Driving through downtown Montauk on Sunday morning was an obstacle course of double-parked cars, e-bike riders going the wrong way, and people stepping out into traffic.
I had been at the boat for a few hours, so the scene was an abrupt jolt after the calm on the lake. A thought came to me as I crept along: What if these sorts of visitors were not being entitled jerks but rather were doing the best they could with the cerebral horsepower they had? A wave of charitable feeling came over me.
Humans apparently rate our personal intelligence as better than average, despite the statistic impossibility. Research shows, too, that we are poorer judges of ourselves than we are of others, perhaps mistaking our self-confidence for actual cognitive ability, e.g., crossing Montauk Highway without looking both ways.
My daughter Evvy and I were in Manhattan on Tuesday for a performance of “Ragtime” at the Vivian Beaumont Theater. We had time before the show for a bite to eat and stopped at random at a sushi place. Across Seventh Avenue, a slow-moving line of customers had formed outside a hot new frozen yogurt shop. Evvy timed how long it took a young man with an easy-to-spot red shoulder bag to get to the front; it was 15 minutes from the time she n oticed him to the moment he emerged from inside. Was the product worth the buzz? There was no way we were going to join the queue to find out.
Hamptons hype, particularly as it concerns Montauk, seems to grow every season. Studies of intelligence have shown an inverse correlation between smarts and susceptibility to the repetitive, sugary brain food on social media. That is, the dumber we are, the more likely we are to succumb, to wait in the hot sun for fro-yo — or sit on the Jitney for hours in both directions for two days at the beach.
Which is all to say that we might think more kindly of the day trippers and Airbnb guests who stumble across our path. Hype is potent, and there isn’t much they can do to resist it given their tools at hand.