The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City

1. People’s Protective Bubbles Are Okay

I hear people complain that, for instance, in this city, people don’t say hi on the street or make eye contact on the subway. And people try to remedy this problem by doing public art projects that are meant to rouse the bourgeoisie from their slumber. But that’s ridiculous! It’s perfectly reasonable for people not to want to see your dance performance when they are coming home from work. People are on the subway because they’re getting from one place to another, and for all you know, they’re coming from a job that involves interacting with lots and lots of people, and going to a home where there’s a family where they’re going to interact with lots more people. And the subway’s the one place where they can have some quiet time, get some reading done, not have to smile, not have to make eye contact. That’s what a city is: a city is a place where you can be alone in public, and where you have that right. It’s necessary to screen people out. It would be overwhelming if you had to perceive every single person on a crowded subway car in the fullness of their humanity. It would be completely paralyzing. You couldn’t function. So don’t try to fix this. There is no problem.

2. How to Make Friends in a New City

If you’re just finishing school—maybe you’re in your early twenties, maybe you’re moving to a new city—you need to make friends. The very most important thing to know is that this isn’t easy. It’s really easy to make friends when you’re a child, and it’s really easy to make friends in high school and in college. And for a lot of people, I think, it’s a real shock to discover that making friends doesn’t take care of itself in adulthood. When you come to university you’re crammed together with a couple of thousand people who are around your age and who share a bunch of stuff in common with you, and most important, are at that very same moment also looking for new friends. In this sort of situation, it would take a lot of conscious effort to end up not having friends. But adult life isn’t like that. You may move to a new city, maybe for a job that doesn’t easily put you into contact with a lot of people with whom you have much in common. So what that means is that it’s work, and maybe for the first time in your life you have to actually take making friends on as a project. I knew so many people around that stage of life who suddenly found themselves isolated and couldn’t understand why, and had never thought of making friends as something they had to bring conscious effort to.

If you see making friends as a project, you can understand that there will be efforts and costs and risks. You have to go to functions that you don’t exactly feel like going to, you have to stick your neck out and make gestures that are embarrassing or can make you feel vulnerable. You’ll have to spend time with people who initially seem interesting but then turn out not to be. But all those things are okay if you see them as the costs involved in a project.

It’s useful to identify what you like to do, because friends are the people with whom you can do those things. So if you like to cook, you might take a cooking class and meet people who are interested in cooking. Or if what you like to do is go drink in bars, then find people who want to drink in bars with you. If you like to watch television and make fun of it, find other people who want to do that. It’s useful to remember that friendship needs an activity associated with it.

If you’re the ambitious sort, you can try to create your own world around you, and maybe have a party at your house every two weeks. I think Andy Warhol’s grandmother gave him similar advice. This gets you more than friends—it can create a whole community. I’ll say it takes a certain kind of person to do this, though. But if you can do it—if you can put yourself at the center of something—it really works.

When I came to Toronto, here’s what I liked to do: I liked drinking in bars and I liked thinking about the Internet. This was at a time when thinking about the Internet wasn’t so popular, but drinking in bars was, so I just started a club, and I put out the word, and I invited other people. I was the only person at my organization at the time who was really interested in thinking about the Internet. It was at a time when sort of every organization hired one person to be their web guy. So there were all these lonely, isolated web guys scattered around the city, and we started a biweekly bar night. I was completely new in town, but just by starting something like that, you really put yourself in the center of all kinds of things. Being a host—it’s a really super-valuable service that a lot of people are disinclined to do, and if you can do it, it’s a great way to meet people.

3. The Uniqlo Game

There’s an online game which I love—from, of all places, a Japanese clothing company called Uniqlo. The game has a fast-paced pop culture feel to it. There is a grid of Uniqlo logos on the screen, and you manipulate them in different ways. You can make big ones or little ones. You can chop them up or merge them together. You can make them disappear. It’s a multiplayer game. All they tell you about the players is their sign-in name and what country they’re from, so you and someone in France and someone in Korea and someone in the United States, all of indeterminate age and gender, are manipulating these shared sets of blocks.

The genius of the game, to me, is that there’s no chat area. There’s no way you can send messages to the other players. You can only communicate by dragging these logos around. It’s so interesting in the context of that to think, Can I make this person in Korea like me? Can I flatter this person in France by echoing the moves that they’re making on this grid? Can I do something terribly mischievous in a way that won’t be perceived as hostile, or can I do something hostile in a way that will be?

I like playing this game a lot.

4. Going to the Gym

One idea that came up a lot around the time I was in college was that some ideas or opinions were social constructions. So, for instance, if you could show that ideals of female beauty were something that society had created, then you could also show that these ideals aren’t something that people naturally feel, but rather they’re a brainwashing tool created by society—in this case to perpetuate the patriarchal hegemony.

Another example of this: I read a book a little while ago which made the point that while we worry a lot about status, maybe we shouldn’t, since after all, the things that are associated with status in our society aren’t associated with status in other societies right now, and weren’t associated with status historically in other societies, so really it’s all arbitrary. Today, being thin and having strong analytic skills are valued, whereas in another society being a fast runner would have been important, or in another one, obesity was a sign of status. The author sort of concludes, Why worry?

But all that stuff’s crazy! Just because something’s socially constructed, doesn’t mean it’s not real. I mean, we can show that every society has a different set of standards for feminine beauty, and that every society has different sets of standards for status, but it’s equally remarkable that every society does have standards for feminine beauty, and does have standards for status. We’re humans. We exist in societies. We create cultures. And these cultures may be different from each other, with different beliefs, but they’re who we are. There’s not something more real to discover about us if you take all that away. A human who doesn’t exist in a culture isn’t somehow more true. In fact, I think a human who doesn’t exist in a culture—that’s not what a human is. I exist in the culture that I exist in, and I can know that other cultures see status in different ways, but I will be swayed by the ideas of status that affect mine. I can know that other cultures have different standards of feminine beauty and still be attracted by the standards of feminine beauty that exist in