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The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café
181–190 of 456 posts
Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café
#182Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Too many negative comments here. This is just someone discovering something new and sharing it very excitedly. Some of the negativity is because many people out there were used to this slower way of living only for capitalist techbros to optimize every waking moment everything and hasten the rat race. So now the only people who can sit idly at a cafe would be those who've already have a few million in the bank. It'…
I have 500€ in my bank account, 3k debt and 30 years of work left ahead of me and I take a lot of idle time in cafes or trains or the park. I don't see the issue. The sooner one realizes that working hard isn't the key to life the sooner one realizes you'll have plenty more time. If you get something out of working hard, like joy, sure go ahead. But dont lie to yourself and think that working hard will actually ever…
You don't see the issue because you're not squeezed yet.
Imagine there are no more cheap places to rent anymore and American work culture invades Europe. Shops are no longer closed on Sunday, you're expected to be on call on weekends, and you have a paltry 14 days of vacation for the year.
Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café
#184Is this a post I'm too European to understand? That writing style is like nails on a chalkboard to me. I love lingering in cafés. In the summer, I bike from café to café, catching up with my reading and slowly getting to a productive state. I'll do a bit of reading for work, maybe annotate some articles, eventually open my laptop, and if I'm lucky meet friends along the way. I often leave at 9 and come home at around…
>Is this a post I'm too European to understand?
Are you in a top tier city? Very very few cafes are open late (later than 8pm) in cities and if youre not in a big city, Chicago, NYC, Seattle etc etc you will likely have none open that late. It's definitely a culture thing. Not many folks are drinking coffee / hanging out that late in cafes. Enough do, but nowhere near as much as Europeans do
Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café
#185I didn’t quite understand why sitting alone in a café makes you a weirdo (is it an American thing?), but the piece was very well written. We all should learn how to be without electronics for every now and then, accompanied only our thoughts. It is good for the soul. I think the important part is leaving your phone and other devices home. Be alone, without even a possibility of connecting (apart from the old-fashione…
No, it's a thing everywhere to be honest. People are their with their friends and you are the only one alone. Without phone it would be too cringe, even with phone its cringe. I behave as if though I'm texting someone. It's the societal weight of being the one who is alone.
Do you feel like being a weirdo when you are alone in public transit?
Maybe you should treat cafes the same?
Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have 500€ in my bank account, 3k debt and 30 years of work left ahead of me and I take a lot of idle time in cafes or trains or the park. I don't see the issue. The sooner one realizes that working hard isn't the key to life the sooner one realizes you'll have plenty more time. If you get something out of working hard, like joy, sure go ahead. But dont lie to yourself and think that working hard will actually ever…
You don't see the issue because you're not squeezed yet. Imagine there are no more cheap places to rent anymore and American work culture invades Europe. Shops are no longer closed on Sunday, you're expected to be on call on weekends, and you have a paltry 14 days of vacation for the year.
This would require a lot of changes in basic human rights and legislatures that would never go through within my lifetime so Ill just not think about this. Nuclear war is far more likely to happen during my lifetime.
Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café
#187Too many negative comments here. This is just someone discovering something new and sharing it very excitedly. Almost 6-7 years ago, I read about a 30min challenge to sit upright without doing anything in a chair challenge. That changed how I think about distractions. If I had written about it, there surely will be people who would just like here say... What is so crazy about it? I do that all the time... To me, this…
I've done some sitting still and doing nothing. It's a deep subject. There's like a thousand things going on right now and you're reacting to all of them. And that reaction is reality.
Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café
#188Too many negative comments here. This is just someone discovering something new and sharing it very excitedly. Almost 6-7 years ago, I read about a 30min challenge to sit upright without doing anything in a chair challenge. That changed how I think about distractions. If I had written about it, there surely will be people who would just like here say... What is so crazy about it? I do that all the time... To me, this…
Trying to sit still for 30 min without any stimulation at all (no talking, watching, reading) sounds like torture to me.
>"Trying to sit still for 30 min without any stimulation at all (no talking, watching, reading) sounds like torture to me"
I've done more than that. Summer time I often swim in open water up to 2 hour at once as one of the ways to stay fit. Obviously it becomes routine and not very entertaining. So I usually doing some high level software design work in my mind at this point, exploring some concepts, thinking business ideas etc. etc. So my body does monotonous work of not very high intensity and my brain is busy with everything else. Not board at all.
I once spent 1.5 hour standing in a church listening to a priest for more than an hour (funeral). Same thing I mentally solved the problem why some piece of my code did not work.
Without this ability I would go nuts. My brain always has to be busy with something. It is like a drug for me.
Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
> after a few trips without disaster 100%. Exposure therapy is the cure for anxiety. I have a personal hunch that part of the massive rise in anxiety in the world is explained by many of us no longer being regularly forced outside of our comfort zones. Before the Internet and smartphones, we were obligated to go into the unknown much more often. It was a constant mandatory exposure therapy. Today, I can't remember th…
> Exposure therapy is the cure for anxiety. Except when it is not. Exposure can make an autistic person's anxiety worse.
Pretty sure the exposure makes _everyone's_ anxiety worse at the start, that is part of the point.
Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trying to sit still for 30 min without any stimulation at all (no talking, watching, reading) sounds like torture to me.
Part of my job, is that I design protocols to help young children lie in MRI scanners for a living. We have all sorts of techniques to help with this. However, for each new scanning protocol, I like to have had it myself - so I know what the children go through. And, at times lying inside a MRI scanner, detached from the world, with only the noise of the scanner (very reduced with our new noise cancelling headphones)…
Fascinating. How many MRIs have you had?
I get a break from constant availability from air travel, but that's slowly eroding as it becomes more connected.