Stooping Season

On the hopeful serendipity of the sidewalk economy

I write this as summer is technically concluding — although I have always thought of September as the true blue of summer months. I am personally relieved to be done with all this talk of the late summer doldrums (I heard someone refer to August as the seasonal equivalent of the Sunday Scaries, which is a phrase I hate almost as much as the feeling itself). Now that the other shoe has dropped, and ironic pumpkin spice latte memes abound on Instagram, let me tell you about one of late summer's most fulsome gifts: the height of stooping season. 

I am both nosy and, thanks to my mother's devotion to perusing the aisles of Home Goods with the hawk-eyed precision of an Olympic athlete, also well-trained in the sport of bargain hunting. As such, when the U-Hauls appear on tree-lined streets each September 1st, and pairs of  old shoes and dodgy kitchenware begin to sprout from people's front doorsteps, I know my time has arrived. Stooping season is here, and let me tell you, there are treasures to be found among these heaps of other people's mismanaged trash.

Maybe you've followed the Instagram account @stoopingnyc, or ones like it, which have formalized the fun of freebie-hunting by posting the rough locations of user-submitted photos of notable scoops. The Brooklyn couple who run the account have said that the number of direct message submissions has grown to hundreds per day due to the churn of movement brought on by the pandemic.

Over the course of this summer, among the gifts I've received from the providence of the sidewalk economy are: an annotated copy of Dracula, a set of glazed indigo bowls, and an enormous lamp with a truly gigantic lampshade that I can't believe is mine to keep. I'm not one for astrology or birth charts, but I do believe in the hand of subtle mysticism that places an object or book into your path at the moment you need it. I have found copies of Clarissa Pinkola Estés and Sally Rooney books swollen from use, which, if I'm being honest are more likely markers of Brooklyn's geography of taste, but in my most main-character moments, secretly believe are acts of divine intervention.

But the circular economics of stooping are really a result of something more physical: a fact of spatial interdependence. The stretches of suburban Atlanta where I grew up offered an abundance of yard and garage sales, but no object-rehoming model so freed from transaction besides donation centers, which are different things altogether. But in this floating metropolis of concrete and iron, proximity is a way of life. Within the steady flow of passersby exists a person out there who will find value instantly in what you no longer need. At its rosiest, stooping season is born from a necessary ethos of the enmeshed; one that says, take what you need and leave what you don't.

I love the two sides of this equation with equal measure. The satisfaction of a really good stoop find is only matched by the thrill of seeing someone from the perch of your windowsill whisk away your rejected desk lamp with an air of self-conscious gratification. There's a thread of serendipity that connects both the leaving and the taking, and I think my attraction to this dynamic, and spaces where it happens (thrift stores or libraries are others) stems from a deep desire for an element of chance in the day-to-day of things. I rely on it to believe in possibility outside the realm of my own purview.

There's a segment of Jenny Odell's book How To Do Nothing, where she writes about the limits of those personalized ‘Daily Mix’ Spotify playlists as it relates to algorithms customized to your music taste. She explores the idea that “good music” is actually music that sneaks up on you by chance, changing you in ways unseen, often falling outside the parameters of genre or BPMs you can predict. She writes,

“If we're able to leave room for the encounters that will change us in ways we can't yet see, we can also acknowledge that we are a confluence of forces that exceed our own understanding. This explains why, when I hear a song I unexpectedly like, I sometimes feel like something I don't know is talking through me.”

I love the serendipity of stoop finds for a similar reason. So much of modern life is governed by systems designed to remove chance or aberration from our daily experience as seamlessly as possible. I discover new music on a playlist made for me by Spotify, purchase furniture surfaced to me by an ad on Facebook marketplace, and choose which restaurant to visit based on the highest user ratings produced by my search engine of choice. And while of course there’s a form of pleasure involved in express reordering the same food delivery order each time, more and more I find myself disturbed by a sense that this automatic ease narrows my decisions in ways that feel less human.

“Bounded rationality” is an idea within the behavioral sciences that describes how decision-making becomes limited when constrained by earlier choices. The concept was originally introduced by the economist Herbert Simon as a challenge to the ruling notion of homo economicus within neoclassical economics: the underlying assumption that any economic agent will act rationally to maximize their own happiness. But since humans are not omniscient, no person can possibly have all information about a given situation to be consistently logical and happiness-optimizing. We know this to be true; humans act irrationally all the time. Sometimes our irrational behavior, which can be shaped by bias or misinformation, harms us. (Just look at the rates of American vaccine hesitancy and its resulting personal and collective harms.) But sometimes, ‘irrationality’ can benefit us in ways that previously were inconceivable; miscalculations reveal new dimensions and choices we never even knew we had. It’s why sometimes we make decisions we have trouble describing cogently. Why accrue student debt for a college degree that has little value in the marketplace? Why have a child in a world that by all accounts, appears to be ending? As Joshua Rothman writes on the subject for the New Yorker, “If we couldn’t aspire to changes that we struggle to describe, we’d be trapped within the ideas that we already have.”

When I talk about the mysticism of finding a book on the street, I mean that I feel a brief reprieve from the rational narrowness that an algorithm-centric life can produce. When considered through the lens of bounded rationality, chance encounters can be small freedoms. I relish the idea of stooping season because its conditions are blissfully irrational. With each thing that’s re-homed, it's use is renewed, and a wordless relationship forms between two people that's neither wholly altruistic nor fully selfish. This too feels radical. Unlike the countless (online) spaces where our opportunities for action feel bounded and binary, a divergent mode of relating to each other feels as paradigm-shifting as any form of magic.

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🌙 To accompany this week’s essay, I asked my friend Knar if she had any photos to share on the theme of “Lost & Found.” In true Knar-form, she replied with a lyrically personal take on the idea: a collection of photos reflective of what she had gained and lost throughout the stretch of the pandemic.

Thanks to Knar for sharing these. You can check out more of her work here.

Til next time -

Nicola