Enervation

I used to go to cafes in different cities just to pick up the vibe of a particular place. I think I became fairly adept at keying into the local culture by observing and listening to the clients in any one local cafe. Now, of course, I have almost no time for this; but I do still make it into a San Francisco cafe now and then. The word that comes to mind when I think about the atmosphere in local cafes is, enervation. The people sitting around in cafes in this town seem strangely absent, strangely disconnected.

It might be that I'm comparing today's cafe scene with what it used to be like, twenty years ago--before the Internet and cell phones and Netflix started taking over our lives. At that time, cafes were still meeting places; nowadays, people meet there only for informal business meetings or first dates. It's more common for people to be sitting alone, working at their computer or sending emails or text messages. With all that solitude, it's no wonder people in cafes seem more disconnected to the immediate world around them; and I'm sure that's happening in cafes everywhere, not just in San Francisco.

But I'm talking about something more subtle--a palpable fatigue hanging in the air. Random conversations between people sitting at neighboring tables rarely start up these days, whereas I used to hear those all the time. People don't seem to have any energy left for striking up random conversations.

If the scene in local cafes can be taken as a bellwether for what will happen to an entire city, I'm not sure San Francisco, culturally speaking, is heading in the right direction.