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You Aren’t In the Crowd, You Are the Crowd

Monday, December 11, 2017 10:33

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“You Aren’t In the Crowd, You Are the Crowd”

by David Cain

For almost ten years I had a job that required incessant driving. I crossed the city by every possible route, often under time pressure. During one of the countless CBC radio interviews I absorbed during that period, the topic turned to coping with rush hour traffic. Someone on the panel offered a novel concept: “You’re not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic.”

Luckily, I was stuck in traffic at that moment, so I had plenty of time to ponder the thought. We tend to think of “traffic” as synonymous with “lots of cars in the way.” You’re trying to get somewhere so you can fulfill your responsibilities. Other parties have competing, perpendicular interests, and that slows you down. There’s you, and there’s traffic—traffic being the obstacle.

As obvious as it seems in hindsight, I hadn’t often thought of my own car as the anonymous, other car it always is to everyone else. It’s never anything but in the way, unless you’re me. And that’s a fact essential to understanding what the everyday problem of traffic actually is—we’re all trying to get home, and we’re all in the way.

Whenever I’m lucky enough to remember that I’m both sides of the problem, the afternoon rush hour experience transforms. It goes from from a zero-sum competition to a shared struggle. No longer feeling at odds with other drivers washes most of the unpleasantness out of the experience. Without indignation or competition, there’s room for an emotion that’s much more useful in slow-moving traffic: sympathy.

Ironically, it’s a lot more empowering to concern yourself with minimizing your impact on others than with how others ought to be minimizing their impact on you. I found that while I still had no power to make the other cars move, I did have the power to improve the experience of others, at least slightly: I could let people in, inch up to let someone turn right, and otherwise show fellow traffic-creators that I cared how things went for them. I could offer to others what I couldn’t make others offer me.

When you see everyone present as both the creator and victim of the scourge of heavy traffic, patience and understanding towards other members of the crowd becomes the natural response, and that makes everything about the experience easier. Nothing about the situation itself has to change, just a little shift in mentality—to us, from you vs them. Everyone present in a given afternoon snarl has the same goal, and the same adversary—not other cars, but rather the impersonal, blameless phenomenon that happens when that many people share a completely reasonable desire to go home.

Traffic is only one form of crowd though. I try to remember to cultivate the “us” feeling (you might call it “us-consciousness”) whenever I notice my own annoyance at long lines, crowded buses, sold-out tickets, occupied gym equipment, or packed overhead bins on airplanes. It’s all okay, and it needs to be, because in our own ways we are constantly playing the part of the “other” to others. If it’s right that you want this and sometimes get it, it’s right that others want it and sometimes get it. So what’s the annoyance all about?

As far as I can tell there are no downsides to this “us” mentality. It removes much of the unpleasantness of contending with a crowd, without adding any additional work, aside from the work of imagining yourself as the other to those others.

It’s easy to forget that possibility, however, and slip back into an adversarial relationship to the crowd. I forget it constantly, especially while driving, and it’s possible the me vs them mentality will always be the first place my mind goes when I run afoul of a crowd. But whenever I remember to see myself as an undifferentiated part of that crowd, it’s clear which mentality is better for everyone.

This moment of forgetting always begins with a thought that you’re somehow different, morally speaking, than the rest of the crowd. That guy didn’t signal when he changed lanes. I always signal. That car could’ve made the light—I would’ve been quicker. I am always very efficient with overhead bin space.

We often differ in our style of pursuing what we want, and in which other styles irritate us most easily. Each of us has very specific ideas about the proper way to change lanes, order a sandwich, stack groceries on a conveyor, move through a concert crowd, and back out of a parking spot, oblivious that we are frequently, possibly at this very moment, an irksome “other person” to some other person.

When you interpret those style differences as important points of contention, you lose the benefit of us-consciousness, because you lose sight of the much more significant way in which you’re the same. After all, a crowd is nothing but the collection of people who showed up with the same idea you did.”

- http://www.raptitude.com/

Source: http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2017/12/you-arent-in-crowd-you-are-crowd.html

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