Creating spaces to engage together
by David Stevens
One of my favorite places in New York City was the now-closed Great Jones Café. Just one block from the legendary club CBGBs, Great Jones was a neighborhood spot for an old Downtown that was fast giving way to money and sterile luxury. It was small and sat on a non-descript block who’s other two occupants were a fire house and a parking lot.
Part bar, part restaurant, I don’t really remember when I first went there. Possibly when I came home from college one summer. Possibly before. But for the next 20 years, it was place that felt like a home away from home. A place where folks gathered and talked, where you knew the regulars’ stories, and where it could take years to realize the bartender was the bass player from a pretty important band.
Along with all the amazing times I’ve had in there, one memory has always stuck out. Right under the TV where we watched the Knicks, and next to the window through which you could see the chef turn out plate after plate of wings, catfish, gumbo, burgers, and chili (with the works), there was an shelf with an almanac, an encyclopedia of film quotes, and one or two other similar books. It was a particular reference section for a particular type of conversation – the kind that happens at tables and bar stools late at night about trivial facts that at the moment seemed both incredibly important to everyone involved and a measure of how your memory was faring – either that night or in life.
They were the kind of conversations where people connected. Even if the new little tidbit that you walked away with was largely irrelevant to your life, it was something that stuck. You felt heard and you listened. You felt part of a small community that was, for a short while, the center of the world. It was tactile, it was direct, and it was not mediated by any technology other than a barstool, gumbo, an amazing jukebox, an out-of-date reference guide, and a skillful bartender.
In a recent essay in the New York Times, Cal Newport, professor of computer science at Georgetown made the case for treating mental stimulation and thinking the same way we think of diet and exercise – necessary practices for the maintenance of our body, in this case, our brain. When it comes to diet, he argues that short form social media is akin to constantly snacking on Twinkies, and that our digital diet needs to be approached with as much care as our physical one – a point which I couldn’t agree with more. But it was the analogy to exercise, where deep thinking, contemplation, and reading serve as our cardio and strength training that really hit home. Because while I could feel that my over-reliance my phone and technology was a negative in my life, I didn’t realize how much I missed the spaces where my mind could just wander – where unstructured thought could lead me wherever it wanted to go.
It also made me acutely aware of what else was missing – thinking together with other people, especially outside of work contexts. Because it’s in these moments where the back and forth required to respond to both the ideas and emotion of a moment exercises systems made dormant by the rush of slop content. To return to the food analogy – we know that eating the right food is important, but we also know that sharing meals with others around the table is what makes it truly nourishing.
And this brings me back to my little bar on a small street in the middle of the city. It was a place of unstructured conversation and connection where ideas, many of them small and even silly, were talked about and discussed with people you may never have met. No major breakthroughs ever occurred, no solutions were found (that I’m aware of), but we thought together. We worked out our brains and on occasion maybe even stretched them a little.
The art of this kind of conversation can seem trivial, but I’d like to argue it’s vitally important. Without it, we lose out ability to engage with people we don’t know, how to challenge and be challenged, how to feel curious and debate. When we lose spaces where little questions turn into sprawling discussions we fall out of the crucial practice of letting our brains wander, explore, respond, and engage with the world in novel and unexpected ways and in so doing probably do our brains a disservice.
So as our media and professional landscapes continue to demand the outsourcing of thinking to our technology – it is more important than ever that we nurture the places where we can think deeply, gather, and from time to time, talk about nothing in particular.