long interaction with didn’t invite me to something they had going on. Because in New York, people have no qualms with simply appreciating other people.
Of course, the culture of being open was not unique to being nice. If you’re in someone’s way, being too loud, or spreading too wide on the subway, someone will usually let you know about it. Unlike in the UK, a lack of common sense is absolutely not tolerated in New York. People feel entitled to their feelings and they will show that. Anyhow, I had far more positive interactions than negative ones with strangers. Probably partly because I’m a British person, but also because you stop taking the stuff that seems negative so personally after a while. Strangers usually don’t intend to be mean, just blunt and honest. A refreshing contrast to British passive-aggression and scowls.
What is my point with this? That after some time, I began to feel more confident interacting with strangers, too. I don’t mind approaching a stranger to talk to them about something I find cool or interesting in the UK, but the threshold is much higher. I have to be feeling quite good or the thing must be quite interesting for me to go out of my way. In New York, it would come far more instinctively. I might draw a stranger into something I’m thinking or compliment them ad hoc just because it came into my head to do so. I felt more confident going to events and meeting new people because I wasn’t afraid to be shunned away or witness cliquiness. I truly believed people would take me in. After a month, I had met some solid people and built good relationships. Serendipity was through the roof. I can only imagine how much easier it must be to build a solid community of people in a year in New York, compared to somewhere like London.
This sense of community you can build with the people around you has measurable impacts as well. This is best expressed by the Roseto effect. A group of Italians living in Roseto, Italy migrated over a period of time to the US, building a town and naming it Roseto, Pennsylvania after their hometown. In the early days of this community, Stewart Wolf and a local Rosetan doctor both realised that despite heavy smoking, drinking, and a diet consisting mostly of meat, lard, and cheese, the Rosetans had no men with heart disease under 55, no heart attacks under the age of 47, and a 35% lower death rate than the nationwide average. The study period was seven years, finding out that genetics can’t have been responsible as many Rosetans also migrated to Bangor and had much higher rates of heart disease before 65 and death after 65 of natural causes. TLDR, what the long lives of those living in Roseto, Pennsylvania was put down to was community. There would often be three generations living and breaking bread in one household; people would stop by and have lengthy conversations on the street; the local Catholic church was attended by a vast majority of inhabitants regularly. Once the community became more Americanised, these benefits disappeared within a single generation, and Roseto became like everywhere else as urbanisation seeped into it.
Nowadays, we see health as an individual phenomenon. It’s all about what you can do to stay healthy. But humans are social animals, so it’s myopic to ignore health from a communal perspective. As children of the water, we hear our parents, aunties, and uncles talk about how back home, we don’t encounter lots of the problems we have here. How when they go back home, they feel healthier and happier. Because it’s where their community is. Roseto is a perfect example of why having a sense of community, people we can stop and talk to about how things are going, break bread, and embrace commonality with is key. It impacts not only your quality of life, but your literal lifespan. In the context of this article, having meaningful engagement with the people around you can help you build a community of people wherever you go, and in particular where you go to regularly. It very much depends on where you go, but in open spaces in London (Hyde Park, Oxford Street) there feels like far less of a community, partly because their population consists of a few locals and a continuous rotation of visitors. But there’s room for repetition everywhere. The same people work at the shops, or maintain the parks, or drive the buses. You can even step into somewhere like a Soho House (this article is not sponsored but trust me, I want that membership) and you have a place that’s slightly ahead of the curve in terms of its communal feel. Both New York and London have the phenomenon of rotating visitors and less locals in their ‘centres’, they’re metropolitan cities. The difference is that when you have a culture as private and shameful as London’s, you feel as if you pass through the environment, as opposed to having the gravitational pull that keeps you orbiting somewhere like New York. That gravitational pull lies in the people more than anything. When you have people who treat you like you matter, who take your humanity very seriously, that keeps you attracted to its core.
Let me double click on the point I mentioned earlier about the commerical nature of London. London has been one of the centres of industrial growth since the beginning of the revolution. People would flock into the centre to do business and profiteer. The result is a culture which is all about business. Set this into a wider Western context of the proliferation of individualism since the 80s and we witness a neoliberal dream. People concerned with themselves. People who believe that being their best selves are contingent on material factors like money, or its derivatives. People who are simply too busy and productive to acknowledge ‘BS’. Most of us are responsible for being like this at times. Sometimes I see my Dad making small talk with a stranger and I mutter to myself that he’s overdoing it, or that he’s wasting time, or that the conversation is pointless. And maybe all of those things were true. But so what? Not everything needs to have a point. Sometimes you can sit around and loaf and be bored. You can spare a few minutes to ask another human being how they’re actually doing. To acknowledge that everyone else is just as important as we are. Your bag and all is great, but don’t lose sight of the fact that the only thing we truly have here is other people.
My question to you, then, is how will you cultivate that sense of community where you are? Be it in London or wherever you live, if it doesn’t already exist there. Will you stop to have meaningful conversations with people when you have a chance? Ask them how they are, how they’ve been, if they’re excited for winter. Lots of people have boring days full of work and are bursting for conversation, and you can really tell by some people’s responses to you caring for them. I’ll say it one more time, sometimes you’re that person having a shit day, and you want nothing more than for someone to give a shit how you’re doing. Even a random stranger can show that type of kindness in this world. How will you acknowledge people as humans with their own stories, with interesting things to say, with stuff going on that feels the same as yours. Stop and talk with a stranger this week. Catch up with someone you haven’t seen in a while. Invite someone you don’t know too well to an event that you’ve got going on. Take New York as a guidebook if you’re in London. I trust you will find your community.
More on the Roseto effect here: http://www.boonewheeler.com/2019/01/24/case-study-the-roseto-effect/
I got it from Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers. A great book on demonstrating that our lives are impacted far less by our individual will and being than we actually think.
