The City While We Wait
When I was a kid, my sister and I would watch television shows back to back to back, usually Nick at Nite, Green Acres leading to Get Smart leading to Dragnet, eventually leading into something we really wanted to watch like Party of Five. My sister got to choose the shows on the hour and I got to choose the shows on the half hour, a diplomatic agreement. Being the oldest, she was better at negotiating than I was, but the result was that we saw a wide variety of television.
No matter how much time we spent in front of the TV, we also had time. We went outside often, or to the homes of friends and friends of friends, we did after school activities. Later in middle and high school came the draw to go home and talk to people you had just left at school on AIM, which felt like a delicious introduction into a technological world that could follow you home, but was still so limited. Your away message and the people you chose to talk to were part of the performance. The only things that could remove you from the public sphere for extended periods were music and video games, and even those had limits because you had to come up for air. You could not drag your desktop to the kitchen table, to the bathroom, or to a friend’s house. You had to unplug at some point.
I think television and occasional computer use taught me patience. I waited for shows. I tolerated downtime. I do not remember a hurried anxiousness that sprouted from nothing. I could call people or chat on AIM, but that was exactly what it was. Nothing followed me. Now everything follows me. There is nothing new about that observation, but I do not hear many people talk about what it means for civic life, especially in a city like New York.
A content creator I enjoy joked to Gen Z about their fascination with the 1990s, saying that if they really wanted the experience they should go wait for a bus without looking at their phones, stare at the ground for ten minutes, look at a tree, then go back to staring at the ground, sit after practice with nothing to do while a parent is late and simply exist in boredom. I remember that world vividly. Growing up, I remember waiting constantly and inventing microscopic ways to pass the time. If I had grown up in New York City, I imagine I would have had a very different landscape to busy my brain than the suburbs of Phoenix provided. I arrived in New York in 2005 and spent six years navigating the city before I owned a smartphone in 2011. Before that, waiting for public transit, standing on platforms, riding trains, sitting on benches, and walking sidewalks meant being present with strangers with nothing mediating the experience. I remember waiting together with people. I remember sharing space with strangers, noticing them, overhearing conversations, observing, and tolerating boredom in public across subway platforms, buses, sidewalks, playground benches, laundromats, and bodegas. In New York, I came to feel that waiting was not incidental. It felt like a shared civic act.
I felt how attention shaped public life in a dense city. Phones quietly changed that for me. New York used to feel like a place where unmediated time was unavoidable. Now it feels optional. I miss what we had. When I think about how screens change the way I experience waiting, boredom, and shared space, I cannot help but feel that it changes how New York works. I have the sense that a city like this depends on people being able to tolerate being present with strangers in public, and I notice that I am not as good at that as I used to be. The subway feels different to me. Public spaces feel quieter and more private. I see children in strollers with tablets. I watch adults anesthetize every pause with a screen, and I recognize myself in that too. This is not nostalgia and it is not alarmism. It is simply how it feels to notice that the way I fill downtime alters how I experience a place built on shared downtime. To me, New York is a city built on waiting in public with strangers, and when that waiting becomes private, I feel like something civic quietly disappears. Because we share so much physical space here, I encounter more people in a day than I ever did growing up.
Cities like this may be the last places where we are still forced to be around one another even as our attention retreats inward, and I find myself wondering what effect that inward turn has on how I experience other people and the place I live.
