Why Nobody Knows How to Behave in Public Anymore

Everyone Thinks They’re the Main Character Now

Nobody Is Being Rude. They Just Forgot You Exist.

The manners conversation is a trap. Here’s the one underneath it.

Someone next to me is eating a bowl of something while their phone plays a reel at full volume. Not music. A reel. With a guy explaining, loudly, how to make passive income.

I have watched this happen every day for about two years now and I still cannot get used to it. Not the noise exactly. The obliviousness. The total, serene obliviousness.

The person isn’t rude. They genuinely do not register that anyone else is in the room.

That’s the thing people keep getting wrong when they complain about manners. They’re diagnosing the symptom and calling it the disease.

The Pandemic Answer Is Too Clean

Yes, three years of reduced contact and the small calibrations atrophied. How loud your voice should be in a quiet cafe. How to read whether someone’s body language is saying “please don’t talk to me” or “I’m bored and would love company.” How to not just stop in the middle of a narrow sidewalk like you’re a decorative boulder.

These aren’t things you think about. They’re things you do, automatically, after thousands of small moments of being slightly wrong and noticing. Getting it wrong, adjusting, moving on.

But the pandemic is too neat. It gives us a start date and implies an end. The pandemic accelerated something that had been running for a decade before anyone heard the word coronavirus.

The Thing in Your Hand Did Something Specific to Your Brain

Phones didn't just distract us. That's the obvious reading and I'm tired of it.

What they actually did, over about eight years of daily training, is teach people to experience wherever they are as an extension of their private room. The bus is not a bus. It's the waiting room of your phone, and the other passengers are furniture. The cafe is not a place with thirty other humans in it. It's just where you happen to be sitting while the real activity occurs in your palm.

So FaceTiming at full volume in a coffee shop isn't inconsiderate. It can't be inconsiderate, because inconsiderate requires awareness of others, and others have been quietly edited out.

Right now, at the table across from me, a woman is telling her phone, at a volume the whole room can hear, about a cauliflower-shaped wart she has between her toes. I know things about this stranger's foot that I will never be able to unknow.

The Third Place Is Gone and Nobody Noticed the Body

You know what a third place is. The bar, the diner, the community center, the church hall, the mall food court on a Tuesday afternoon. Not home, not work. The place where you got accidental exposure to people who weren't like you and had to figure it out in real time.

Most of those are gone now, or they're so expensive they've become destinations you plan. You don't wander into a destination. You go with a purpose and leave.

I'm meeting a friend tonight at a bar with long wooden tables where strangers share benches and talk to each other. It's going to be actual torture for me, I'm a committed introvert, and I'm going because I know if I don't practice being around more than two people at a time I will go fully feral by autumn.

The reps are how we learn. Without the reps we don't build the instinct. And when everyone around us is equally unrepetitioned, there's nobody to model it from either. This is where I'm honestly not sure the story holds completely, because there are places, communities, pockets, where people still do this well. I've been to them. Small towns in Portugal, certain neighborhoods in Naples. So it's not gone everywhere. Which makes me think what's really happened is that the default changed, not the human capacity.

But the default matters a lot.

Why Nobody Says Anything (I Include Myself in This)

I wouldn't have said anything to the reel-playing, passive-income-reel guy alone. I know this about myself.

A few months ago I was on the last leg of a twenty-hour journey with three friends, all of us demolished, and the man directly behind us decided the correct activity was to stream a live football match with Turkish commentary at full volume. It took exactly ten seconds of shared eye contact before all four of us turned around simultaneously and said "headphones" with the unified energy of people who had nothing left to lose.

I would not have done that alone. Not a chance.

The unspoken contract of public space is held up entirely by the threat of mild social friction, and that threat has collapsed.

Not because people are braver or meaner than before. Because you genuinely don't know what's on the other end anymore. Maybe they turn it down. Maybe they film you. Maybe they follow you outside. The risk calculation changed, and so most people do the math and stay quiet, and once enough people stay quiet, the norm exists only as a private opinion with no mechanism to enforce it.

What People Think the Fix Is (They're Wrong)

The popular advice is to "model good behavior" and trust it will catch on. Lead by example. Be the change.

This is wrong and it bothers me every time I see it shared earnestly. Modeling works when people are watching and register that there is something to model. When the person next to you on the train has reduced you to furniture, your impeccable headphone usage is not teaching them anything. You're just a chair with good habits.

Online Is Where the Practice Hours Went

A former friend of mine used to spend real time and real energy going to celebrity posts and writing specific, detailed insults about their appearance. Madonna had some work done. She would go find every post about it and leave a comment.

I told her I didn't like it. She said everyone does that online.

And she's not wrong that everyone does. That's exactly the problem. People have logged, conservatively, more hours practicing the online register than the in-person one. The online register rewards volume, self-focus, interruption, treating strangers like NPCs, performing for an audience of exactly one. There is no room to read because there is no room. The room is a screen.

And then those same people walk into a cafe.

Bring the volume. Bring the self-focus. Bring the total, genuine confusion when someone looks annoyed.

(Madonna looks absolutely incredible now, by the way. Have you seen her sing "La Bambola" live? She clearly did not care about a single one of those comments. Good for her.)

Your Great-Grandmother Had the Same Complaint, But

Every generation has said the next one doesn't know how to behave. My great-grandmother could sit on her porch and judge my shorts for three hours without losing steam. She also had opinions about my attitude toward boys that were not unconnected from the shorts.

So I hold this lightly. Pointing at strangers and finding them wanting is one of the oldest pleasures a person can have.

But here's the thing I keep coming back to at 11pm after thinking about this for two years.

It Was Never About Manners

Manners are downstream of something else. You can only be considerate of a shared space if you still perceive yourself as being in one.

The thing that actually changed is whether public space exists as a real category in people's minds.

The woman crying in a supermarket aisle, filming herself. Someone I used to follow who posted photos of herself next to her mother's hospital bed, mom in a coma, tubes everywhere, every other day. I unfollowed eventually. I felt bad about it and I did it anyway.

That's not a manners failure. That's a category failure. The private and the public have merged into one continuous feed, and the physical room you're sitting in is just the set.

If you're talking to someone you know who does this, not to be rude, but just because they genuinely seem not to register the people around them: this is what's actually happening. The room stopped being real. Not you. The room.

Everyone is furniture to everyone else now.

Annoying furniture.