The Art of Etiquette: What We've Lost, What We've Gained, and Why Your Subway Ride Will Never Be the Same

Remember Your Manners?

It's 9 a.m. and I'm riding the A train downtown. I'm sitting right by the door, deep in my book a real one, with pages.  A guy walks in with his music blaring like he's auditioning to DJ a block party nobody asked for. He stands by the door. His speaker is practically kissing my ear. My first thought: Where are his headphones? My second thought: Turn that down. But this is New York City, and asking someone to lower their volume could get you a verbal essay on civil liberties or worse. I'm not ready to die over someone's questionable taste in music. I look around. Everyone else is buried in their phones, unbothered, lost in their own digital rabbit holes. And I'm left sitting there thinking: Does etiquette even exist anymore?

When I was a kid, manners weren't optional, they were oxygen. Always say please. Always say thank you. On the subway, you give up your seat for the elderly. You hold the door for the person behind you. You cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze, and if you forgot, someone was going to remind you…loudly. I was never allowed to call adults by their first name. It was Mrs. So-and-So, Mr. So-and-So or Auntie, Uncle. It wasn't until I became a full-grown adult that I realized half the "aunties" and "uncles" from my childhood were just family friends with strong opinions about everything. Disrespecting adults came with consequences. Sometimes in the form of a spanking, but always in the form of disappointment. And if you've ever had a Caribbean or Hispanic mother look at you with that face,  the one that says absolutely nothing and everything at the same time. You know that disappointment cuts deeper than any punishment ever could.

Now here's the thing: every generation has pushed back on the one before it. Gen X (my people) grew up in a world of face-to-face exchanges and landline phone calls where you picked up the receiver not even knowing who was on the other end. We said "yes ma'am," we wrote thank-you notes, and we learned the hard way that talking back was a full-contact sport. Millennials loosened the tie a bit, bringing flexibility and emojis into professional communication and deciding that work-life balance wasn't a radical concept. Gen Z? They've turned the period at the end of a text message into a declaration of war and made avoiding voicemail an Olympic sport. According to a YouGov study, nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds think late-night phone calls are perfectly acceptable, while only about one in ten adults over 55 agree. And Gen Alpha? They're still forming, but they were swiping iPads before they could tie their shoes, so I have questions.

But here's what I'll say: I love that younger generations demand mutual respect rather than blind deference. Playing loud music on the train isn't new — in the '80s, kids carried boom boxes like they were sacred artifacts. The difference? Back then, there was always an auntie or uncle on that train ready to ask you to turn it down. Today, everybody's got their heads in their phones, and the communal corrective has gone extinct.

Connected Yet Alone

My mom jokes by calling me antisocial.

 Honestly, as I've gotten older (esp after the pandemic), I've come to deeply appreciate my personal space and manners. I'll admit it: I have issues with shared spaces. Most of those issues stem from other people's total lack of self-awareness.

In 2001, I moved to Munich. It was a completely different world from where I was raised in the Bronx. I loved how organized everything was — though I'd later learn the pitfalls of German punctuality applied to everything. One afternoon, I'd been rollerblading up and down the historic Englischer Garten when it started to pour. My friend and I decided to hop on a tram. We were young. I put my feet up on a seat. A woman turned to me and said (in German) "Please put your feet down. Others need to use that seat." Just like that. No attitude. No confrontation. Just a perfectly reasonable request delivered with the calm efficiency of someone who has never been late for anything in her life. And you know what? She was right. It made complete sense. Looking back, that interaction would never happen in NYC without a verbal altercation breaking out or worse.

It's my belief that with the rise of the internet, we became antisocial long before COVID got the credit. I remember the early 2000s, entering chat rooms where people said things they would never say to someone's face. The anonymity was intoxicating and terrifying. Some people argue the real isolation started during and after the pandemic. I respectfully disagree. The internet laid the groundwork. Meeting people shifted from bars, house parties, and brunches to swiping right and sending DMs. Before the 2000s, people socialized in person. They talked. They made eye contact. They argued over the check at dinner and meant it as a compliment.

Two years ago, I interviewed for a creative director position and the entire interview was conducted via text. Text. Not Zoom. Not a phone call. Text messages. That was new. In the workplace, meetings and brainstorming sessions are increasingly conducted virtually. And while the convenience is undeniable, something gets lost. The little nuances — a raised eyebrow, a knowing glance, the energy of a room when an idea lands — those things don't translate through a screen. Or maybe I'm just old-fashioned and not embracing this new world fast enough. But there is something irreplaceable about meeting in person. The other thing people forget? When you're on a virtual meeting, you're not actually at home. I've seen colleagues show up to work-from-home calls in what appears to be pajamas. I've watched people take virtual meetings without headphones while their kids stage what I can only describe as a small revolution in the background. The old proverb often attributed to various sources and frequently cited by Barack Obama captures it well: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." We've given everyone the internet. But did we teach anyone how to behave on it?

Speak Up, Speakerphone

My parents are among those people who talk on the phone using the speaker without headphones. In public. At full volume. I have heard entire conversations in coffee shops, on subway platforms, in grocery store aisles — people broadcasting their personal business like it's a podcast nobody subscribed to. It's even more chaotic when multiple people in the same space are all having separate speakerphone conversations simultaneously. It's like being trapped inside a call center that nobody manages.

And then there's the train the great American theater of poor phone etiquette. People watching videos at full blast. Playing video games with the sound cranked up. Having FaceTime conversations with the camera angled in a way that accidentally captures every stranger within a five-foot radius. Pew Research found that about 75 percent of Americans think cellphone use on public transit is generally acceptable — but "acceptable" and "considerate" are apparently two very different things.

I'll be honest: I'm far from innocent. I once took a flight to Paris and was playing a video game with the sound on low. A man next to me politely asked me to put it on mute. I complied immediately — and then felt a wave of embarrassment, because he shouldn't have had to ask. Regardless of how low the volume was, I had hijacked everyone's ear. But I wasn't thinking. I was so lost in my own world that I forgot other people existed in it. And I think that's the crux of the cellphone etiquette crisis: we're all trying to tune out the stresses of everyday life, to escape reality for a few minutes, and in doing so, we stop noticing the people right next to us. The phone becomes a cocoon. It's comfortable there. But a cocoon full of people who can't hear each other is just a very expensive, poorly ventilated waiting room.

The Keyboard Gladiators

Debates are fascinating. I love a good one the back and forth, the exchange of ideas, the intellectual sparring. What I don't love is what social media has done to the concept. On social media, we rarely interact with actual people. We interact with avatars, hot takes, and carefully curated outrage. The art of conversation has been replaced by combative rhetoric and the ever-growing need to "win" the argument by any means necessary. Agree to disagree? That phrase has been buried in the comments section, right next to nuance and critical thinking.

Research from the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas found that anonymous online comments tend to be significantly less civil than those posted under real names. When you remove accountability, you remove the social contract. In person, there are consequences for being rude — a raised eyebrow, an awkward silence, the possibility that the person you just insulted is bigger than you. Online? You can say the most vile thing imaginable and then go make a sandwich. Social media has normalized a kind of discourse where overconfidence reigns, echo chambers flourish, and complexity is the enemy. Everything gets flattened into binary positions: you're either with us or against us, and there's no room for the messy, beautiful middle ground where most of reality actually lives.

The irony is thick. We have more tools for communication than any generation in human history, and yet we've arguably never been worse at actually communicating. We've traded depth for speed, empathy for engagement metrics, and listening for waiting for our turn to type. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that a conversation requires at least two people who are willing to hear each other out — not just two people shouting into the void and refreshing for likes.

Evolving, Not Extinct

So where does that leave us? I've been sitting with this question for a while, and here's what I've landed on: etiquette isn't dead. It's evolving. And evolution is messy, uncomfortable, and occasionally shows up to a meeting in sweatpants.

I see all the extraordinary things technology has brought us. I can video-call my mother from across the world. I can order dinner without speaking to a single human being — which, depending on my mood, is either a miracle or a tragedy. I can access the sum of human knowledge from a device that fits in my pocket. That's remarkable. But I also see what we've lost. The communal accountability of a stranger on the subway who cared enough to say, "Turn that down." The patience of a handwritten letter. The vulnerability of a face-to-face conversation where you can't hide behind a screen or an emoji. The understanding that shared space is shared — that your freedom to blast music doesn't override my freedom to read in peace.

Merriam-Webster defines manners as "social conduct or rules of conduct as shown in the prevalent customs." The key word there is prevalent. Manners aren't static. They shift with each generation, each technological leap, each cultural moment. What was polite in 1985 might be unnecessary in 2026. What's rude today might be perfectly normal tomorrow. The constant, though ( the thing that doesn't change)  is the underlying principle: awareness of other people. Consideration. The radical act of remembering that you are not the only person on the train, in the meeting, on the internet, or on the planet.

We're not going backward. We can't un-invent the smartphone or delete social media from our collective consciousness. But we can choose to bring the best parts of the old world into the new one. We can put on headphones. We can look up from our screens. We can say please and thank you not because someone will spank us if we don't, but because it costs nothing and means everything. 

We can disagree without destroying it. We can be fast without being reckless.

Etiquette isn't about rigidity. It never was. It's about grace the kind you extend to strangers, to coworkers, to the person sitting next to you on the A train who just wants to read their book in peace. And if we can hold onto that? We'll be just fine. Loud music and all.

Sources

1. Pew Research Center. "Americans' Views on Mobile Etiquette." August 26, 2015. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/08/26/americans-views-on-mobile-etiquette/

2. Pew Research Center. "Key Findings About Etiquette in the Digital Age." August 26, 2015. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/08/26/key-findings-about-etiquette-in-the-digital-age/

3. True You Journal. "Do Gen X and Gen Z Even Agree on What Counts as Good Manners Anymore?" October 10, 2025. https://www.truity.com/blog/do-gen-x-and-gen-z-even-agree-what-counts-good-manners-anymore

4. Grand Valley Lanthorn. "Increased Cellphone Usage Destroys Social Norms." 2025. https://lanthorn.com/122651/opinion/increased-cellphone-usage-destroys-social-norms/

5. Center for Media Engagement, University of Texas. "Improving Civil Discourse." https://mediaengagement.org/research/online-discourse/

6. Public Square Magazine. "Impact of Social Media on Public Discourse." April 9, 2025. https://publicsquaremag.org/media-education/social-media/effect-civil-discourse-social-media-tone/

7. The Conversation. "How Social Media Shapes Public Debate." https://theconversation.com/im-right-youre-wrong-and-heres-a-link-to-prove-it-how-social-media-shapes-public-debate-65723

8. N.C. Cooperative Extension. "How Does Your Generation Define 'Good Manners?'" February 2021. https://lee.ces.ncsu.edu/2021/02/how-does-your-generation-define-good-manners/

9. Merriam-Webster Dictionary. "Manners." https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/manners

10. BrainyQuote. "Barack Obama Quotes." https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/barack_obama_167636

11. The Vanderbilt Hustler. "Gen Z Needs a Lesson in Etiquette." January 21, 2025. https://vanderbilthustler.com/2025/01/21/shear-gen-z-needs-a-lesson-in-etiquette/

Christian Science Monitor. "Mobile Manners: How Americans Are Navigating Cell Phone Etiquette." August 26, 2015. https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2015/0826/Mobile-manners-How-Americans-are-navigating-cell-phone-etiquette