The pub as practice room
We are on top of each other and falling apart at the same time. There is a place where you learn the antidote.
The pub as practice room
We are on top of each other and falling apart at the same time. There is a place where you learn the antidote.
In 1851 Schopenhauer tells of porcupines on a winter's day. They huddle together for warmth, prick each other, back away, get cold, huddle again. Until they find the distance at which it is just about bearable. Not too close, not too far.
The philosopher Hans Schnitzler uses that parable to make a diagnosis I recognise. Online we have come so close to one another that we snap at the slightest thing, like hens in an overcrowded shed. And at the same time we live in what Noreena Hertz calls the contactless age: atomised, without a shared point of reference, without a feeling for the place we live in. Overheated and hypothermic at once.
His remedy is not a policy paper. It is the neighbourhood pub.
That sounds like a joke until you look at what happens there. You come in, you need know nobody, you can sit behind a newspaper or fall into a conversation. You are alone among others. Latin has a word for it that we have worn out: inter-esse, to be in between. In 1976 the sociologist Gerrit Jansen wrote four hundred pages of doctoral thesis on it and concluded that the liveability of a society can be read off the quality of its pubs.
Ray Oldenburg called such places third places: not home, not work, and indispensable. The library, the barber, the square, the tasca on the corner. In Alfama, where I live, there is one on every street corner: a counter, four stools, a bica for ninety cents. Nobody asks why you are there. You are allowed to be there.
That is the skill the pub trains. Not talking. Staying. Keeping the right distance without becoming indifferent, and the right closeness without smothering anyone. Exactly what the porcupines learned, and exactly what the digital village square untrains in us.
I wrote earlier about the Italian piazza as a design that arose through use. The pub is the covered version. Go alone. Order something small. Leave the phone in your pocket and see how long you last without it.
Sources: Hans Schnitzler, "De kunst van het samenleven leer je in de kroeg", NRC Opinie, 10 January 2026; Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena (1851); Noreena Hertz, The Lonely Century (2020); Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (Paragon House, 1989).
Source: Based on: Hans Schnitzler — 'De kunst van het samenleven leer je in de kroeg', NRC Opinie, 10 January 2026 (series Samenleven: hoe moet dat ook alweer?); Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (Paragon House, 1989)