> It’s contradictory to sit alone in a café. It’s against the reason cafés exist.

> 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.

For me, cafes are essentially libraries; except cafes actually have reasonable opening hours. I can't get work done at home (too many distractions), so I switch up my environment to one where I am forced to work.

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.

I was also instantly struck by the intro of this piece of writing. It just doesn't make sense to me to state one's subjective interpretation as a universal fact, a universal law, as "the reason cafés exist". As if there is only one reason.

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.

As someone who very much enjoys going to cafes solo and just observing, in my experience people sitting alone are definitely a small minority, unless they’re there with a laptop. This even in my stereotypically introverted culture (Finns).

Right, exactly. Cafés _used_ to be meeting places; now, they are "coffee, solitude, and WiFi acquisition places"

Because it's just AI output.