What are you waiting for?
It’s a serious question. Because unless you need an organ transplant or are trying to vote in a Southern state, there is basically no good reason to join the end of a very lengthy queue—to slowly shuffle forward, sandwiched between a pair of strangers, for more than a few moments of your one wild and precious life. This truth is self-evident no matter what might be promised at the end of that inessential line: a new rhode bronzer; a cache of rare Labubus; a four-ounce cup of whimsically flavored status yogurt.
Yes, gratification cannot and should not be instant in every scenario. (This is why LLMs are destroying all we hold sacred.) At the same time, line culture has gotten out of control. As anyone who lives in a big city knows, it’s frighteningly easy to fritter away the bulk of our waking hours moving from one line to another: waiting for single-origin coffee, for rush tickets, for sneakers, for bar seating at the Michelin-starred restaurant that maddeningly doesn’t take reservations. And those are just the normal lines—not the special-occasion ones that require more serious temporal investment.
As trend story after trend story after trend story published this summer implies, the lines are particularly pervasive in New York—which must be called the city that never sleeps because it’s impossible to sleep standing up. Unless you’re a horse. And in New York, even the horses have to stand in—or as they’d say, “on”—line. Ever seen the southern edge of Central Park at hansom cab rush hour?
I think we’d all do well to adopt an edict I just invented called the 30 Rock rule. A wait in line should last no more than 22 minutes. If it goes on longer than that—the length of one episode of Tina Fey’s canonical sitcom—whatever’s at the end of that rainbow simply does not deserve you.
Big Line, of course, would have you thinking otherwise. Line culture feeds on and is fed by a DSM’s worth of modern-day maladies: FOMO, herd mentality, the sunk-cost fallacy. Most insidiously, line culture lures its practitioners into a false sense of democracy. Sure, I’ve been standing here forever, a line lingerer might think—but so have all these other people. And eventually, each of us will have our eternal reward. Waiting among a group of the like-minded can induce a sense of camaraderie, of community; there’s a reason that the Park Slope Food Coop’s official newsletter is called the Linewaiters’ Gazette.
