Somewhere to go to do one thing
Craig Mod, writing for Esquire Japan about a tendon shop with arbitrary-seeming rules:
First, no talking. […] Talking slowed things down. You couldn’t talk AND eat. So no talking. Apart from the sounds of burbling oil and chewing, the place was dead silent. It felt like church.
And, no books. Come on. Books? No. You were there to eat. This was not a beachfront resort in Bali.
I started eating there just as Japanese flip phones were becoming a thing. So that rule, too — no phones, even though they were far more benign than anything we have today, no doom scrolling, no photographing your food for foolish algorithms.
Finally, if you ordered the big portion of rice and left even one grain uneaten, you were banned from ever ordering a big portion again.
I miss places like this, where the whole point of going to the place and maybe spending a little bit of money is to focus on a single activity. I miss going somewhere for something: eating, listening to music, drinking a coffee, sitting in a hot bath. The UK doesn’t seem to have places like this; there's usually some social aspect, as at the pub.
This quote also resonates with me, sitting here in late November and wishing that I could visit an onsen and just decompress for a bit:
I feel like there’s a hint of something in the shoe locker system at sentos, local bathhouses. Those wooden cabinets with big metal or wooden keys. They’re lovely to use. The keys are huge and satisfying. I could imagine the same kind of system being used for a café. You walk in, and put your phone in the locker, take the giant key, sit down, read a book, perhaps … write on paper?! No video calls allowed, no dopaminergic loops. Do something where you are in the moment, something far from the algorithm, far from an LLM tempting you to ask it to re-write or draw or perform the creative act for yourself.