Testing Social Norms!?
Very rarely, but occasionally, I feel constrained and confined by the norms of city and suburban life. I am not a true anarchist. Occasionally I feel restrained and caged.
Thus the times you say, climb over the side of a beautiful fountain and wade under the water cascading down. Or climb on a wall or tight rope walk on the side of a bridge. Nothing illegal per se, a bit naughty, a bit adventurous. Enough to satisfy my desire for freedom in a concrete jungle full of people wearing the same clothes, arriving at the building they work in, taking the same elevator, the same lift. Sitting at the same desk, doing the same work. Occasionally I want to bust out from that norm. To feel alive.
These moments are usually managed by planned holidays that allow you to ski or hike or climb. You work, work and work very hard, obey all of the correct social rules, so you can get driven to the airport to take a plane to some distant location to be able to climb for hours per day to reach a distant natural space so you can call out to see if your voice will echo back at you. You take the obligatory photos of this amazing adventure and then travel back, take a taxi to an airport, get on a plane, go through customs, take a taxi or drive home from the airport to sleep off the jetlag and collapse for a few hours or a day until that hum of normality takes you back to the daily norm.
Occasionally, occasionally this is not something I can wait patiently for. Occasionally that holiday or even day trip is just that too far off in the distance and I need to experience some sense of freedom from an over crowded well behaved world. Thus, small tests of social norms begin.
Whether it is skinny dipping in the moonlight at the local beach rockpool. Lying on a pavement with a university friend for a dare, outside an exclusive restaurant and not moving to 10 minutes. Or just doing something, anything that makes you smile. It could be singing loudly to the music on in your headset and not caring that others can hear you. This day was a little bit different. I decided to test the social norms of the bus queue etiquette.
There is no law that says that you have to queue up in public places, but we all do. People will even camp overnight to queue up to buy tickets for some amazing concert.
We humans are social animals and queue up as part of our basic social etiquette.
But what happens when you decide to test social boundaries? They are not laws. There is nothing written in legislation, nor, would there be any written directive from anyone in authority that could enforce this etiquette.
They may choose not to let you buy tickets once you reach the counter, but it would not be within their legal right to stop you walking past others to stand where you wanted on a sidewalk even if others had camped out all night.
Another human or a number of humans may be disgruntled with your behaviour. You may have upset their sense of “justice”, “fairness” and normal social behaviour standards, but there really is no legislation that says you have to queue up for buses, planes or other transport. Trains for example can, when the stations are packed be like a mass crowd pushing forward towards doors as they open. There is no rule that says you must line up neatly and wait politely. Yet, often, most of us do!
I decided to test this premise one day. I was thinking about this as I saw the queue for the bus and our bus queues from Sydney's Wynyard bus stop, to go to the Northern Beaches could reach up to three busloads of people winding in and out of the bus shelters where some were fortunate enough to find a seat.
I was thinking archaistically during that half an hour inner dialogue on social norms.
I decided to test this theory. I moved forward. I just went to the front of the queue, where bus front entrance was. The bus pulled up and I just entered the bus along with the people who had been standing so patiently waiting for the bus for such a long time, lined up neatly. They had probably missed out on boarding the last two or three buses based on basic bus queueing etiquette.
Now, I moved forward. I got on the bus, I got my “opal card”, the wifi based card we use to pay our bus fares with and proceeded to go upstairs on the double decker B1 bus. They are bright yellow buses and carry us all home via the lower North Shore. It can take anything up to 1 hour and 20 minutes. I, in conducting my social experiment, did not directly push anyone out of the way.
I just walked past a whole line of people that I usually commute with from the city and got on the bus, clicked my payment card and took a seat.
Not one person said anything to me. I smiled quietly to myself. My social experiment now completed. I felt my sense of anarchistic freedom no longer needed to be appeased and never tried this again.
One of the reasons people stand in line early in the morning and late at night, travelling into the city of Sydney and further to work each day is because, when you get home, when you see daylight, the beaches and views on the Northern Beaches are superb!
Yet, sometimes I smile to myself when I notice what well behaved creatures we can be when we are socially conditioned to be well behaved. Usually it is worth it. For when I lived on the Northern Beaches, I got to enjoy my weekends at spots like this!
My desire to share this personal story came from an article I read this morning! This may represent other peoples perceptions of what it looks like when someone decides to step out of social norms.
If you would like to buy me an etheric Coffee in appreciation of my work, please do. Just click here. Buy Me A Coffee and it will take you to my BMAC page!
