The other day I was in a coffee shop when a man hovering over me said, “Hi, I’m going to ask you a favour. Can you move over there?” He jerked his head at a neighbouring table. “Since I have a stroller.” There was something about his tone (as well as his lack of “sorry” or “please”) that made me bristle. What if I had a bum leg? Or my own stroller en route? I nearly said, “I’d be happy to move if you weren’t so rude.” Instead I let out a passive-aggressive harrumph as I moved to the new table.

As I settled in, I admonished myself for grousing. Who was I to feel entitled to the table? (It was only a two-top, but had a coveted position in the corner.) I should have been more empathetic. Wielding a child in a stroller is no easy task in Brooklyn, a borough with cosy but cramped shops, uneven sidewalks, and walk-up brownstones. But when he, his partner, and their children left the cafe, he did not return the three extra chairs he’d corralled from other tables. They left behind a table full of crumbs. I recanted my earlier neighbourly empathy.

My point is not to rehash complaints about the Brooklyn stroller set that debate peaked back in 2008, when a Park Slope bar put the kibosh on baby strollers due to fire hazards, only to be met with backlash from local parents.

I realise this stroller anecdote could be summed up with the Twitter hashtag #firstworldproblems, accompanied by a miniature violin solo. But living in a first world country comes with its own niggling little problems, small stuff that nonetheless seeps into the crevices of our daily lives. And these irritating minutiae can take a cumulative mental toll. They make us less happy and less pleasant to our neighbours, thereby perpetuating the cycle. So in order to improve our overall quality of life, we need to find a better, less entitled way to communicate. We need to conduct ourselves with more empathy.

Perhaps the beauty of being a melting pot/salad bowl/[insert preferred multicultural metaphor here] is that America does not have a scripted set of cultural mores. But with no default code to fall back on, we’re often left to navigate the Wild West of social interactions on our own. People talk at cross-purposes as they request or demand things of each other, and each party leaves feeling a little more frustrated than before.

Compare the behaviour of Americans to that of the British, who have mastered their own verbal pas de deux among strangers. “Deference and a quiet consideration for others are such a fundamental part of British life,” Bill Bryson writes in Notes from s Small Island, that most conversations begin with “’I’m terribly sorry but’ followed by a request of some sort ‘could you tell me the way to Brighton,’ ‘help me find a shirt my size,’ ‘get your steamer trunk off my foot.’” The interaction is rounded off with a follow-up apology by the first party, “begging forgiveness for taking up your time or carelessly leaving their foot where your steamer trunk clearly needed to go.”

Koreans have a similar sense of social deference, summed up in the word “yangbo” to defer or yield to. A youth will “yangbo” his seat on the bus to the elderly; cars at an intersection will “yangbo” to the flow of traffic. In South Korean restaurants, you might be uprooted mid-meal to make room for a larger or more important party.

A recent study found that that reading literary fiction is one path towards increased empathy and emotional intelligence. Test subjects performed better on tests that required “read[ing] someone’s body language or gaug[ing] what they might be thinking.”

This might offer one possible solution towards a semblance of citizenly courtesy. Yes, there is a dark side to deferring our individual needs to that of society it strikes an eerie chord with utilitarianism. I’m not saying we should resurrect the principles of Bentham and John Stuart Mill (yet). Nor am I saying it should take us 10 minutes to communicate the smallest of requests that would never fly, especially in a city like New York. But we’d all improve our quality of life if we gave empathy a shot, myself included.

Guardian News and Media Ltd.