I’m friends with a man named Joey who plays saxophone and engineers elevators. I’m also friends with a man named Kiel who reads Wordsworth and engineers empathy. I tossed an idea their way recently about intentionally designing “social nudges” into what might be the most awkward social space on the frontier: elevators.
They lit up at the idea, and so, I present to you a pilot project: LIFT. It’s my attempt to prove that with some simple mechanics and poetics, we can turn social wastelands into ecosystems of belonging. Please feel free to adapt and try out with your friends, groups and teams. If we don’t practice this sort of thing, we have no right to expect people to just do it spontaneously. We’re not there as a society with our social skills, other-awareness and self-esteem.
By reimagining what’s possible in our current infrastructure, we don’t have to wait for budgets, policies and leadership to change. We can snatch the power left on the table and occupy elevators, subways, grocery store lines, and sidewalks with micro-gestures of friendliness. This isn’t something for extroverts; it’s something for humans.
There’s little hope of lessening polarization and its related civic strains or loneliness and its related mental health struggles if we can’t see a path to connection in our current spaces. It’s tempting to leapfrog over the mundane acts available to us when Pew and the CDC release their alarming statistics that can paralyze us from action rather than inspiring it. But I want to suggest that these “little things” are little in the same way that cells are little. They’re elemental, the the building blocks of life, of all complex organisms. They’re the actual stuff comprising experience. They’re everything.
What’s more, friendliness in overlooked spaces begets friendliness and comes to set the atmosphere of a place. This is how belonging culture organically forms—through the tiny, repetitive acts of friendly people. We have more power than we dream.
Let’s push buttons together…you know, instead of pushing each other’s buttons:)
Cat