The Unbearable Joy of Sitting Alone in a Café
Key topics
The notion of solo café-sitting being a profound experience has commenters divided, with some embracing the author's romanticized view and others dismissing it as a mundane, even privileged, activity. As one commenter astutely pointed out, people's experiences can vary wildly despite identical circumstances, highlighting the complex interplay between internal states and external environments. The discussion also took a meta-turn, with some poking fun at the author's seemingly novel experience and others referencing literary influences, such as Milan Kundera's famous novel title, which inspired the blog post's title. Amidst the debate, a nuanced understanding emerged: that solo café-sitting can be a simple pleasure or a profound experience, depending on one's perspective.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
1h
Peak period
62
0-6h
Avg / period
26.7
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Jan 4, 2026 at 9:37 AM EST
3d ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Jan 4, 2026 at 10:58 AM EST
1h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
62 comments in 0-6h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Jan 7, 2026 at 9:07 AM EST
3h ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
I sit alone in cafes all the time, for many reasons. I don’t feel particularly joyful about it nor weird. I just do it to take a break and have something to drink, or wait for someone or something. Often I don’t look at my phone at all. That doesn’t feel weird either, or rebellious, or whatever the author experiences.
I don’t understand the post at all.
I’d have gone to Japan. I’ve been to Japan, it’s awesome.
Two people can go to the exact same venue, do the exact same things, and have radically different experiences because of how our different internal worlds collide with that same external world.
And a further part of the magic of being human is that we're then able to share those experiences with each other. I wouldn't want to diminish someone else's experience of a place simply because I didn't have that same experience.
When you're so addicted to checking at your phone (like me and many others), it does feel weird to sit and not look at it.
I say this to help you understand, nothing more.
Very well written title though.
The post is eloquently written, and if it inspires people to take a little time for themselves the world will be a little of a better place because of it. And posting it makes the author a little vulnerable; I’d much rather people write posts like this than self-censor because they’d be exposed to ridicule.
Except the dog thing. PLEASE do not bring your dog into a cafe. Somehow people like me are in the minority though so I will stop here.
> 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.
Go to any coffee shop in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, and you're bound to see students and tech workers sitting alone, typing away on their laptops. Even in LA, you'll see people editing videos and posting stuff on social media.
I think it's perhaps very American to go to cafes alone, especially if you are going there to get work done. Anecdotally, I had a French tennis partner back in 2022. One time, after our match, we went to a neighborhood cafe to chat and talk about life. He remarked to me how strange and foreign it is that Americans work so hard. He finds it stupid, even off-putting, that people work in cafes, which to him is a place to relax and socialize. He used slightly stronger language than stupid, so I didn't have the heart to tell him I plan to work in a cafe later that day. Maybe it's just a cultural thing.
Cafés can be both of those spaces.
I'm probably an above averagely anxious person, but after a few trips without disaster, it becomes a non issue.
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 the last time I walked into a restaurant without already having seen the inside on Google Maps, read several reviews on Yelp, and perused the menu online.
Except when it is not. Exposure can make an autistic person's anxiety worse.
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.
Just randomly doing shit that causes you stress isn't exposure therapy. It's just hazing yourself and rolling the dice as to the outcome.
> Exposure therapy can make sense if it always resorts in good outcomes but that’s the issue
I think you have an over-simplified notion of "good outcome" here.
It's not necessarily about achieving the goal of the action, it's about seeing that the catastrophizing scenarios in your head aren't based in reality. In the example with the ugly kid, if he's afraid that asking a girl out will lead to her laughing in his face and publicly humiliating him, then even simply being rejected with compassion is enough to thwart that catastrophizing.
But, of course, having him ask out every girl at the school is a terrible example of "exposure therapy". Strangers should not be used as unconsenting test subjects in one's personal therapy.
Another thing to try is to go to a diner alone. Same deal.
Oh yeah. This is one of the things I enjoy most when traveling for work (more often than not means traveling alone). I can go to dinner alone, watch people interact, feel the city, the people, the staff.
Discovering dinner alone to me was an interesting experience. And a lovely one at that.
I still, to this day - even with a good typing speed, I write way quicker with a pen. A pen isn't slowing me down. A pen is a force multiplier. At least to me and in my totally subjective experience.
> The writing must hurt your wrist or hand. It must turn into a burden. That pain is a signal telling you that you have written long enough. Maybe you wrote only five lines. Perhaps one thousand.
The author must not have used a pen much in their lifetime. I have written 50 to 80 pages in longhand - never cramped, never felt it to be a burden. No pain.
Overall - from the beginning, to the end, this to me felt so contrived. The "sampled title" (sorry, but I would call it a blatant rip off), the LinkedIn/TED-talk writing style. Making something an uncountable number of people experience every day sound like the holy grail of enlightenment - and the writing style overall - to me it read like Claude being prompted well.
Not my piece of cake. Sorry.
> Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead.
Not OP, just wondering if the unwritten conventions changed since I was here the last time.
The writing might not be innovative or groundbreaking, but it is a great and relaxing piece of text that helps me connect to another person. It was a good read.
A decade ago I was working a boring job paying the bills in a small company. I honestly felt that despite being financially safe I was wasting my life. I didn't believe in the company mission and I wasn't gaining new skills. I was bored out.
I went to a cafe every morning for 30min BEFORE my actual job. I did whatever I wanted, meaning reading, writing, jolting down ideas, being productive or not, but the point was it was MY time to think.
This is so basic. I went with a notebook, a pencil, paid 2€ every morning for a basic black coffee... but what was special was having a dedicated time and place regularly to just inch at it, whatever "it" might be for me.
Well, fast forward ~10 years and I'm HYPED. I'm so excited pretty much every morning that I can't help for the next day to work on more interesting projects.
TL;DR: yes, go to the cafe, alone, for yourself.
- embrace liminal spaces
We tend to see such spaces as waste. We tend to skip them. We use any trick possible, from rushing to having a mobile phone with a podcast. We find ways to avoid being alone with our thoughts.
Guess where ideas come from? Shower? Waiting for the bus? ... they come from our running minds NOT being entertained.
Embrace liminal spaces. Make your own liminal spaces. They are liberating.
- None of my colleagues, and nobody in any of my social circles, would ever be seen dead there
- You meet the best people, everyones really nice
- Nobody judges anybody, we're all just there go get a bit pissed, lots of people socialising, some people are there doing a crossword, I'm just a guy sitting on my laptop coding, nobody cares
- I can focus better with lots of background noise
- Cheap beer
If you've not tried it, try it!
It's the sort of place you can go at 9am and see people having a full English breakfast with a large glass of wine. It's people who want to drink a lot of alcohol for not a lot of money, but not quite at the point where they're buying very cheap cider (which is always alcoholic in the UK), and sitting in the park with it. There's a veneer of high-functioning about it.
They do vary a bit (the "posh pub" in central Hull is the 'spoons, one of the roughest pubs I've been to in West London is also a 'spoons), but the clientele are typically white, working class, pro-Brexit (the founder is very anti-EU and publishes an in-house propaganda mag to that effect), pretty right wing, heavy drinkers.
It's not my preferred crowd, I'd rather spend a bit more and go to a pub where there's a chance somebody is reading something other than the Daily Mail or The Sun, but each to their own.
That's a massive stretch. In my experience, the common denominator with Wetherspoons is it's somewhere people go for the cheap drinks and food. You get people of different backgrounds, age ranges and political beliefs going to Wetherspoons pubs (including plenty of apolitical people). The only undeniably true statements is that Tim Martin was pro-Brexit and there was anti-EU material in the Wetherspoons magazine around the time of the Brexit referendum, but beyond that it's not an issue that's particularly high profile anymore, it's not part of daily conversation like it once was, many people have moved on from discussing it.
Worth it though for ~£1.30 unlimited tea and coffee.
In the centre of the city there are three spoons. One for the people with tattoos on their knuckles (near the magistrates' court oddly - I used to pick up gossip in the barbers round the corner but he has been bought out so the building can be converted in to 'luxury apartments'), one for the old geezers with leather jackets and a third very large one opposite a conference centre. This latter one very well managed and always a seat. All kinds of people but never rammed.
I didn't read the book but I read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. An eye-opener for a young college student.
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 post is someone's joy and curiosity shared through a well written piece. Everybody discover certain things at different stages of their lives. What's so bad about that?
Was able to bring a smile on my face. A good post. :)
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 consumer of thoughts.
I had to sit still a lot as a child, since I wasn't allowed to have friends or go anywhere. I read a lot, but a lot of the time I was to tired or bored to read, so I'd just defocus my eyes, and disappear into my imagination. It would look like I'm reading, so I wouldn't get punished. In hindsight I'm not sure it's terribly healthy, as I now find it impossible to put up with boring people (which is basically everybody who has time to sit around chatting, almost by definition).
You're being judgemental to call them boring - and to widen your opinions to be a "definition" sounds like an unhealthy worldview. You likely appear boring to others.
Then again I have a saying I use when anyone says they are bored - I say they are boring!
This is a very clever come back, I wonder if it might qualify as the best thought terminating cliché I've seen this year!
That is certainly the best back-handed compliment I have received in the last hour. Thank you. Your writing molests me.
> is that the people I find interesting are usually busy doing interesting things, so the boring ones are the only regular people at social gatherings.
That comes across to me as a refreshingly honest self-centred view.
You recall me of a friend who does contemporary dance as part of a troupe. I find them interesting - however I also find sewage plants and stink beetles interesting.
What's I'm trying to say is that finding people interesting (or boring) probably says more about you than it does about them.
The smartest people I know seem to be interested in everything. I often find people interesting for reasons I would find difficult to admit to them. I'm not that smart.
I find myself boring - contemptuous through familiarity?
And yeah, I'm rather cynical about "norms" too.
Why not? Is this some form/culture of parenting I’m not familiar with.
This idea of not allowing a child to have friends or go anywhere just sounds like actual emotional abuse.
it was. my father assured everybody that he and I were best friends and I didn't need anybody else. I was allowed to go to school, that was it.
I also find it problematical to deal with people who live 'normal/standard' lives who are not curious about the world and how everything works. Being put in a conversation talking about sports, gossip, celebrities is intolerable for me.
I've come to accept (and I think some people here may resonate with) that this is can be a blessing or good filtering mechanism.
Time to find support that you trust and face whatever is going 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
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 thing I ever “feel” good about is purely a mental thing. Eg I hit a new PR (progress), didn’t skip a lift (perseverance), or whatever. The act of exercising itself is always painful and it’s why I always dread it.
I say this because my experience is very different from yours: I get a very perceptible "high" once I get into the rhythm of a good workout. Think mild euphoria, mood lift, and general feeling of "rightness" in my body once it's been well wrung.
This only happens if I'm in decent shape, though. If I've fallen out of shape it's a slog.
Edit: I can't remember the podcast, but I recall some discussion of emerging clinical evidence in exercise response variability along many dimensions that may help explain the disconnect.
There's no way I'm going to run for 2 years on the hope that one day it will stop hurting and get enjoyable.
Harder is not always better.
Also late to the party, but creatine is the body and more importantly the brains friend too.
There's more to it like how to pick the weight, etc... but the perfect rep piece I really enjoyed.
> 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.
You are way too demanding of yourself my friend :(
this is almost certainly wrong - 100% balls to wall training will surely be suboptimal (on avg) to achieving most fitness goals - eg within a running training block there will generally be recovery and "general aerobic" runs which are easy in effort relative to the harder work in the block. These easy efforts are necessary to optimally achieve the desired physiological adaptations acquired through increased volume and "nailing" the hard workouts. The easier runs enable this by getting volume at lower risk of injury + conserving energy/will for the key workouts.
This also doesn't consider how important recovery is to optimal results (as in sleep, rest, self-care etc).
There's also something to be said for seasons of maintaining a level of fitness rather than pushing for the next level!
https://stories.strava.com/articles/a-productive-weekly-trai...
You end up hearing conversations more clearly, environmental noises you wouldn't normally hear and I find more clarity for the environmental area.
[1] https://q4td.blogspot.com/
I would say it is very enjoyable 30 minutes every time I do it. I don't think anyone would describe that kind of experience as hard to do?
Some would, especially the younger generation. Their attention span - or probably their brain chemistry - is strongly affected by constant stimulation, to the point where disconnecting from it causes anxiety and restlessness.
Not just the younger generation either, millennials are probably the first generation to be affected.
Those of us over 40 have already had plenty of this in our lives, it used to be so common. Waiting for appointments, waiting for the bus, etc. before smartphones. My first job had two hours between lunch and dinner service. I only had about 15 minutes of work during that time, so it was hour plus of almost entirely idle time every shift.
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), is almost meditative, and a welcome escape from the constant connection and pressures of being immediately available at work. Sounds like the writer achieves something similar in the coffee shop.
I get a break from constant availability from air travel, but that's slowly eroding as it becomes more connected.
Yes, my last transatlantic flight I caught up with a stack of email.
What works to get children to stay still though?
But for kids over 8, a nice long form video works well. That, and having enough time so that they don't feel like we're in a rush, but also not taking to long to load them onto the scanner...
For the younger ones, it's very much dependent on the child. So we take a bit of time to get to know them before we get them to attend. We have videos to prep them, and can follow a script when loading them (e.g. becoming an astronaut and blasting off into space...).
2-6 days of just riding your bike, eating, sleeping outside. Yeah it can be hard but nothing makes the MS Teams chime in the woods.
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.
After some struggle you will enter into a weird state that I think should be similar to what they achieve through meditation.
Not my cup of tea. But I do get your point.
I try and think about this often.
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.
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.
Yes, it's hyperbole, it literally will not get rid of all the problems but the ethos of the view is being conscious of your needs and your actions and you only truly get that by having the space to think. As opposed to just go go go and not taking a step back and implicitly treating your mind as a hostile place you need distraction from.
I'll throw in another quote that sits nicely with the Pascal quote, from Ursula Le Guin:
> Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive
just discrimination can only come from being comfortable to be with your thoughts, which can, but is not limited to, happen in a quiet room
The second quote does not comport with Pascal, because Pascal was not advocating for a path that led to internal happiness, but rather the abandonment of the desire for happiness altogether. He believed that suffering on Earth was the purpose of being Christian and would lead to salvation through God.
As a related aside, that's why I continue to find it odd that many people take their phones when they're using the bathroom. Just further limiting the few places (with the shower being #1) where circumstances does force your brain to review and assess like it clearly wants to do.
The mind finds entirely new areas of stimulation when it’s not being distracted or purely having sensory experiences.
Also, a lot of folks think it's easy to do. Until you try it, that is.
I also remember reading somewhere around the lines of handling the chaos in your-self. Or controlling the chaos within yourself.
And always thought this exercise showed what that is about. (Sorry, forgot the expression. Been a while. It's definitely more nicely put than the above.)
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/people-pr...
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.
274 more comments available on Hacker News