A man fell unconscious at a coffee shop. Life went on

It’s lunch time on a Wednesday.

My colleagues and I are buying our food at the coffee shop opposite our office. The place is packed, and we aren’t keen to hang around for a seat, so we opt for takeout.

As we’re queueing, a man runs into the coffee shop with an automated external defibrillator (AED), scanning the area with wild eyes before dashing off.

Seconds later, he circles back: “Has anyone seen a person who’s unconscious?” His fear pierces through the chatter.

I haven’t, and it seems neither have those around me. We assume he had the wrong place; someone must have already handled it. We shrug, sorry we can’t help, and return to what we are doing. Many continue eating; others resume their conversations. I pay for my food and wait for my colleague to collect her meal. 

Then, we spot him: A man, who appears to be in his 60s, slumped in his chair, in a corner of the coffee shop.

A space is quickly cleared. The man with the AED bolts over and starts cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Less than a minute later, a team from the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) arrives to take over. 

I watch them perform continuous chest compressions before my view is blocked by an overzealous onlooker angling for a better shot. She is one of several. A growing circle of passers-by wait with bated breath and raised phones. 

The man on the floor doesn’t respond, and it seems less likely by the minute that he will. It’s been over 10 minutes. Eventually, the paramedics carry him off to the ambulance.

Some people shuffle off. Those who stopped eating return to their half-finished lunch. The food’s getting cold, and they are probably on the clock. It is a working day after all.

Two realities at once

I learnt that the man with the AED was Dr Martin Wong (not a medical doctor), who works opposite the coffee shop. He is a registered volunteer on SCDF’s myResponder app, and was alerted to the incident when someone called 995.

I later discovered that this someone was Mr Chen, the drinks stall uncle. He told me that the man looked like he was sleeping, but had been leaning against the pillar behind his table for a suspiciously long time without movement. He wasn’t around when Dr Wong arrived because he was waiting for the paramedics at the carpark.

I wasn’t able to find out the man’s condition from the hospital where he was taken to. But even if he had survived, it didn’t change how the incident unfolded. 

As the weeks passed, I kept returning to a singular jarring moment that had little to do with his life: Once it seemed he wasn’t going to wake up then, many onlookers resumed their lunch routine.

It was like being in two realities at once. At one end of the coffee shop, a man was receiving CPR. At the other, life went on. 

The crowd’s swift exit unsettled me, even though I knew their lingering would have been pointless. The paramedics had it covered. Did I expect the public to hover and analyse what had just happened? Was I looking for a prolonged visible acknowledgement that we’d just seen something quite awful, and that the rest of our day wouldn’t be business as usual?

That anticipation now seems to have been my subconscious attempt to rationalise what was, to me, a muted response. My unease lay in a deeper belief that a major personal emergency would necessarily elicit an equally significant reaction.

But seeing a collective ambivalence settle over initially curious onlookers was a jolting realisation of how often and how greatly we tend to overestimate the importance of our experiences and our existence. What grinds our world to a halt may be just a brief interruption in someone else’s. 

Misplaced expectations?

As a journalist, I am no stranger to witnessing the consequential moments of a person’s life up close.

I’ve talked to international musicians happy to be remembered decades after their prime, and people who lost loved ones to suicide. I’ve felt the passion in everyday Singaporeans achieving extraordinary things, and the pain in domestic violence survivors recounting their abuse. 

Social media has only turbocharged this access that all of us have to each other’s highlights and lowlights. And these instances at life’s edges tend to come with a script.

Big emotion organises itself into something legible, even communal. You can see this in the fund-raising support for a child with cancer, or the collective rage when netizens feel a traffic accident victim hasn’t been given due justice.

An obvious medical emergency playing out at a heartland coffee shop in front of a lunch crowd seemed to fall into a similar category that demanded a pronounced reaction. At the very least, I thought the dramatic contrast of a critical moment against a mundane backdrop would stop more people in their tracks for a longer time.

Perhaps it would have – if the man had been a child or a familiar face. Or if he had dramatically fallen off his chair. But he wasn’t, and he didn’t.

He was just an ordinary guy, dressed in a plain T-shirt and pants, who walked into a regular coffee shop by himself, found a corner seat and didn’t get up. 

The moment he slipped into unconsciousness was utterly unremarkable. It struck during a normal weekday afternoon, and the rest of life continued to flow around it, like water around a stone.

A wake-up call

The common response, after such an incident, is to criticise the prevalence of the bystander effect in Singapore, and list ways we could do better. 

If we were more observant, maybe we’d have caught the moment a man with his eyes closed was no longer napping. If we knew the difference a single person could make, we wouldn’t feel less responsible for one another just because there may be other people around.

Maybe even, if more people knew how to do CPR, someone would have stepped up before help arrived. 

But skills and knowledge, while valuable, go only so far. Becoming more socially conscious doesn’t always close the gap between who we think we are and what we actually do in every instance. 

People watch and then move on quickly for many reasons. Perhaps the most uncomfortable, and least acknowledged, is this: When it comes down to it, many of us are simply not important or special enough for most others to care what happens to us.

It’s a sobering thought that seems to contradict the human need to feel like our existence matters. We place an immense weight on elevating our daily lives – like gunning for a promotion, accumulating more social media followers, buying a home, getting married by a certain age. We might even achieve it all. 

And still, we could be that man, and the crowd would carry on. 

But that, to me, could also be the most liberating realisation. If our most vulnerable moment can pass unremarkably – if few people continue to care after a man who falls unconscious cannot be revived on scene – then so too can our worst embarrassment, our biggest failure, our most humiliating setback. The weight of needing to matter is, at least partly, self-inflicted. Nobody is watching as closely as we think. 

This is not to say everything we do is pointless, or that our cosmic insignificance excuses careless living.

On the contrary, since the world will continue spinning regardless of how we live, we might as well live fully and on our own terms. 

Our successes and accomplishments that we boast about are irrelevant to the people we pass on the street. Our mistakes, failures and anxieties that plague us barely register in their lives. We are just another face in the crowd, and it is just another Wednesday.