One of my past awesome significant others, I found due to something like some of the awareness talked about here.
She'd made a post on a dating site, asking, simply, what was your favorite part of the city, and why.
I responded with something about the different atmospheres of rather small areas, where the transitions are, etc.
I won, and our first date was to be a lunch break from her science lab work on a weekend. But after lunch we played hooky, and walked all around town and talked for many hours, ending up sitting on a harbor wharf.
Where one of the boats we saw was a ferry to the Cape Cod area, which I suggested as our second date. We just explored it without plans or arrangements.
(Much later, her heightened awareness grew to realizing that she could do better than me, :) but we did have some shared understanding and values about the world, and a lot of that was about perceiving, like when on walks.)
For anybody interested in being more present while walking, I recommend photography.
You will become more aware of your surroundings if you look for cool things to photograph. I recomand using an actual camera, the quality of it is irrelevant. Using your phone will be a distraction since you open it to take a photo, but see a notification from x and then you will at least think about how to respond, even if you don’t open it.
I agree with the photography idea. I used to walk around Bombay with a camera just to shoot, which I might have missed on a general commute. With the improvement in phone cameras, I let go of everything since the iPhone 6. Of late, I have meaning to get back with an actual camera and start with street and landscape photography.
I’m jealous of three of my friends:
- A street photographer with a primary focus on London
- A worldwide landscape photographer from Nepal
- And travel photographer from Bangalore
They are all non-professionals, but their work is well-praised, and I won’t be surprised if you have seen them, too.
The idea of framing your view in pictures gives you the right amount of encouragement to walk a lot more. Recently, I walked about 15 km on a weekend, taking photos of the eerily empty weekends in San Francisco. https://www.instagram.com/p/CtpbIlJujAH/
Of course, my phone never makes a noise - no notifications.
Related to this: I have been working towards not carrying a phone around at all. Being a hyperconnected and reachable as we tend to be nowadays does not feel healthy. I recently set up a JMP Chat account so I can proxy SMS and calls to my XMPP account.
The experiment part (proxy to XMPP) is interesting. Here is how I did the crude and manual way.
- There are no social apps (Instagram, LinkedIn, etc) on my phone. I prune apps that I do not use, once a while and have set an arbitrary limit of less than 42 non-Apple apps on the phone. I will keep reducing that number and will negotiate my mind to less than 10.
- The first thing I did on any new installation is disable notification[1]. The only notification I have on the phone is the critical ones such as Health, Calendar. I have been doing this for more than a decade.
- I carry a phone but it does not even ring[2], except for some of my family and friends. I have left/forgotten and intentionally left the phone while walking around the neighborhood and had never missed it. I do have a watch on, at almost all the time and that also allowed me to de-tether the phone much more.
Super advanced pro level - keep the phone and just don't spend the whole time playing with it. Also when a notification comes in just ignore it. If it is important, they will leave a message.
It's like having a cigarette in your mouth, a lighter in your hand and not smoking - if you can do that then you have truly kicked your addiction.
Cheeky intermediate hack, put it on silent and in your backpack. Helps kick the habit by making it less accessible. You have enough time for self-awareness and shame if you have to take off your backpack to get to it.
Totally agree. And ideally it should be either something small like with 4/3 sensor or small aspc like fuji/sony/canon/panasonic. And it doesn't need to be expensive. Second hand Sony a6000 with a pancake lens can do wonders and doesn't cost a ton of money. Or the lumix gx80/gx85. Or if you are into film, idk Rollei 35 are small, or maybe something from Olympus if you want something automatic.
*I'm not a professional photographer, just sharing my opinion, but I go on walks pretty frequently with a camera with no expectations, it's just more fun
After reading Digital Minimalism (or, possibly, already before it) I decided to switch off most notifications. If someone needs to reach me, just call. The calls from known numbers will come through. All else is mostly useless anyway.
If you live in a city, and travel on foot or bicycle, you can do this every day as part of daily business. You need some downtime and exercise at some point, you're outside anyway, so take advantage of the opportunity.
I was wondering if there was a term for this. It is something I noticed a few months ago, when my phone broke at the precise time I had a full blown day-long internet outage at home. I got in my car and started driving around, looking for phone repair places. Asked for some directions. Walked into a pawn shop I normally wouldn't have. All in all it was an enjoyable/novel experience (compared to normal, anyway - I am old enough to remember a time when it was always like this) but definitely turned what should have been a ~30 minute chore to a 3 hour one.
I’ve always enjoyed just wandering around towns and cities with no particular aim, just pick a direction and go, see where it takes you.
Even in my neighbourhood, not so long ago i walked to a party, it was close by, 30 min walk, but took me through an area i somehow had never walked through before, little parks, woods, shops, a mansion. My city is well served for pedestrian access and there’s little shortcuts everywhere you don’t even know existed.
I've been trying to bike every stretch of road in my city (Oslo) for over a year now. Basically I just take new roads home, a wider and wider arc. Or go out with the intent of doing this, just bike along everything I can find in a part of town.
It's been surprisingly nice. Normally I bike to get from A to B, or to work out. With this I pay attention to the journey as well. And it has forced me out of the habit paths. You know, first day to work or the store or whatever you select a route, and then you just stick to it. There are so many nice areas or parallel streets I never had seen the first 3 years of living here until starting this.
I've been fascinated with the idea of a dérive for a few years, but have also been timid in actually doing one with a friend or acquaintance for fear of being asked basic questions like, "If you just want to go on a walk, we can go on a walk."
Why walk when you can cruise around at 5mph in your big ole stupid truck on the road you paid taxes pay for. This is your road. Rev that engine real loud make sure people see you and your big truck.
Hmm... the fact that the flaneur is an archetype of the industrial city, and he only got a name 150 years ago, is pretty interesting, and worthy of further elaboration. Add to this the odd state of affairs that in America, most do not even live in an environment where the flaneur could even exist makes it even more noteworthy.
I grew up on the prairie of North Dakota. I would spend all day wandering around fields, dry creek beds, railroad tracks, shelter belts. Just looking to see what there was. The occasional abandoned farm house to explore was always risky but fun. Farmers usually have storage buildings near the abandoned houses, so you never know when someone might be coming through.
When I got older and I moved to a small city and then larger ones and continuing on til now in my mid 30s, back in that same small city. And when I'm on vacation. I just wander. I spent months aimlessly wandering around Australian cities in my 20s. It wasn't any different than wandering around those shelter belts and fields and creek beds. I'd walk around the western suburbs of Sydney documenting graffiti one week and drunkenly walking through a nature preserve in Canberra the next. My favorite thing is to try and get lost and see if I can find my way back to where I started. I'd make maps in my head with graffiti tags as coordinates and find my way back that way.
Anyway, most everyone likes to walk around and explore whatever environment they're in. Nothing too noteworthy about it in my opinion.
> Anyway, most everyone likes to walk around and explore whatever environment they're in.
I know a lot of people who never walk anywhere, never really "wander", think it's weird at best, unsafe at worst. They will on vacation, in an environment branded for it. think cutesy town, think Disneyland.
What you're doing is maybe not exceptional, but it _is_ noteworthy that it's not universal.
Wandering in nature isn't really the sort of urban wandering the "flaneur" does either. That only exist in the industrialized city. It requires some anonymity, since it's a little voyeuristic. It requires leisure time, wealth, it's consumptive, since the flaneur and cafe culture are complementary. The city needs to be large enough to discover new experiences.
I don't think we're disagreeing overall, more maybe in our assessment how widespread it is.
I don't need to look at this bowl movement because I get no aesthetic pleasure from looking at bowl movements, even though each one is unique and I'll never get a chance to see that one again.
Before phones people had ways to bury their noses still. Newspapers, for example. Let's not pretend that phones are some great big problem. Embrace it. Let people escape their daily life a bit if they want.
An easy test with AI: analyze 1000's of crowd scenes from 1970 (probably easy for Manhattan streets) to see what percentage were walking while looking at some print material vs. scenes from now with smartphones.
Your assertion is it'll be the same. I'm willing to take that bet.
The essay defines the concept of psychogeography then explores how people have historically engaged with that concept.
As a small example of what this essay is pointing to: suppose your neighborhood could be 100% walkable and that you could easily walk to work, the doctor, your friends' houses, etc. What is desirable about that kind of environment? What would it take to make it possible? What kinds of systemic forces counteract it?
> Many of the issues we face [...] are deeply connected to the physical world and our interactions with our immediate surroundings. [...] As we emerge into post-pandemic public spheres, we have the opportunity to imagine new versions of the public sphere[.]
> Guy Debord, a founding member of both bodies, defined psychogeography as an environment’s impact, whether mindful or not, on an individual’s behaviors or emotions.
> These sorts of actions, even on the smallest scale, carry significant meaning when practitioners assert how they wish to inhabit a space, and when they are able to convince others to likewise undertake this reflective process of questioning the status quo.
Who on earth thinks there’s any probability to the place you want to work, the friends you want to talk to, and the doctor you trust being within walking distance to your home, among all the other things? It sounds like an unbelievably narcissistic or naive idea - that all the things you need wound somehow be just a few steps away because you’re that important. I mean, this is like a very childish thought.
I live in a small college town in Germany. My workplace is a 15- to 20-minute uphill walk away, my family doctor is in the building next to where I live, and all my friends are within a 40-minute walking distance. The situation was almost the same when I lived in China, in a smaller town two hours' drive from Guangzhou. I've walked my whole life and don't even know how to drive. I've almost taken for granted that one should be able to walk to any place that is important to them; perhaps it's not that universal elsewhere?
Not my reality. I've lived in four different cities as an adult over almost three decades (not Europe - Australasia). This has always been the case for me. Though of course I also have friends and family that are more far-flung, and I see relatively less of them.
If you don't design your life around a car to begin with it really isn't hard (in many places). On the other hand, if you assume you'll be reliant on a car and then choose to live in an outer suburb you have no chance.
Uhmmm, don’t know what to say to that, that’s the reality for me and many others. Not a few steps away, and maybe 15 mins is a bit optimistic for everything, but i have all that in max 30 mins walk
Nothing to get. Just upper middle class people who have surrogated every difficult thing in their lives and now without struggle or meaning need something to fill that. So a utilitarian task - walking somewhere - suddenly becomes a think piece on how to walk somewhere better than other people.
The author pays no mind to people who would love the luxury of mindlessly podding around smelling the roses and taking it all in. Except for they can’t because the immediacy of their stresses overwhelm any chance of taking it in.
Saying that, it’s nice to keep your head up wren walking around a nice place.
Luxury? Some of the poorest places I've been are full of people with relaxed paces of life who make a habit of taking in the scenery, whether sitting at a cafe or walking.
Not only that, but half of the paragraphs reference at least one social justice trope, including, ironically, redlining, which supposedly disproportionately urbanized minority populations by keeping them out of newer suburban developments--but those newer suburban developments were inherently less walkable, weren't they? https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...
She'd made a post on a dating site, asking, simply, what was your favorite part of the city, and why.
I responded with something about the different atmospheres of rather small areas, where the transitions are, etc.
I won, and our first date was to be a lunch break from her science lab work on a weekend. But after lunch we played hooky, and walked all around town and talked for many hours, ending up sitting on a harbor wharf.
Where one of the boats we saw was a ferry to the Cape Cod area, which I suggested as our second date. We just explored it without plans or arrangements.
(Much later, her heightened awareness grew to realizing that she could do better than me, :) but we did have some shared understanding and values about the world, and a lot of that was about perceiving, like when on walks.)