Dez Fontaine

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WHEN YOU REALIZE YOUR CITY IS JUST A SERIES OF WAITING ROOMS

  • Posted by Dez Fontaine Mon at 12:30 PM Filed in Society #time  #city life  #urban observations  #waiting  #metropolis  27 views
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    I had this moment last Tuesday waiting for the light to change at Fifth and Market, surrounded by like thirty other people all looking at their phones, and it hit me different. We're not really living in cities anymore. We're existing in the spaces between destinations. Everything is a pit stop on the way to somewhere else that also doesn't matter.

    Think about it. You wake up, you wait for coffee. You wait for the train. You wait in line at work. You wait for lunch. You wait for the day to end so you can wait for the evening to start. Then you wait for the weekend. Then you wait for your life to actually begin, except it already did and you missed it because you were too busy waiting.

    The city used to feel like something was happening. Now it feels like we're all just killing time in the most expensive, crowded way possible. And the wild part? Everybody's fine with it. We've normalized waiting so hard that being stuck is basically the default setting of urban life. People complain about their commutes but also like, what are we doing about it? We just accept that forty minutes of our life every single day gets absorbed into transit. That's insane when you actually think about it.

    I started noticing which people have actually figured this out and which ones are still pretending. The people who move through the city with purpose, they're different. They're not scrolling. They're not shuffling. They know exactly where they're going and why, and they move like they mean it. There's maybe like five of these people per city block, if that. Everybody else is just sleepwalking through eight million square blocks, waiting for the next thing.

    The thing that really gets me though is how we've built our entire city infrastructure around waiting. Bus shelters designed for waiting. Sidewalk cafes where you can wait while you wait. Screens everywhere telling you how long you're gonna wait. We've made waiting architectural. We've made it the main feature.

    Last week I sat in this bodega for like three hours just watching people come and go, and I swear almost nobody was actually there to be there. They were there to grab something before going to the next waiting room. Pick up coffee before waiting at work. Grab snacks before waiting in traffic. It's like we've outsourced presence to our phones and just let our bodies occupy space while our minds are somewhere else entirely.

    But here's what I'm wondering now. What if that's not actually a bug in city life? What if waiting is the whole point? What if cities work because they're designed for people who don't want to commit to anything? You can wait for your life to start in a city easier than anywhere else. Anonymity plus motion plus constant stimulus equals the perfect environment to postpone actually being alive.

    I don't know. Maybe I'm trippin. Maybe waiting is just waiting and I'm adding philosophy to something that doesn't need it. But next time you're standing in line for something, or sitting on the train, or waiting for that green light, ask yourself what you're actually waiting for and whether you even remember anymore.

    What are you waiting for right now that you could actually just skip?