“The phone is the enemy of the cafe. Take it out and the cafe is just a room you are paying to sit in.”
A short, clean essay about the rare experience of being in public alone without using a screen. The author rediscovered it by accident and writes about how strange it now feels to do something every previous generation took for granted. We have collectively lost a basic skill, the skill of being alone with our own thoughts in a third place. Worth practicing. Worth remembering.