How to Feel Alive in the City during Late-Stage Capitalism
A lesson about presence from those stupid electric scooters.
“We’re going to have to take the scooters,” they groaned. Panic rattled through my insides. It was 2 AM, I was half-drunk, and we were standing on a sleepy side street lined with the cute brick rowhouses I love most about DC.
I hated the scooters.
Something about my body going at an unnatural speed while standing fully upright instilled sheer terror in me. But Uber was trying to charge $50 to go the 4 miles that stretched between this bar and home, and walking an hour and a half was pretty much not an option either of us considered, so reluctantly, I pulled out my phone to scan the barcode on the object of my loathing.
I am apparently one of the 30% of people in the US who don’t like these scooters, according to a 2018 report. It’s strange, because I’m not a risk-averse person, at least not when it comes to vehicles. One of my favorite pastimes is driving fast, music all the way up, weaving down a highway without signaling.
My ability to learn how to drive anything has always been a point of pride for me, the way it becomes automatic, unthinking, an extension of my very limbs — the scanning kind of attention required, watching everything happen, ready to react. In another life, in another country, I had not one, but two motorcycles, and I miss the thrill of leaning a bike around a mountain curve every single day.
But here in the American capitol, I can’t afford to own any vehicles besides a hand-me-down bicycle that I rarely ever unlock from my building’s bike storage because I do not have the quad strength to push myself up basically any hill, so there I was in the orange glow of a streetlight, putting my right foot tentatively on a shared-fleet scooter.
These silly contraptions are part of a larger trend referred to as micromobility, an extremely lucrative industry that’s further individualizing transport, filling a particular need in a country with a shitload of streets, severely lacking metro systems, and a population that increasingly cannot afford their daily commutes.
We call it “the sharing economy”, but in a lot of ways, it’s making us more atomized, more alone. Instead of getting on a train and sitting together, we share a scooter with hundreds of strangers we will never meet.
Instead of pushing our cities to invest in public transit infrastructure that can benefit everyone, we acquiesce to the offer of highly customizing our personal commutes with micro-vehicles owned by venture capitalists, who sell us this tech under the guise of sustainability (despite the fact that they only really last a few years, so based on life-time emissions, they’re probably not even that sustainable at all).
You’re not going to keep the ocean from burning by using an electric scooter to get to work — your individual choices don’t have that much power, really. That unsettling fact nags at the back of my mind everyday, as the notifications on my phone remind me of large-scale catastrophe while I fold my laundry, dragging around this existential weight I feel powerless to lighten on my own.
My partner, familiar with these scooters because of their own 9-to-5 commute, hopped onto one without a thought and took off up the street. I wobbled a few steps, kick-pushing too slowly while I pressed the little button throttle with my thumb.
“IT’S NOT WORKING,” I shrieked as they grew smaller in the distance, silently hoping it was broken and I could just crawl home. But it wasn’t a technical issue — I just didn’t trust it enough. You have to get to a threshold speed for the electric motor to take over, and I was too scared to throw myself into the experience.
They slowed down, laughing, and yelled back, “Kick harder!”
I know people love to wax poetic about the beauty of the city, but as someone who only really feels the sublime in vast expanses, it’s rare that I have moments where I feel alive surrounded by concrete and traffic and noise.
Most of the time I feel trapped in urban environments, overwhelmed by it all. There is pain in all the sharp edges of a city, choking out the green spaces that wash me clean, a brutal reminder of a greedy society whose values I abhor but can never really escape. How do you feel alive in a place that always reminds you of choking?
There was no choice in that moment, so I kicked harder, and soon we were flying, or at least, they were. I was hitting every single pothole at 15 miles an hour to the sound of my own screams, gripping the handles so hard my fingers hurt. I was living the skater boy dreams of my youth in white-knuckled terror. I’m sure I woke up several blocks worth of slumbering citizens, scream-singing that Avril Lavigne song to myself to push back panic.
To make your fully upright body into a vehicle, to give it no protection in the shiny dark sea of the street, one slip away from spilling your brains all over the bike lane — it’s profoundly stupid, but these are the things that become the best kind of memories. Inching to the cliff’s edge of mortality and looking over. Remember when we did that? What were we thinking? Isn’t it funny that you feel most alive when you realize how easy it would be, in that moment, to die?
When psychologists say the key to happiness is savoring — “the process of deeply and presently enjoying a positive experience”, as Dr. Devon Price describes it in their book — I think of these moments when I’ve peered over the cliff.
Gliding across sprawling empty intersections on two little wheels in the middle of the night, shuddering and cackling at every giant metal car beast that swerved past me, I was fully present. I was in my body. My brain made a memory that I can still taste, one that still makes me laugh when I reminisce on it.
There was no virtual world tugging at the corners of my attention, unraveling the spools of it. No ominous hovering of past or future over my mind. No circuitous ruminations about the tedious details of my daily life. I was in my body, and I experienced every moment that my heart pounded blood through aching muscle. It was stupid, sort of dangerous, and kind of beautiful.
Everyone dreams of getting away. Americans, in particular, tend to hang all our hopes on those two weeks of vacation we are lucky if we get every year — booking a flight to some tropical place that will somehow magically make all the mundanity of daily life worth it.
But as someone who once spent a few years living out of a backpack because I was terrified of that mundanity, I can tell you that it’s not really that romantic, and it doesn’t solve any of your problems. Mostly you are uncomfortable, and dirty, and waiting for the bus.
You don’t need to go across the world for new experiences to savor — any part of your own city you’ve never seen will do. It’s the unfamiliar that shakes your brain into presence, the novelty of a thing you don’t yet know how to do, the fear of uncertainty that turns on all your senses.
It can be hard to break out of the well-worn paths you tread everyday. That’s why apps like Randonautica exist, a random number generator that can give you coordinates to a new destination in your neighborhood — an adventure in plain sight you would not have headed for yourself. It’s why people go on Tinder dates, the thrill of reaching out into the void to experience a new person they would otherwise never meet.
Adventure doesn’t have to be some grandiose journey you take on your vacation time — it’s all around you. The typical can be beautiful when the light hits it just right. An electric kick scooter is not profound in itself. If you take one to work on the same route, every single day, over and over, it quickly fades into the minutiae of your life, like anything else.
But if it’s new, and laden with uncertainty, and it reminds you about the fragility of your own existence, that can be something precious, no matter how ordinary a person, place, or thing it is.
That’s the jewel of this terrifyingly brief conscious blip we are all experiencing. We live in an absurd and often terrible world, and we absolutely must try to change it for the better. But at the same time, we have to accept that we utterly lack control over its fate. We have to make meaning wherever we are, in the small ways that we can.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed,” William Blake wrote, “everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Blake saw “a world in a grain of sand” and “heaven in a wildflower” — he was savoring, delighting in presence.
In a world of desire and distraction that constantly dampen our ability to experience, we must fight for that kind of presence. We must look for it in the everyday, the inconvenient, the terrifying — the ridiculous 4-mile scooter rides in the middle of the night.
