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The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

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Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#251

Post by bradlys »

galleywest200 wrote: post #189
fnord77 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Nah, it’s actually a studied thing. Exposure therapy can work for some subjects but it’s quite controversial due to it quickly becoming “trauma therapy”. It can easily reinforce someone’s existing beliefs and make someone actually weaker and traumatized. Happens a lot. Imagine an ugly kid asking every girl out at school, you think maybe he just needs to get a single success but it’s possible he gets completely rejected and/or the rejections are so immense that it overpowers any single acceptance. He won’t be resilient from this - it will haunt him for the rest of his life. Plus, there can be social consequences (and consequences with other exposure therapies) that will be lasting from making such a brute force strategy.

Exposure therapy can make sense if it always resorts in good outcomes but that’s the issue - bad things do happen. And sometimes bad things happen more often to those who are “needing” exposure therapy.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#252

Post by trgn »

manicennui wrote: post #236
delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #9

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…

It's really just people in the suburbs and smaller cities. Doing things alone is completely normal in a city like Chicago or NY.

It's hard to put a finger on, but I do think it only "works" in a locale where you have a certain degree of anonymity, where it makes sense. Chicken egg for sure. But yeah, categorically, you can't really do city activities in the burbs, the feel isn't right.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#253

Post by anonymous908213 »

vlod wrote: post #211
cm2012 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to sit still for 30 min without any stimulation at all (no talking, watching, reading) sounds like torture to me.

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." - Blaise Pascal I try and think about this often.

I don't think it's very much worth thinking about. It's a pseudointellectual quip that sounds superficially insightful but which holds zero substance.

The overwhelming majority of humanity's problems, such as they might be described, stem from the biological drive to survive and procreate. The quip presupposes that man naturally has a room to sit quietly in; this is not the case. The procurement of a room to sit in requires a significant amount of effort. It can entail the securing of territory and building of the shelter oneself, or it can entail the education, advanced skill development, and daily labour required to pay to reap the results of other people having secured the territory and built the shelter. To say nothing of food, mating, and rearing of offspring.

Pascal was born well-to-do, so perhaps he was removed from the general human experience. He was provided with the room to sit quietly in by the efforts of others, and may never have had to work a day in his life, affording him the luxury to make that statement. He also did not marry or reproduce. If everyone had lived the life he lived, there would be no rooms to sit in and indeed no men to sit in them. Being charitable, I suppose it's true that if all mankind were to stop reproducing, there would shortly be no more problems for humanity on account of humanity no longer existing.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#254

Post by cm2012 »

anotherevan wrote: post #225
cm2012 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to sit still for 30 min without any stimulation at all (no talking, watching, reading) sounds like torture to me.

If nothing else, having to go to church every Sunday in my youth taught be to be able to sit still while bored off my brain for an hour a week.

My mom used to say I made her seasick since I would fidget and sway so much when bored in church. I'd also pretend to go to the bathroom just to leave the service to walk around. Memories unlocked!

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#255

Post by tmn »

bradlys wrote: post #247
Tagbert wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be at first until you get used to it. You can observe your surroundings, make up stories about what is happening. Ask yourself questions. Listen to yourself. This is a bit like excercise. When you first start, 30 minutes of exercise can be torture as your is out of shape and not used to the effort. Keep doing it and it feels better and you feel better. Work on becoming a source of thoughts rather than a consum…

People talk about this with exercise and I’ve never understood it. As someone who has exercised continuously for years - it has never gotten better. Which, to me, makes sense because you’re supposed to always be pushing yourself. You’re not supposed to ever feel comfortable or feel better from it. You should always feel shitty because if it doesn’t hurt then you’re probably not making optimal development. The only th…

Exercising is doing some activity that is good for your health. You’ve reduced this to some narrow set of activities that presumably make you stronger, faster, or better at some other easy to measure metric. I assure you it’s easy to enjoy exercising if your incentive is longevity and simply healthy living by a more subjective metric

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#257

Post by cm2012 »

reg_dunlop wrote: post #96
cm2012 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to sit still for 30 min without any stimulation at all (no talking, watching, reading) sounds like torture to me.

My therapist used to say: this means you must do it for 40 minutes

Id find that annoying and find a new therapist

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#258

Post by spudlyo »

throwtt4er5 wrote: post #241
spudlyo wrote: post #79

I struggled greatly with this article. There was something halting about it. Something precious. I felt that the author desperately wanted to elevate the mundane into the realm of the sublime. I found myself annoyed. I thought to myself "Are paragraphs a renewable resource? Is it wrong to waste them?" It doesn't matter. In neuroscience, there is a thing called the "default mode network" which is best known for being…

I appreciated the author’s writing format. For example, I read your first four sentences/paragraphs. When I got to your last paragraph, it was so long that I started skimming halfway and then just gave up. I think a mix and match of small paragraphs and single line sentences for emphasis is a pretty good writing format for holding my attention, but I can see how others might be annoyed by it.

Yeah, I should have split the final paragraph into two, but I kept it long thinking it would be a funny contrast; it wasn't. In retrospect, it probably would have been better not to have made fun of the poster's style at all. I also find it annoying when commenters complain about trivial stylistic issues in folks' writing rather than engaging with the substance.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#259

Post by try_the_bass »

moooo99 wrote: post #100
arccy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with a modicum of self control, you can turn off your phone when it's not needed.

The problem with the reliance on self control is the self control. You have it or you don't. While I generally agree just exercising pure self control may be a viable strategy for some, it does not work for everyone. Particularly people with ADHD do have a tendency to be easily captured by screens. I've personally struggled with adherence to my reduce screen time goals and while exercising more self control has helpe…

> You have it or you don't.

To quote the Gorillaz:

> That's a fallacy

Self-control is not a "have it or don't" thing. It can be developed and exercised, often simply by trying and failing, and then trying again (like any exercise!).

I'm not saying it's not harder for some people than others. I'm also not saying that it isn't harder to exercise on some circumstances than others. However, it's absolutely not a binary thing, and it is achievable, in some form, for anyone.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#260

Post by performative »

FerretFred wrote: post #141

"So, I took long walks with my dog. What used to feel like 10 minutes between breakfast and lunch while working became a full-blown day. Even though I was spending two hours walking my dog instead of a 30-40 minute rush, it felt like an eternity" My dog has a way of slowing down time, although he won't tell me how. I think as humans we know what we expect from this other species, but they have a way of reorganizing t…

this is a very cute anecdote, thank you. my parents have three dogs, so i've had similar thoughts. i believe they're just truly used to the dead space in a day. it makes sense once i think about it, but it feels so far away
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