So there I was, cruising home from preschool drop-off with coffee in hand and a pep in my step. Two young women walked towards me, side by side, taking up the width of the narrow sidewalk, and as they marched closer, I shifted as far right as I could so they could pass single-file on my left.
But whatever Unspoken Rules of Pedestrian Traffic the rest of us have agreed to, these ladies would not be abiding.
Instead, the woman on the right brushed past me, thwacking her shoulder forcefully into mine without so much as a glance my way. Onward they went, bulldozing through the family behind me, chatting as if none of us existed, their lateral tête-à-tête more important than sharing space with (or certainly acknowledging) anyone else on the sidewalk.
So as I rubbed my shoulder and continued home, I got to wondering—when exactly did we all become so selfish?
I live in San Francisco, where the billboards advertise startups, driverless cars glide by as you walk the dog, and where you overhear things like this.
Whether for you the city veers ridiculous or sublime, innovation is inarguably woven through its fabric. That embrace of progress—of the new—results in a place full of early adopters. It also means the rose loses its bloom early, too.
So with this as a preamble, I will tell you that for the better part of the last decade, my husband has been listening to me gripe about Uber and Lyft anytime we drive around this city.
My typical screed goes something like, Look at this f***ing a**hole double parked at an intersection!
Or, Why is this Lyft blocking our damn driveway, and where has the driver gone?
Somewhere in there, I’ll inevitably yell that these two apps have made us all more selfish. In fact, on days when I’m really on one (read: the traffic is unbearable), my rant will extend to all apps that are part of the on-demand economy. You know, the ones that shop for your groceries and deliver your food and generally ensure that anything you want—whether it’s a burger or a pedicure or a black tie gown—can all be delivered to you immediately, if not sooner, please and thank you.
But if one rant leads to another, in my neurotic mind it also leads to self-reflection, and after thinking about this particular essay for the last three years (literally), I felt like it was time to dig to the root of my beef and figure out what exactly I’m so worked up about. Especially because—surprise, surprise—I’m just as complicit as anyone else.
Selfish
/ˈselfiSH/ · adjective
Lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure.
2010 B.T.A. (Before the Apps)
If I close my eyes and return to a time when Postmates was a courier service and Uber’s fleet consisted only of black town cars, I can still vaguely remember The Before.
Before every last person waiting for anything, anywhere used screens and headphones to mute the outside world for numbing, illusory solitude.
Before we no longer tolerated the planning and occasional delays of public transportation, and instead summoned cars to our doors (for you and you alone!); thousands of cars similarly summoned in cities here and there, roads clogged, traffic worse than ever.
Before we sent hurried, faceless people to shop for groceries on our behalf. (People who will inevitably buy us 2 pounds of lemons when we asked for 2 limes.)
Before we crashed into people on sidewalks without acknowledging we did.
But here in the Year of Our Meta Overlord 2023 S.T.U. (that’s “Screen Time’s Up”), these things are part of our reality—to varying degrees, in myriad combinations, and as much as we let them, sure, but here we are all the same. (My on-demand drug of choice? The convenience of ordering absolutely anything I need from Amazon, and having it show up one to two days later. I can live without ride-sharing. I gave up on grocery delivery long ago. But ugh, Prime is my Achilles heel.)
As I’ve lately watched pedestrians speed up to enter a crosswalk before a car can beat them to it (me first!), and the cars speed up in kind to beat the pedestrians (no, ME first!); as I can Buy now with 1-click and Get it today by 10pm; and as everything, everywhere is built to cater to my every last whim, I can’t help but conclude that selfishness has infiltrated how we think and how we live.
What does it look like? Well, beyond people literally running in front of my moving car so they don’t have to wait at an intersection, I know I’m a little less patient at times. Chalk it up to parenthood, life circumstances, whatever, but I must also turn a lens onto the immediacy present in my technological life. Is it not the same for you? In what scenario does a genie in your pocket not mar your relationship with waiting and needing? (You ain’t never had a friend like me, indeed.)
Maybe it was always going to be this way. Just the other day, as I walked my daughter to school and she asked why there was trash all over the ground at a park near our house, I explained the concept of a Litter Bug and ended up in a cultural critique, dissecting the Americanness of it all. You know, I told her, in Korea, there are hardly any trash cans in public, yet the streets are very clean. People there carry their trash around with them, all day if they have to, until they can throw it away properly. Because they understand that it’s better for the community if everyone does their part.
Which is to say—we were a culture that veered selfish anyway. The apps—and yes, our phones generally—were the nail in the coffin.
Then there’s the human capital aspect eroding an additional layer of our humanity. For any of these apps to work, there’s an enormous number of people required: the box packers, the food runners, the delivery and car service drivers. If you could map the billions of interpersonal transactions between every user and every worker, in every app, what do you think the average customer interaction would be? My guess is it falls somewhere between “Customer thanked me,” and “It was like I was invisible.”
And when you render other humans invisible—when they are but a cog in the wheel to your own gratification—it is a slippery slope to no longer thinking about them at all.
(Here’s the disclaimer today’s Internet requires: I could lay down another 1000 words on the accessibility of on-demand apps; suffice to say, here are 32: having the means to pay $10 in delivery fees, a service fee, and gratuity, all to get takeout to your door while the delivery person doesn’t have health insurance breaks my brain.)
Let me pause for a second. I don’t want my words to come across as an admonishment to anyone reading them. In fact, I know my anger comes from my own complicity, my fear that we’ve collectively let it all go too far and this is simply How It Will Be to Live from now on.
And yet, I’ve stewed over these words for a long time because I am worried about the decline of civility, of the recognition of the humanity we share, all for the sake of our individual convenience. All in the name of “progress.”
And—another level deeper—I wonder if the drumbeat of SELF CARE and its newly minted black sheep sister HUSTLE have contributed to the miasma. Have we crossed a delicate line in our pursuit of self-actualization and a good night’s sleep, and accidentally made our own lives worse at the expense of others? (After all, if you don’t have time to shop for groceries, is grocery delivery actually enhancing your life? Or is it an inadvertent mechanism to fill your plate with more of something else?)
In that vein, I am almost certain that the relationship between on-demand apps and productivity has grown equally toxic. If I no longer have to shop or think or wait for anything at all—in theory creating time and space in my day—our American culture demands to know what else can fill those empty hours.
(On a personal note, I will admit to becoming less bullish on productivity apps, because I realized they vastly altered my relationship to what productivity should look like in the first place. My own ruptured relationship with productivity in the preceding handful of years affected me as a parent, partner, friend, and all around functioning human. Which is to say: a too-high level of productivity turns you into a droid, and thus probably more selfish, because your robotic directive is to do more, create more, be more, all of your doing only in service of the self and some arbitrary, unattainable self-label of “super productive.”)
So what’s the remedy?
How do we fight against the collapse of our culture into a completely selfish, self-absorbed, inhumane place? Is it already a lost cause?
Well, noticing when others have fallen into the disconnection trap is step one, since it has a high likelihood of highlighting one’s own deficiencies. Only that day dawns to which we are awake, after all.
And as ever, I suspect that observing and nurturing one’s own sense of curiosity are the keys to maintaining our links to one another. No one will get this right 100% or even 75% of the time. But I like to imagine that if 50% of the time, we looked up and observed; if we took out the earbuds on half as many walks and listened—what would we see? What would we hear?
In drafting this piece, I poked around in search of studies that measured perceived societal selfishness alongside the rise of connectivity. While I couldn’t come across anything definitive, I did find this editorial from last summer, titled “Algorithms are making kids desperately unhappy.” This part really stuck out to me:
So many of us can barely remember when we didn’t have Amazon to fall back on when we needed a last-minute gift or when we waited by the radio for our favorite songs to play. Today, information, entertainment and connection are delivered to us on a conveyor belt, with less effort and exploration required of us than ever before.
A retreat from the rituals of discovery comes with a cost. We all know instinctively that the journeys in life matter just as much as the destinations. It’s in the wandering that we learn what we like and what we don’t like. The sweat to get the outcome makes the outcome more fulfilling.
This fall, I’ve been workshopping a few children’s picture book manuscripts alongside four other writers. Last week, our instructor talked about a book called The Art of Noticing, and shared a wonderful passage from it. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.
Here’s a transcript from the part of the interview we discussed, which was originally aired on the On Being podcast featuring poet Marie Howe. The italics and bold are my own:
MARIE: It hurts to be present, though. I ask my [writing] students every week to write 10 observations of the actual world. It’s very hard for them.
KRISTA, INTERVIEWER: Really?
MARIE: They really find it hard.
KRISTA: What do you mean? What is the assignment? 10 observations of their actual world?
MARIE: Just tell me what you saw this morning, like, in two lines. I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places. No metaphor. And to resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason.
We want to say, “It was like this; it was like that.” We want to look away.
…And then [the students] say, “Well, there’s nothing important enough.” And that's the whole thing. It’s the point.
KRISTA: It’s the this, right?
MARIE: Right, the this. But then this amazing thing happens, Krista. The fourth week or so, they come in and clinkety, clank, clank, clank, onto the table pours all this stuff. And it is so thrilling. Everybody can feel it. Everyone is just like, “Wow.” The slice of apple, and then that gleam of the knife, and the sound of the trashcan closing, and the maple tree outside, and the blue jay. I mean, it almost comes clanking into the room. And it’s just amazing.
KRISTA: On some basic level, what they’ve done is just engage with their senses.
MARIE: Yeah, and [they] have been present out of their minds and just noticing what’s around them, which—we don’t do.
…And then on the fifth or sixth week, I say, OK, use metaphors. And they don’t want to. They don’t know how. They’re like, Why would I? Why would I compare that to anything when it’s itself?
Exactly. Good question.
Maybe all these service apps have become our metaphors for living. We have taken the simplicity of the things in our lives that were fine, even beautiful as they were, and replaced them with programs that purport to make the simple thing better, to enhance the experience of it (often by eliminating the experience entirely).
But maybe going to the grocery store is the point. Maybe the shopping cart you select has a locked wheel, and when you extricate another from the lineup, the sound of metal crashing against itself makes your daughter cover her ears. Maybe in December, when the mounds of satsumas arrive, you notice their leaves are dewy and soft, Because, the old man who manages the produce section tells you, A local farm is supplying all the holiday citrus this year, and oranges will be delivered fresh every couple of days. Maybe in the pasta aisle, you say hello to the neighbor you’ve seen but never met, and learn your spouses are from the same town. Maybe you smile at a child in a stroller, because you overhear him debating whether vanilla or strawberry ice cream is preferable (Vanilla, kiddo—it will never fail you). Maybe you add a bar of chocolate from the cash wrap into the cart, a moment of mischief between you and your daughter (Don’t tell your dad, it’s our secret dessert before dinner), and you share bites of it together on the car ride home. Maybe she screams out, chocolate smeared across her face, that this, this right here, was the best day ever.
Why would I replace this with anything, when it could be itself?
Exactly. Good question.
Hi from DC! It's like you're in my brain! I've been sitting with these feelings too. So glad to have you on Substack, looking forward to reading more of your musings.
nice to see you here, victoria ❤️