Day 24

It's Sunday. Which means I started my day picking at an almond croissant and sipping on a skim latte at Cafe Vanille. I don't even like lattes but this one's different. It taste like fireplace. 

There's a bakery right on the corner of my street but instead, I walk a mile to Cafe Vanille. Every Sunday. Rain or shine. There's nothing that special about the place itself, but I like the people that come inside. There are always a lot of young families. They walk in. Their kids flip out when they see the shiny cupcakes, tarts, and sugar-coated things. They order. They hang out. They bump into people they know. Then they're out.

Cafe Vanille is my "third place". The wine shop I now work at is a "third place". I'm obsessed with the concept of the third place. I was before I knew it had a name. I don't remember how I found Ray Oldenburg's book, The Good Great Place, but I think about what he said almost every day. 

It is a sign of the times that the three best selling drugs in the country are an ulcer medication, a hypertension drug and a tranquilizer. (p10)

In the absence of an informal public life, Americans are denied those means of relieving stress that serve other cultures so effectively…our urban environment is like an engine that runs hot because it was designed without a cooling system. (p10)

What modern society is losing in its failure to proliferate third places is that easier version of friendship and congeniality that results from casual and informal affiliation. (p65)

Compared to Europeans, we are more concerned with seeking comfort and less concerned with going into the world to seek stimulation. (p44)

The most stopped-up, intellectually constipated, and unhappy men I know are those who work all day and go strait home to eat, watch TV and sleep. (p45)

The Frenchmen’s daily life sits firmly on a tripod consisting of home, place of work, and another setting where friends are engaged during the midday and evening aperitif hours, if not earlier and later. In the United States, the middle classes particularly are attempting a balancing act on bipod consisting of home and work. (p15)

His territory was the coffeehouse, which provided the neutral ground upon which men discovered one another apart from the classes and ranks that had earlier divided them. (p24)

The judgment regarding conversation in our society is usually two-fold; we don’t value it and we’re not good at it. (p27)

We lack the stuff of which conversations are made. In our low estimation of idle talk, we Americans have correctly assessed the worth of much of what we hear. It is witless, trite, self-centered and unreflective. (p28)

Those distant ancestors who hunted and fished in order to sustain life found ample novelty in those pursuits. They confronted hardship but never boredom. Our own work conditions contrast sharply to hunters and gatherers, and we are not strangers to drudgery or boredom. Most work is highly routine and too narrowly focused to bring many of the individual’s talents into play… (p44)

The word idiot comes to us from the ancient Greeks, who equated privacy with stupidity. Idiots were those who only understood their private worlds and failed to comprehend their connection to the encompassing social order. (p71) 

My favorite story in Outliers was the one about some Italian immigrants from Roseto that settled in Pennsylvania in 1882. A physician who studied digestion began to investigate the town when he discovered that virtually no one from Roseto under the age of 65 had heart disease. And this was before the advent of heart medications. 

They conducted thorough medical examinations, took medical histories, went house-to-house and interviewed every person over 21. They discovered no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction and very little crime. People were dying of old age and that was it.

Their first thought was that it was their Old World diets. Nope, they were eating more fat than ever, even using lard instead of olive oil like they did in Italy. They struggled with obesity. Smoked heavily. And no pilates classes. 

It wasn't the land either. Towns close by, also inhabited by immigrants saw significantly higher rates of heart disease. 

"What Wolf began to realize was that the secret of Roseto wasn't diet or exercise or genes or location. It had to be Roseto itself...they looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian backyards...the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world." 

8,974,758 calorie croissants aren't just for clogging arteries. 8,974,758 calorie croissants save lives.

One day I'm going to open a third place. Of some sort. You should stop in. You will like it.