I stood for twenty minutes on the subway last week with an empty seat in front of me the whole way.
I do this all the time, and if you take the TTC downtown you have watched other people do it too, standing by the doors, holding the pole, while perfectly good seats sit there empty between stations.
Ask me why and I have answers ready. My legs are fine. I don’t feel like being crammed between two strangers. Someone might get on who needs it more than I do. I’ve got my headphones on and I’m happy where I am. My backpack would have to come off and go on my lap or the floor. And once I’m down there, getting up at my stop means squeezing past whoever ended up beside me.
Not one of those is “I don’t want to sit.” Every one of them is a cost around the sitting.
Then sometimes I do sit down. And about ten seconds later I think: why didn’t I do that twenty minutes ago.
The seat was never the problem. It was free the whole time. What kept me standing was a pile of small imagined costs, and not one of them survived contact with sitting down.
You know the feeling from somewhere else. There’s an email sitting in your inbox you have been avoiding for four days. It isn’t a hard email. When you finally open it you answer it in ninety seconds and wonder what the four days were about. The email never got easier. Your estimate of it was wrong, and there was no way to discover that without doing the thing.
People don’t avoid the thing. They avoid what they think surrounds the thing.
I come back to that every time someone tells me residents don’t report problems because they don’t care.
Every city has a way to report. The seat is empty, it has been empty for years, and people walk straight past it the way I walk past a seat with my bag still on my shoulder. They are running a calculation nobody at the city ever sees. How long is this going to take. Do I need to know which department. Will anyone read it. Will somebody call me back. Do I have to give my name to complain about my own street.
None of that is apathy. That’s a person pricing the cost of sitting down.
And they price it the way I price the seat, which is to say badly, because the only way to learn it was cheap is to have already done it. So they keep standing, and the silence on the other end confirms they were right to.
So the work was never a better form. It was making every one of those small costs vanish before anyone has to guess at them. A photo. Thirty seconds. You get told what happened. Nothing to know, nothing to chase, nothing to commit to.
The thing people say most often the first time they use it is the same thing I say when I finally sit down. Why didn’t I do this earlier.
