New Slow City by William Powers

Author:William Powers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New World Library

ONE EVENING, while I’m picking up some kimchi at the Korean grocer’s around the corner from our apartment, a pair of bar-hopping young women come in behind me. One of them approaches me and says: “Like that hat.”

I touch the beret on my head. Chartreuse plaid. It’s Melissa’s, and I threw it on because it was the first thing at hand as I walked out.

“Thanks,” I say, realizing the hat unintentionally endows me with metrosexual cred. She tells me about a similar hat she has and then asks, “By the way, do you like tea?”

I tell her I’m more of a coffee guy.

“Oh, but teeaaa,” she says, stretching out the word, her eyes alight. “I work at David’s Tea. It’s new here on Bleecker.”

“Great,” I say.

“Hey, since I work there, I can get you a free tea anytime. We have a thousand varieties. I could tell by that hat that you’d like something different. Just drop my name if I’m not there, and you’ll get your tea.”

I’m beginning to get an uncomfortable feeling. She’s obviously out with her friend, partying, so why is she pushing a tea habit on me?

“Do you want to come by tomorrow?”

I tell her I’ll try. We chat for another minute about the Village bar scene, and then I leave the shop.

On the walk back home, it fully hits me that her offer was calculated. She was selling tea. And yet, at the same time, she really did seem authentically interested in the hat and in talking about local bars. She didn’t fake a human connection, but she used it. Afterward, I realize I had sensed her awkwardness: she knew what she was doing and did it reluctantly.

Later, after some online research, I discover that this is a trend. Some companies pay their employees to nonchalantly offer samples or discounts at any time during ordinary social interactions. Employees are rewarded with “points” toward raises and promotions, and if less than, say, ten people come in and mention your name during a month, you can be demoted. The worker’s “free time” — and the space of casual encounters — is thus co-opted by the marketplace.

Melissa and I realize our Slow City tools need sharpening. And that includes our “smart filters.”

Smart-filtering is another practice — along with living at the third story, urban sanctuaries, savoring food, and coming into Natural Time — that has developed in our Slow Year. It arose from something Pablo Picasso once said: that he would not mind imprisonment in solitary confinement because he could spend years contentedly enjoying the light patterns made by tightening and loosening the muscles of his closed eyes. Okay, he’s Picasso, and he gets to be weird like that, right? Nevertheless, Melissa and I find it useful to smart-filter the city’s advertising on taxi tops, buses, phone booths, and the billboards that increasingly appear as giant digital screens. We simply squint our eyes a little and — voila! — said advertisement is transformed into a pleasant blur of shape and color.

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