There’s a saying among my more condescending New York friends: West Coast nice, East Coast kind.
There’s a lot to unpack.
Having spent half the year since moving to a small town in California figuring out whether the corn dog line at the Tuesday farmer’s market is worth the wait and the other half figuring out which grocery store checkout line is fastest (an unknowable function of length, average advanced age, and paying-in-change loquaciousness).
This is because cities are just an agglomeration of lines (“queues” as the Brits would say). Traffic, the subway, grocery stores, plasma donation centers, you name it, all boil down to systems focused on getting people where and what they want in an ordered way.
But not all lines are the same.
Chuck Klosterman quipped upon moving to Portland, “there’s no sales tax but there is a conversation tax.” This town embodies this, alongside lots and lots of actual fiscal taxes, of course, because California. I learned social norms growing up in NYC, where efficiency is necessary to accommodate 29,000 people per square mile. Small talk and speed limits are a luxury, a cost no one living off the G train can afford let alone a rudeness we’d never impose on others.
So, when confronted by small talk, all I can think is “In this economy?”
But it turns out the pleonasm (ed. we get it, you read The New Yorker) of small-town interactions serves a useful, dare I say essential, function. In Gotham, most people I walk by I may never see again. Here there’s only so many places to buy milk.
All it takes is one sociopath to completely upset the herd in these smaller locales, while in a bigger population this becomes background radiation. Repeat interactions with the same people require consistent pro-social signals to maintain and strengthen community ties.
Like sales tax paying for pothole repair, paying the “conversation tax” means even a noob can rely on free help from a neighbor to, say, move a discarded wine fridge.
Kurt Vonnegut once told NPR that his wife asked why he would go buy a single envelope every time he sent a letter: “[Y]ou’re not a poor man…go online and buy a hundred.” To which he explained, he’s not buying an envelope – he’s going out and meeting people, eyeing “some great looking babes,” giving thumbs up to a passing fire truck, asking a woman about her dog…he was affirming the “extended family” of community.
“...human beings need all the relatives they can get — as possible donors or receivers not necessarily of love, but of common decency.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick (prologue)
Socially, every benefit comes with a tradeoff. You pay a toll to drive the HOV lane and dust those right lane goobers. So I’m coming to terms with driving below the speed limit, socially speaking, because if I have a blowout on the highway, it’s more likely another driver will pull over to help change a tire.