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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

#401

Post by barnabee »

moooo99 wrote: post #25
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…

> 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…

I fairly often go out with just my Garmin watch and an ereader (Boox 6”, which is just about pocketable).

I can sync music to it and use it for contactless payments, which is just about enough.

It’s possible to do a bit more but it’s more basic than an Apple Watch as a smartphone alternative (but much better for everything I want it for), and as I mostly use it for sports tracking and being phoneless, I haven’t set any other apps up.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#402

Post by jillesvangurp »

If you travel solo, going to cafe's, bars, and especially restaurants can be a bit awkward. But also enjoyable. Mostly, it's just a mental block that people need to get over.

Some venues are really just not designed for solo travelers. You have all these couples and social groups having fun with each other and then the tables they give to social travelers don't tend to be the nicest.

This is annoying if you are hungry and not looking to get another fast food meal. But fast food restaurants are of course perfect for solo travelers otherwise. And there are lots of restaurant types that serve decent food in a bit informal setting where eating by yourself is not that weird. Other good options include hotel restaurants. Because hotels tend to have lots of solo travelers. The bigger the city, the easier it is to find nice places to eat by yourself generally.

Cafes are easier. Lots of people go there to have a coffee by themselves, work, read, or whatever. It's normal. The venue might not like the sub optimal use of tables though. But if it's not too busy and you tip well, they typically don't mind people staying for a few hours and perhaps reading or working on a laptop. I do this a lot.

I don't drink alcohol anymore and getting drunk by yourself in a bar can be a bit weird. Though depending on the bar, it's perfectly normal to have a drink by yourself of course. These days I tend to like to sit down after a day of sight seeing to have a few cold alcohol free beers. Lots of places where this is perfectly normal.

I've been traveling solo for a few decades. I can be quite social but I'm also fine not talking to people for days/weeks when traveling. It's not for everyone. I tend to prefer booking apartments and self catering these days. Going to restaurants for dinner is expensive and not really worth it to me by myself. But I'll have coffees, light lunches, and other beverages.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#403

Post by barnabee »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #81
acntr_employee wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its like riding the bus. There's nothing wrong with public transit, its just that its somewhere warm for poor homeless people to sit all winter, so its not very cool. Public transport often is the best and most efficient way to move within a city where I live, or in places like London, Stockholm, Berlin or quite a lot of other European cities. > Its a social class thing. Homeless people sit alone Really? Anyone sit…

I think most people's experience of homeless people is schizophrenics talking or yelling into the air, meth heads doing their thing, and aggressive panhandlers. The rest are just invisible. Unfortunately this distortion of reality effects public policy around homelessness in bad ways.

Most people in one specific country?

Here we take the bus if it’s the best route. We also read books and sit alone in cafés (sometimes at the same time).

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#404

Post by ofTimothy »

indigo945 wrote: post #375
DenisM wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get two phones. One for carrying around, lock it down 100% with parental controls against all distractions. The other one unlocked. Parental controls are underrated.

I've thought about doing that, but it seems to require multiple Google accounts - one for the "child" and one for the "parent", which is hard to achieve without also having multiple SIM cards with different phone numbers that can be used for the account registration. I assume the process is designed to be full of friction to prevent people from freeing themselves of the addiction.

You don't need multiple SIM cards; you can just create new Google accounts. I have my main google account set as the child of a different account and it works great. But the set up was somewhat annoying, took me a couple hours.

I've been postponing writing a guide on how to set this up for a while, but I think I'm motivated to do it now, I'll try to have something up by the 8th here https://tim2othy.github.io/ws/screen-time/, maybe useful for you.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#405

Post by barnabee »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #372
the__alchemist wrote: post #112

This doesn't match my experience at all, starting from the beginning. Many go to cafes alone to read, work, study etc. Seating set up for this, including small tables and bars. That's one of their biggest draws. With large fluctuations, I estimate ~30%. I suspect this depends on the location, given this contrast. It seems the Author might be from Delaware, USA? I haven't been to any coffee shops there. Maybe this is…

>Many go to cafes alone to read, work, study etc. I've seen a few cafes in the UK push back against this, in particular people who buy a drink and then sit at a laptop for hours. One I visited last week had a large table set aside for laptops and the rest were marked as laptop free.

I enjoy a laptop free café. I’ve (thankfully) never come across any that has a problem with reading though.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#406

Post by barnabee »

artur_makly wrote: post #393

Reading 1 min into it.. somehow I felt he was German.. and voila.. he lives in Berlin.

I’m quite surprised that Berlin is a place where it’s seen as odd to go to a café alone.

I’ve certainly done it there plenty of times, but it would never have even occurred to me that it may be unusual.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#408

Post by doublesocket »

thunfischtoast wrote: post #369
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…

A great exercise while being still is to put your attention to various parts of your body: what does the air smell like? What do you hear? How does the chair under your butt and the ground under your feet feel like? Try not to think too much, let the thoughts come and go like cars on a motorway, but observe closely in and around you.

My ADHD brain recoils at the thought of this, which probably means I would benefit even more from doing so.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#409

Post by big_paps »

barnabee wrote: post #406
artur_makly wrote: post #393

Reading 1 min into it.. somehow I felt he was German.. and voila.. he lives in Berlin.

I’m quite surprised that Berlin is a place where it’s seen as odd to go to a café alone. I’ve certainly done it there plenty of times, but it would never have even occurred to me that it may be unusual.

It isn‘t. Absolutely not.

Re: The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

#410

Post by rglynn »

seb1204 wrote: post #331

> a cup of americano with a double shot of espresso. What is that exactly? A cup of percolator coffee with a double shot of espresso into the cup? Or a long black (a double shot of espresso filled up with hot water) plus two extra espresso shots? Or just a long black expressed in a complicated way?

They are basically the same, long black is water with espresso poured on top, americano is espresso with water poured on top.
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