Connector Field Notes #9

Sitting on a friend’s couch chatting is actually a great social activity

I ran into a friend I hadn't seen in a while at an event on a recent Friday night. She lives nearby and we usually go on lunch walks, but she had been traveling a lot lately. We had texted here and there, but our schedules hadn’t lined up for our walks at all.

The day after we saw each other at the event, she texted me on her way home to ask if I wanted to come over and just hang out for a bit. I was out running errands down the street from her and the timing worked out perfectly. We got to catch up in person for an hour or so, spending unstructured time chatting on her couch.

We weren't rushed, we weren't going somewhere or doing something, we had the time and space to just be. The experience highlighted something I had just been reading about in an article about unstructured hangouts- why they're less common nowadays, why they're great, and how to get them back. (Check out Hobbyist Academia #44 for more.)

Playing nice on planes

Bad behavior among plane passengers is usually what makes the clickbait social media headlines- stolen seats, pungent meals, hogged arm rests.

But on a recent ordinary flight, I observed multiple small moments of kindness, courtesy, and connection between strangers temporarily coexisting in close quarters. The woman who offered extra space on her tray table to the man sitting next to her, people passing drinks and snacks from the flight attendant down the aisle, the person in the window seat who asked the person in the middle if they had a preference for the window shade.

Perhaps everyone was feeling a particular sense of shared vulnerability after recent flight safety incidents, or perhaps there is more good than bad if we look beyond the online rage that feeds the algorithm.

“Not famous but known.”

PopUp Bagels opened in Boston recently- the NYC bagel shop with the slogan "not famous but known." Known it is, indeed. This place has a perpetual line. The bagels come in 5 flavors, always hot, never toasted, not sliced. You rip and dip into the schmear, which comes in plain or scallion.

The whole process of ordering and receiving your bagels is very efficient, few words required. And yet, there is this unspoken connection with the staff and the other customers. You are all here participating in this sacred ritual of trying the bagels everyone is talking about.

Now, in a digital world, some amount of that talking is of course happening online and on social media. But it’s also happening offline, which is how I found out about the bagels in the first place.

It's a word of mouth kind of thing. One that certainly would not function the way it does if the bagels weren’t also actually delicious. But they are, and the product speaks for itself, so to speak.