Philosophy in a Can—philosophical thoughts and observations from everyday life. Casual and imaginative (sometimes loose) connections between everyday events and philosophical ideas or questions. The goal is ultimately to inspire further thought and inquiry, and perhaps encourage a more personal relationship to philosophy. Most anything is on the table, from the serious to the joking, though I hope to present everything from a personal perspective and in a light, easy-to-read way.
My goal is also not to offer prescriptions or steadfast conclusions, but rather to unearth the hidden mystery and complexity of the everyday experience and poke at it a bit.
Thanking the Bus Drivers
It was my freshman year at Cornell, and I was on the bus. It might have been a Tuesday. When I got off the bus, I did not thank the bus driver.
What prompted this non-response was that I had witnessed a curious phenomenon. (It bears mentioning that before coming to college, I didn’t have much experience with public transportation.) Someone said “thank you” to the bus driver as they were getting off the bus. Then another person walked off and thanked the bus driver. And another, and another, and another. This happened at every bus stop. At first, I thought it was polite. (Or perhaps ingratiating). And after a while, the phenomenon began to seem outright strange to me.
It might help to conjure up a mental image: an assembly line of thank-yous. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Imagine hearing that 50 times a day. Imagine hearing it 100 times a day. Imagine hearing it 100 times a day, every day, for weeks on end.
What’s the controversy about thanking the bus driver? Allow me to take on the task of problematizing yet another seemingly uncontroversial thing: the simple act of giving thanks.
Why did thanking the bus driver suddenly become odd to me? Why might it become odd to you too? Let’s run through some possibilities. I’m not asserting any of them as the Truth, but they might make you think a little deeper about the mundane, the commonplace, and our everyday interactions.
Preliminary idea: “Thanks for what?”
This first idea is admittedly abrasive and cynical.
They’re bus drivers, they’re doing a job. Why are you guys thanking them? They’re not driving the bus for you. A little self-important to throw out a “thanks” and then what, pat yourself on the back for it?
This idea captures one aspect of my intuition: that the countless thanks were lacking in an important quality or weren’t altogether genuine. But it fails to account for the fact that we thank people every day just for doing their jobs. It’s the kind thing to do. People doing a job are people, they exist outside of the confines of a job. And furthermore, especially in the case of bus drivers, the job they do benefits many other people.
Idea 2: Our Social Scene
Maybe we can improve on the first idea…Here is a question: Where does meaning come from, and when it’s gone, where does it go?
What’s the difference between hearing a heartfelt expression of gratitude (or a simple, but significant “thanks!”) and hearing one repetitive phrase, day in and day out? After hearing 20 thank-yous, the meaning of the phrase starts to dissipate, like the existential analog of saying “person” over and over again until it ceases to sound like a word at all. After hearing so many identical expressions of thanks, I myself became habituated, and just started tuning them out. I can reasonably imagine how the driver felt. Each subsequent thank-you decays in value exponentially, if one wants to consider it “mathematically”, and becomes not much more than a repetitive sound.
This observation brings me to our social scene at large. That is, a person’s everyday collection of interactions and the landscape in which they occur.
Earlier, in the preliminary idea, I talked a little about how bus drivers were not just bus drivers, but—in case you didn’t know this already—people, too! Maybe, as individuals, we see no problem with saying thanks. Because, in that individual act, there is no problem. But the thanks add up in the big picture, and ironically, the more times the phrase is said, the less meaning it has. That’s one possibility. Moreover, just saying thanks might actually reduce bus drivers to their job title. Bear with me.
Let’s remove the polite connotation of “thank you” and replace it with something formulaic—[socially acceptable phrase 1]. This might help illustrate my point better. The public transportation exchange is a formula, and it goes like this: get off bus, insert [socially acceptable phrase], interaction complete. The problem with this is two-fold: it doesn’t allow for any genuine interaction for either the driver or the passenger. It seems polite, it seems personable. But arguably, it’s depersonalizing. It reduces a human experience to a formulaic exchange that is the same on any day, with any driver, in any other set of circumstances, so long as one is getting off a bus. In a word, it’s impersonal. We might then consider it a mere facsimile of an interaction. It doesn’t involve any spontaneity or improvisation or any thought at all, so is it a genuine interaction in any significant or meaningful sense?
If it isn’t, you might then ask people why they engage in it. If you say that the point of saying “thanks” isn’t social in nature, you might then ask yourself the very same question: so why say it?
Now, I want to talk about how this is not a great state of affairs for either the bus driver or the passenger. Look, the idea isn’t to become best pals with everyone, or learn the intricate details of each person’s mental and emotional world. That’s just unreasonable. But “thank you” seems… it seems we could do better.
In this world, and I think I’m qualified in making this general claim about humanity, it’s very easy to feel like an observer of life rather than a participant (calls to mind “Boredom” by Siegfried Kraucauer). It’s not always bad to be an observer, but sometimes arbitrary boundaries arise in situations where they need not arise. We can, in a way, become prisoners of our own social norms—and maybe thanking the bus driver is a mild manifestation of a form of compartmentalization. That is, the routinized expression of a polite phrase strips it of its meaning, and furthermore, restricting what is supposedly a social interaction to a formulaic exchange, reinforces disconnection between individuals, and between individuals and the world. In a small sense, it is connected to the idea of being an observer of one’s own life, going through the motions, rather than actively participating.
Now, this seems dramatic. But that’s one way to make a nuanced point clearer. It’s hard (at least for me) to express it frankly otherwise, without making it seem too small and insignificant.
So, what to do? Maybe a simple smile would do. And if it’s a quiet day and not many people are on the bus, strike up a conversation with the bus driver. Or, just sit in peaceful silence. Mix up your choice of words on the way out, do what you have to do, but consider if you should save the “thanks” for someone else.
Note: I reached out to the homogenous entity that is Bus Drivers to request their thoughts on the matter, but they couldn’t hear me over the non-stop thank-yous they were receiving.
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And that’s it. That’s your first serving of Philosophy in a Can.
Up next: Some (shorter) thoughts on gender in the classroom
– Ashley Gasdow