The New York Attitude
The New York attitude is a lot more complicated than simple rudeness. According to a local, it’s a mixture of being tough, brave, on your toes, jaded, overworked and intensely focused. Who needs to be pulled into a conversation or potential conflict with a crazy person. Why would I want to be waylaid with small talk when this 15-minute commute is the only time I have to myself all day?
But beneath all those jaded exteriors where no one is making eye contact, beneath all those masks, there is a sense that those who live in New York are all in this together…whether waiting for the next train rerouting, watching the homeless man tap-dancing through the subway car or waiting for the next 9/11.
One evening I sat next to a twenty-something on the subway who was reading a Chiang Mai Thailand guidebook. When I asked if she was traveling there (so much for not talking to subway riders) she flashed a quick smile and asked if we had been there. We just got back from Thailand a month ago, we said. Then she wanted to know which neighborhood we lived in in Brooklyn (usually the first question you get). She wanted to know if we had any suggestions for a guesthouse with it’s own bathroom. Bob referred her to a place he had stayed that also offered reasonable mountain hiking tours among the indigenous villages…just what she wanted. Have a great time, we said as she got off in her Brooklyn Heights neighborhood.
I think the tough outer shell that many New Yorkers adopt is out of necessity. How else to keep your sanity intact in a city that’s rife with all sorts of people. Busy, overworked, highly focused and goal-oriented locals must balance a skittish energy with surviving in a city where it is difficult to succeed…where just the apartment rent will often suck as much as three fourths of their income.
Service workers are efficient and task oriented and come off to us friendly Left Coasters as downright cold. On the other hand, when I want to be outside our apartment sometimes I will sit on the stoop and read the paper. To my surprise, about 30% of the people walking by will look up and say good morning or good afternoon. But then I am in their neighborhood. On a certain level I have some sort of an identity.
People in big cities in other countries of the world do not seem as cold, distant and rude, Bob and I say to each other…but then I think that even though we often wish service workers in other countries would be given training in customer service, there is not the added pressure coming from the efficiency ethic in those cities…and as a whole the people are ethnically homogenous so that social interactions are already predictable, easy and nonthreatening.
But this is my take and not Bob’s. Bob thinks that it is a learned, conditioned behavior and has a cascading effect. If people are nasty to you several times each day then it puts you in a nasty mood (fragile, friable and ultimately bitchy) and it snowballs from there…like coming home and kicking the dog when someone at work yells at you. Anyone with any other ideas?
Tags: Culture, New York City, USA
Zoe