On Co-Working and Coffee Shops

Long live the video mute button!

Drinking coffee snobbishly

One of the fascinating things about the truly urban neighborhoods in America is the pretension. Having extracated themselves from the working-class blandness of strip-malls and Walmarts, the cafe patrons seem intent on playing European and looking down their nose at the uglo-American. Or at least that’s how I imagine it; perhaps that is projection.

Is there anything more American than raising yourself up and looking back in disdain on those who are where you used to be? It betrays how self-loathing drives so much of the striving we see everyday.

But one day I was sitting in one of these cafes and started looking around. And then it struck me how completely modern life has transformed, change accelerated even further by the pandemic. Work is both more collaborative and more isolated. Interaction is constant through video-conferencing, the ringing of message notifications, the occasional phone call to discuss whether the regional supervisor’s divorce led him to be an ass about turning in those sales reports. We don’t interact directly, which is all well and good. You wouldn’t talk to these people if you weren’t paid to do it.

This may seem at the surface to be a lonely, isolated way to work. Man, however, is a social creature, and he is adept at finding ways of…