“You continental types, never out a café…”
This tongue-in-cheek remark by an online acquaintance of mine on a café-related status update got me thinking. Just what is it with people and cafés, and why am I seemingly drawn to one like a moth to a flame? Well, to be honest, I’d had an outline fort just such a post flying around in Notion for some weeks, but that quip gave me the perfect opening that I’d been searching for. So, now that I’m sitting in a café yet again, what is it about these places?
Personally, I’ve grown up around cafés. As a teenager, I spent several years in a boarding school in Austria, in a forlorn attempt to complete my secondary education. Cafés were a staple of my time there, after all, Austrian coffee culture is so entrenched that coffee houses have even made it into Sid Meier’s Civilization series of video games as a unique cultural building for Austria. There was just something about popping into a café after school to shoot the breeze with classmates, do homework, or just grab one of the newspapers or magazines available there and watch the world go by. It was a calm, comfy place where you generally weren’t bothered unless you wanted to be.
This fascination has stayed with me over the years, although it has morphed somewhat as a consequence of leaving Austria. Back in Germany, global chains such as Starbucks took the place of the coffeehouses of Austria, not least because “native” German coffee culture generally couldn’t hold a candle to its Austrian counterpart. The fascination remained the same though, cafés were a safe space during my spells of unemployment and later on, as I took up blogging as a hobby, they turned into a favourite writing environment for me, not least because Starbucks was one of the few café chains with enough economic oomph to deal with Germany’s idiotic liability laws around public Wi-Fi hotspots during the 2000s and 2010s. And once I moved to Ireland, cafés became a beacon of familiarity whilst I got my bearings here in Cork.
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| There's just something comforting about sitting in a cafe while watching the world go by. |
However, there’s more to it rather than just pure familiarity. This would be a very short blog post otherwise, not to mention far too self-indulgent, even by my standards. There are actually scientific reasons to not just frequent cafés. For starters, our brains crave novelty. According to a paper published in 2006, parts of the human brain associated with regulating motivation as well as processing of rewards respond better to novel situations as compared to familiar ones. Whilst this study links this increased brain activity to novel environments in general, rather than cafés in particular, the generally warm and informal atmosphere in said cafés certainly helps to reinforce this positive feedback effect.
Then there’s the noise aspect. Back in 2012, researchers Mehta, Zhu and collaborators published a paper in the Journal of Consumer Research that showed that a moderate level of background noise, the study used a background noise level of 70 dB as a benchmark for that, actually enhances creativity. Incidentally, that’s the average level of background noise in a café, although the exact value can, and does, vary from person to person. I’m not sure whether anyone has looked into the composition of said background noise, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the frequency composition also has an effect, especially given that the background noise tends to be on the lower end of things, at least in the cafés that I frequent. I haven’t had a look into that though, there are only so many neuroscience papers my brain can take!
There’s also the psychological aspect. For starters, cafés are so called Third Places, as laid out by Ray Oldenburg back in the 1980s. Now, I have some issues with Oldenburg’s original work on the subject, The Great Good Place, which is a subject for its own post, but the basic premise holds. A Third Place is a place that is independent of an individual’s home or their work place, a place where they can exist without being subject to the constraints of the first two. As such, cafés offer an environment that effectively shields its customers from all of the restrictions and obligations associated with home life, work, or education. This freedom gives the brain more breathing space, more room for the neurological effects mentioned above to do their work.
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| The noise background in a café can have a positive effect on creativity and productivity. |
However, I recently stumbled across another aspect to this, quite by chance really. Whilst trawling the internet for sources to reinforce my arguments, I stumbled across a 2024 paper by Gloria Kurnianto and collaborators at Semarang State University in Indonesia. In their paper, they looked at the motivation that their fellow students had for doing their classwork, studying, etc. at a café, rather than back at their homes, college dorms or libraries. Whilst the sample size was pretty small, the answers were pretty interesting. Some of the reasons meshed with the points Oldenburg laid out when talking about third places. They looked for a place that was just separate from their “mission-oriented” places. Noise concerns were also brought up, meshing with what Mehta, Zhu and Cheema had laid out in their 2012 paper. However, there was also a point, echoed by several participants, that they wanted a return on the “investment” they’d made by getting coffee in the first place. I honestly hadn’t thought about that before, but after reading that, I can’t help but agree with that particular sentiment!
Leaving the world of academia aside, there’s one other, rather unpleasant aspect to the café question, certainly here in Ireland. Yes, I’m talking about the seemingly perennial housing crisis here on the emerald isle. Scores of young people, both students and workers, even high-paid professionals, are forced into shared accommodation by rents that are beyond obscene, whilst at the same time, politicians across the entire political spectrum are both unwilling and seemingly unable to get this situation sorted and ensure the availability of affordable housing. This has effectively turned cafés into surrogate living rooms or home offices for scores of people looking for a better a working environment than a crowded bedroom with a pile of laundry substituting for a proper desk.
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| Sometimes, you just need a different environment to get some proper work done! |
But I don’t want to end this post on a sour note. After all, I was able to crank out this entire post in just two working session at my local caffeine dealer of choice. For me, cafés are just a fun place to be, a welcome beacon of normalcy as my life is slowly but surely falling apart. And I’m not going to lie, if I could somehow make a living by sitting in a café all day and writing blog posts like this, I’d gladly do it!
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