21–30 of 456 posts
Rawdogging a coffee, will try it.
This reminds me of the “techbro discovers very common x thing” meme. Going to a coffee shop (that is 75% solo remote workers) without your phone and pretending it’s some divine experience feels conceited. Do things you like, sometimes don’t check your phone. Very well written title though.
I 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…
The annoying part is that this becomes increasingly difficult to impossible. For example, I can't use public transport without my phone anymore, because my ticket is bound to my phone and the provider does not issue paper tickets or smartcards anymore.
Less severe but equally frustrating, many restaurants choose to use QR codes for menus rather than printing them onto a sheet of paper or writing them to the wall.
I love leaving my phone behind, primarily because I am in the "we're entertaining ourselves to death" crowd considering I essentially grew up with mobile phones already. But our environment is increasingly build on the assumption that we carry a smartphone with us at any given time.
This reminds me of the “techbro discovers very common x thing” meme. Going to a coffee shop (that is 75% solo remote workers) without your phone and pretending it’s some divine experience feels conceited. Do things you like, sometimes don’t check your phone. Very well written title though.
Too bad. The writing style... quickly loses it's luster. After you make it past the title.
I 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…
> I think the important part is leaving your phone and other devices home. The annoying part is that this becomes increasingly difficult to impossible. For example, I can't use public transport without my phone anymore, because my ticket is bound to my phone and the provider does not issue paper tickets or smartcards anymore. Less severe but equally frustrating, many restaurants choose to use QR codes for menus rathe…
> It’s contradictory to sit alone in a café. It’s against the reason cafés exist. > They are designed as meeting spaces. There is no table with a single chair. I'm so confused by this, because every cafe I've ever been to is full of people there alone. It seems to almost be the default, honestly.
I really do not get the tendency to reduce everything down to one singular reason or cause. Is this a monotheistic religious thing? Is this a binary thing? I just can't wrap my head around this. But that might just be me - having originally studied literature and history (after graduating from high school with mainly stem subjects) I always felt I had one foot in each of those worlds - one in the "hard sciences" one more in the humanities. Never able to reduce myself to just one reason of being or one interest - and never able to attribute only one reason/meaning to a work of art.
So my long winded way of saying, that I just did not buy the premise.