Our Menu Options Have Changed

Who we tend to be to one another.

I find myself in a funny moment. I probably spend more of each day interacting with people than at any other moment in my life. But something is different about these interactions. As a middle-aged dad with a job and grandiose artistic ambitions, free time is scarce.

Friends have moved away. The city is expensive. This is bad for the things that should matter to me. I’m a stranger, a coworker and a customer for more of my waking hours than anything else, even a father or a husband.

Beyond this personal midlife red-shift, I hear tell of a slip away from friendship in the broader world. People cite statistics to this effect, proving loneliness like the weather. At the same time, I spend more time in screens, which remove me from in-person conversation. They often leave me lost in a buzz of vague demands where urgent priorities mingle easily with pointless distraction.

It makes me think of who I’ve been to others, and who I am to them these days.

Hey, stranger

To be a stranger is erotic, though it’s also a crushing disadvantage. In big cities, the atmosphere of eroticism and opportunism can overcome those disadvantages. In a small town, they may straight-up murder you for your charm.

Customer services

To be a customer is to be quite entitled to a few specific things. Just don’t push it.

Co-worker

This is someone who’s necessarily not a friend, but to whom one is unfailingly friendly. The distinction between this and a friend stings at going-away drinks where the departing coworker gets emotional. They want it to have meant something. But it's too late. The law is clear as glass and stiff as steel: Garbage in, garbage out.

Colleague

This one is funny. I call my boss and the occasional employees I’ve had colleagues, mostly because I despise authority while working in rigidly hierarchical organizations.

It’s a lie. Really, this is a customer situation. Your boss is your customer, and you’re the customer of the people who work for you.

The worst is when I colleague it about people with whom I might have been great friends, if only time, money and the crushing compromises demanded by each had allowed.

The downgrade

This is subtle, but it lingers like a slap. A friend devolves to an acquaintance, or a colleague. A colleague becomes a former co-worker. Or a friend becomes a stranger. You’re an ex. You’re kind of a problem. You see how thin it was all along. Something happens, and you’re no longer a customer to the insurance company, but a case. Don’t forget your case number. You’re a sad sack asking for a favor.

The upgrade

People surprise you. This is also subtle. It’s nice, but makes me feel ashamed when I didn’t see it coming. Maybe the other person felt weaker than they let on when I was kind. Maybe I was reflexively dismissive of the situation, and of them. Maybe they liked me more than I can understand, for reasons that may never even occur to me.

Fellow customers

I think that one of the real tragedies of my lifetime is the escalating dominance of customer-hood as the default mode of interaction.

Everyone is hustling. There’s a sense of being customers of one another. A customer isn’t a citizen. It’s not a neighbor. It’s not a friend.

A world in which we’re all judged on the quality of our services is a nasty, insecure place. A world in which we all judge others on the quality of their services can only hold as much empathy as the market requires.

Fake friendship

The barista at the coffee chain wants to know your name. The place where you bought a chair insists on an extensive one-way email relationship. I never wanted these friends. I just wanted a coffee and a place to sit while I drank it. Oh, you’re sorry to see me go? Get off me.

A plague of flaking

Making plans has gotten harder. People cancel. They flake. Some of it is the sense that plans matter less, because everyone is always somewhat available anyway online. Among the middle-aged it’s exhaustion, and contingencies in the form of shifting work commitments, family demands and health.

More than in other historical moments, there’s a constant pressure on people. There are shrill demands being made every time I check my email or look up the weather on my phone. Ads, politics, news and other exaggerated provocations. And even when the actual demands are gone, their presence remains as a constant ghost-nudge pressing on the few empty hours.

The compulsive phone checking and the sense that there’s always something left undone amounts to a cloud of faceless authority, extracting importance from what we would freely choose to do. It detracts from our freedom. We cancel plans with friends and withdraw from other pleasurable activities because we feel less in control of our own time. Our time, if it is ours, is owed elsewhere. Where? Oh let me get out my to-do list.

Customers of the universe?

The problem with being a customer is that it necessarily pretends that the confounding paradoxes of human desire and human psychology don’t exist. It ignores the problem that animates all religions, namely that Something’s Wrong.

Emphasizing customers and customer service doesn’t change anything. Something is still fundamentally wrong with human existence. And while it spills out everywhere, it tends to squirt most spectacularly wherever we pretend nothing’s wrong.

When people go overboard with angry Yelp or Amazon reviews, it seems the problem isn’t with the company or the service provider. They’re angry at their own insignificance or their own insatiability. They’re angry at something for which there’s no recourse. And the better you make the company at serving the customers, the worse the customers get in this regard.

They’re angry at the universe. But being a customer of G-d is a nightmare. Gripe to the priesthood, the rabbis, imams and gurus. They’re angry that there is no recourse. In response, they get cookie-cutter words of wisdom from a noreply email address.

Relating to G-d or an impersonal universe is a different relationship, one impossible for a customer.

Gift? tax?

A year into this essay project, my subscribers are mostly my friends. I find it awkward (see January’s “The Tackiness of Asking You for Money”). It makes something that should be freely given in the spirit of a gift feel like a tax. It makes me feel simultaneously like a dubious friend and an unpopular consumer good.

Survival among the customers

I was at a party the other night talking to an intelligent, earnest woman. And she uttered her modus operandi: “never say a bad word.” I nodded. Although it chafes against my natural impulses, it’s something I try to abide by in my life as a stranger, colleague and coworker.

It’s a smart strategy, though it argues against honesty. It’s good advice for an unsafe place. But how did decent, intelligent people end up in a place so unsafe?

Imagining better

Relationships take their toll. They shape our sense of what we can hope for, wish for and actively pursue. And when that sense gets narrow enough, as it sometimes does for me, I can feel trapped and doomed.

This is a counterintuitive point: What’s wrong with how we see, think and know begins with how we treat each other.

Selected bibliography

The Tackiness of Asking You for Money

SPECIAL BONUS!

LET’S CATCH UP

- a refresher kit for the middle aged (simply check off each one and then list the things you have to do the next day)

Explain yourself

Pets equal/don’t equal children 

Not sad!!!

The last year has been…

Our wealthy friend

Kids? Kids okay?

The deal for me now… 

Real estate! Insurance!

Dead friends/Unmarried friends

Running late

Fleeting glance at youthful hopes and dreams

When she got married…

Was laid off/Gonna get laid off/Overworked

Happiness/health

Talking politics by accident!!

Childhood/Tax return

Parents dead/parents dying/Parents spending my inheritance

Moving/Renovating/Neighbor problems

Dying slowly is awesome!

Is cancer/At least it wasn’t cancer

Demanding spouse??? 

Bad to be born/Good to be born

Never talk about this/Always end up talking about this

Just keeps on like this I guess