Today on a crowded subway train, I was standing and a woman in front of me was sitting, with one person in the seat directly on her left, another person on her right, and another two seats to her right. The person directly to her left was pretty skinny, and was sitting forward with most of his body not over the seat.

Then the person to her right got up. The person two seats to her right was a bit large, and taking up some of the now empty seat directly to the woman's right. The woman then quickly slid over to this newly empty but partly taken up seat, from the perfectly good one she had next to someone not even taking up their entire seat.

Two forces are at work here: one, giving her the right to slide around like that. Sitting is not good enough for people anymore. They have to be sitting in the best possible seat that's accessible by sliding from their current seat, as if they're in a one-dimensional version of those sliding board puzzles with one empty square. But why does she have the right to do this? Because there are two classes: the sitting, and the standing. As she is already sitting, she has first rights to any seat that becomes available (as long as she can get to it quickly enough). As a current stander, I only have the right to the seats that no sitter wants. Fortunately the social climb from stander to sitter is a quick one, even though it actually involves a physical descent.

Then there's two: given the right, why did she choose to move to a seemingly suboptimal seat? The most common slide is to a seat at the end of a row, so that one only has a neighbor on one side. But the seat she slid to was one away from that seat. It's possible that she want to be as close to the end as possible, in case she later got the opportunity to slide further. But on an express train heading into midtown during the morning rush hour, I find this much foresight unlikely. I think it's a case of grass-is-always-greener. People are getting so anxious to be in the optimal seat that they're taking any slide that becomes possible, like the desperate solver of those board puzzles who no longer trusts their own judgment, and simply moves the pieces around as much as possible in the hopes of stumbling toward a resolution.

When the woman made this seemingly bizarre move, the person she had been next to gave her a bit of a look, like 'what, do I smell bad?' He understood.