Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

candost.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 456 posts

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#321

Post by jrowen »

spudlyo wrote: post #258
throwtt4er5 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've seen some other commentary on the short/one-line paragraphs trend, and linking it to LLMs. I think it is just kind of a thing of the times—attention spans and all that.

I think it is more suited to the ways people consume text these days, kind of like how digital platforms moved to sans-serif fonts. Long dense paragraphs are fine in books and newspapers but hard to read and don't flow right on web browsers.

Books have also always had sections of short paragraphs for dialogue or pacing effect. I find myself breaking my own writing into more succinct paragraphs/thoughts that start to feel like jumbled run-on sentences without line breaks.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#322

Post by johnisgood »

dwaltrip wrote: post #297
johnisgood wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I end up being consumed by depressive thoughts and lots of body scanning. I hate it.

Sounds like your body is telling you something? Time to find support that you trust and face whatever is going on under the hood. For me, the three major turning points were quitting my job, later starting somatic therapy with the right therapist, and then finally getting diagnosed with ADHD. Good luck to you :) wish you the best

Well, I have MS and I have muscle spasticity, spinal hyperactivity, etc. The feeling of not having control over your body is terrible.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#323

Post by andrewinardeer »

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…

Exercise can become a form of self harm. It did for me.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#324

Post by anonymous908213 »

cal_dent wrote: post #313
anonymous908213 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

just go to a park mate. an open field. an empty car park. everyone can find a place to sit or stop. no one has taken that away from you

I guess I can see how I didn't communicate clearly, but that was really not the point I was getting at. The point about the room is more that ordinary people need to acquire shelter and food to survive. If those things are not freely provided for them as they were for Pascal, their life will have many problems in the pursuit of those things. Meditating quietly in nature is all well and good, but doing so will hardly free you from all the problems that are associated with the pursuit of survival and/or procreation, and which make up the majority of human problems.

Pascal also stated...

> as we should always be, in the suffering of evils, in the deprivation of all the goods and pleasures of the senses, free from all the passions that work throughout the course of life, without ambition, without avarice, in the continual expectation of death

while going so far as rejecting medical care for an illness that eventually led to his death at a young 39. In other words, his attained enlightenment was suffering in the name of his religion to the point of dying. He certainly committed to his beliefs, but I don't find his form of enlightenment inspiring, and do not believe that humanity should strive to follow in his footsteps of fatal self-deprivation. The only way sitting quietly solves all of humanity's problems is if all of humanity commits to doing only that until they wither away and die without any pursuit of the things they need to survive. He framed it as giving up ambition and avarice, but even without ambition and avarice you will endure struggles merely to sustain yourself if you are not born into wealth. I, personally, am quite content dealing with those struggles and have no interest in solving them by dying prematurely as Pascal might prefer to do.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#325

Post by notepad0x90 »

You know, on the internet I've read a lot about how "it's not weird" to sit alone in cafe's and restaurants. But in real life, even when I don't think it's weird, people go out of their way to make sure I know it is. You can try and ignore what people think, but it is an exhausting exercise in mental gymnastics.

Same goes for not caring about what people in think when you're trying to work on your health and go to a gym.

I don't know, it just feels really bad, no one wants to be treated badly, it's that simple. But if you can manage to find a good spot where it just works out for you, treasure/keep that.

Solitude is precious when it is done with purpose.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#326

Post by bradlys »

melagonster wrote: post #289
bradlys wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But you have ability to suffer painful for a long time.

If you think that’s ability then you should see what my whole life has been. Pain from exercise is a joke in comparison.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#327

Post by safety1st »

hliyan wrote: post #318
safety1st wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stillness isn't only enjoyable (for some), it's incredibly valuable. Stoicism and Buddhism both talk a lot about it and they're not the only ones. I make a point of sitting comfortably and doing nothing with no stimuli for 5-10 minutes every morning. Inevitably when you're still with no distractions, your subconscious starts surfacing various thoughts. There is a random element to what pops into your head, but there…

There's an argument to be made that what alcohol achieves, and what meditation aims to achieve (and often fails) is the same thing: disengaging the prefrontal cortex. Once our basic needs are met, our higher brain functions can become an impediment to happiness, since they have neither a shut off switch nor a goal threshold -- it is insatiable, and will continue to analyze threats and manufacture problems to solve.

I am not sure I would consider those two things substitutable goods but I do advocate for social recreational use of alcohol for this reason, and at a certain point in life a creed along the lines of "if you don't practice mindfulness, go drink" probably moved me a lot farther forward than most people would give it credit for.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#328

Post by tkgally »

unsungNovelty wrote: post #50

Too 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…

> Too many negative comments here.

I wonder if the author’s use of “you” rubbed some people the wrong way: “You are alone and powerless. You encounter a deep challenge,” “When you let your thoughts wander, they take you on a journey you’ll never think possible,” etc.

The pronoun seems intended to refer to the author’s own experiences, but I can see why some readers might think it refers to them. I had a bit of a negative reaction to those “you”s myself, as I experience cafés very differently from the author.

I have a similar negative reaction to op-ed articles that use “we” to refer to some sort of personified zeitgeist. From some essays currently appearing in the Opinion section of the New York Times:

“We are all in a constant state of grief, even though we don’t always admit it.”

“But we spend much of our lives in weaker friendship markets, where people are open to conversation, but not connection.”

“Over the past six decades or so, we chose autonomy, and as a result, we have been on a collective journey from autonomy to achievement to anxiety.”

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#329

Post by jdkee »

cm2012 wrote: post #69
unsungNovelty wrote: post #50

Too 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.

That is because the monkey mind is trying to create a narrative where none exists in the moment.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#330

Post by abustamam »

cm2012 wrote: post #69
unsungNovelty wrote: post #50

Too 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.

I thought it was too, but when my daughter was born she had trouble regulating her temperature so I had to stay with her while she was under the warmer for an hour, then another hour swaddled in my arms. They didn't allow phones, so I got to spend two hours with her, no distraction. The time passed surprisingly quickly. I sang to her, I told her stories from my head.

Nowadays when I'm feeding her or napping her I admittedly do have a phone behind her head, but I'll always cherish those two hours where it was just us two.

Post reply on HN