A Table, a Drink and a Friend: Reflections from Europe, Part III
In the first of my reflections from Europe, I wrote about the transformative nature of the trip itself, about how impactful it was to see the beaches of Normandy and other WWII sites. In my second post, I described just how nice it was to not have cell phone service along for the ride. In this final post, I reflect on Europe’s café culture and how magical it was.
On my first day in London, wandering about the streets of Westminster, I couldn’t help but notice that across the street from my hotel was a pub called The Old Star. Standing outside on the sidewalk were a group of people, all around my age, hanging out and drinking a pint of (inevitably warm) beer. Not sitting, but standing, as is customary in British pub culture. After about an hour, when I had made my rounds through Piccadilly and St. James’s Park, I returned to my hotel, and passed the same group of people standing outside, still enjoying each other’s company, another round of beer just recently distributed to them all. It was a wonderful sight.
In the town of Bayeux, France, where we spent the bulk of our time, the café culture was alive and vibrant. It was inspiring. Walking about the town, I’d find myself popping down one street after another only to see another café with people sitting outside, having a coffee or beer or gin, a smoke and some food, all while enjoying the company of their friends and family. For hours on end, the streets of Bayeux were filled with locals and tourists visiting the cafés, doing nothing more than enjoying themselves in one of the most human ways we know how.
One of the highlights of the trip for me was when, one night in France, myself and the other members of the newly established Quad went to a local café for dinner. It’s hard to describe just how picturesque this night was. The sky a deep blue color, the temperature perfect, the vibes, as the cool kids say, were up. Seated at the café, outside of course, we spent the night sipping G&Ts and sharing stories with one another. We had a grand ol’ time. And here’s the amazing thing: no one took our their phones. Why distract yourself with the fake stuff when the real thing is sitting right in front of you? Frankly, during my 9 days in Europe, I cannot recall seeing anyone take out their phone sitting in a café. What a great night that was.
It was much the same in Munich. One of the highlights of my time in Munich, which I alluded to in my first reflection, was Saturday night. Beer is the drink of choice in Munich, Augustiner bier in particular. Within literal spitting distance from our hotel, there were probably 4 or 5 bierhalles. After Shabbat was over, I was standing on the street corner outside our hotel, across the street from the Haxnbauer, when I saw a group of young guys, probably a bit buzzed, hanging out outside, arms slung over one another in marvelous camaraderie and friendship, drinking and enjoying themselves. The next morning, when I had my morning cup of coffee, I asked the barista, a local named Daniel, about nightlife in Munich. “Do you guys not have clubs?” I asked. “Clubs?” he responded, a bit puzzled. “Why would we go to clubs; we have friends. We go hang out with friends at the bierhalle.” Now that’s a line that will stop you dead in your tracks.
I’m not here going to argue that Europe is better than America because of its café culture; the two are simply different, as the travel writer Chris Arnade recently wrote about. But I will say that I do think that there is a moral superiority to at least this aspect of European life that we should pause to consider.
What struck me most about my time experiencing some of Europe’s cafes and bierhalles was just how relaxed it all was. There was a particular lack of urgency, specifically that nefarious type of urgency which is pointless. We in the US are used to a hustle culture, that is continually looking to “optimize” both shareholder value and our own lives. And for that we are the richer country. But Europe is both healthier and happier. Let’s pause and consider that for a moment. Europeans drink and smoke much more than Americans do. There isn’t the same “gym-bro” culture there, where people unironically post nearly nude pics of themselves at the gym for all to see, nor are there regular TikToks with “come run a 5k with me at 3:00AM” captions. So how does that work? How does the seemingly more “degenerate” culture actually come to be healthier than ours? It seems to me that there are two answers.
The first is that we in America are killing ourselves to stay healthy. Not in some metaphorical, abstract sense, but quite literally grinding ourselves into a state of anxious exhaustion in the name of wellness. Everything is tracked, optimized, hacked. We’ve turned health into a second job, and like most jobs in America, it never really ends. It’s not enough to be in decent shape; you have to broadcast that shape, preferably in a mirror selfie captioned “no days off.” Wellness becomes a spectacle, a brand. You're not just running to clear your head; you're running to beat your last time, while your fitness app tells you how heroic you are. You can’t simply enjoy a bike ride, it needs to be tracked and measured against all your friends on Strava. Oh the shame of not being as fast as last time! All of it carries the unmistakable scent of self-flagellation with a ring light. And yet somehow, despite the smoothies and magnesium supplements and color-coded gym routines and fitness influencers and self-help books and inspirational podcasts set to dramatic music and clips of David Goggins and, of course, the algorithm, we seem to be getting sicker and sadder.
In Europe, it just didn’t look that bloody hard. People drink and smoke more, yes. They still have cigarette vending machines there. But Europeans also walk everywhere. They eat full meals, slowly. Their food is pure and fresh, made with ingredients that you can pronounce. They sit in the sun and talk for hours. There’s no panic around food, no obsession with muscle definition. They didn’t look like they were working to stay healthy—they just looked like they weren’t working so hard to feel human. And that seems to be a much more stable foundation to build a healthy and happy life on.
The second reason, and maybe the more important one, is that they have friends. Real life friends that they see often in the confines of a third space. Social scientists have been saying for years now that the strongest predictor of health and longevity isn’t exercise or even quitting smoking—it’s close relationships. How many people you can call when something good happens. How many people would notice if you disappeared for a while. The presence of real, consistent, face-to-face connection. And Europe, for all its flaws, seems to have held onto that.
It was everywhere. Old friends playing cards in the afternoon. Couples having the kind of quiet, easy dinners that only come after decades together. Young people sitting on curbs outside bars, laughing at something no one else will ever find funny. It all looked so simple. Not therapeutic, not curated, not "intentional community." Just... life, lived to the fullest.
I keep thinking about those guys in Munich, arms slung around each other, drinking the night away, awash in laughter. It was almost as if their presence on that street corner belonged there. As if it was a staple of the Munich architecture. And then Daniel the barista, asking with total sincerity, “Why would we go to clubs? We have friends.” That line hasn’t really left me because it’s so plainly true. It made me wonder how many of us—myself included—have forgotten that friendship can be the thing itself, not just something that happens on the way to something else. Pure friendship, for its own sake. I believe it was CS Lewis who wrote that “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” Amen to that.
But there’s something else in Daniel’s line too: a quiet little rebuke. Why are you always trying to go somewhere else? Who told you that being with your people wasn’t enough? Why do you need to lose yourself to external stimuli to enjoy yourself? Why can’t you just be, surrounded by people you love and who love you back? Why do we insist on dressing joy up in spectacle, in noise, in novelty, when all it ever asked for was a table, a drink, and a few familiar faces?
These days, I can’t escape the feeling that in our world, even joy feels transactional. Time with friends becomes “catching up.” Even our rest must be productive. We say things like “let’s get something on the books” and “sometime soon” and then bury ourselves in the crap that’s held a few inches from our nose in a brightly lit screen. But those guys in Munich weren’t “catching up.” They were living. Fully, freely, unselfconsciously.
So maybe the question isn’t how to add more joy to our lives. Maybe it’s how to remove the things that keep us from seeing it. Maybe joy’s already there, waiting on the street corner, leaning on a friend’s shoulder, telling a story for the third time, just because. Pour the second drink. Tell the same jokes again. Be there, fully, not because it’s efficient or scheduled, but because the soul craves it.
So here’s my open invitation: linger. Sit a little longer. Let the evening stretch and revel in the moon’s glow. Reclaim the useless hour, the unstructured night, the conversation that wanders nowhere in particular. Life will try to speed you up. Let your friends slow you down. Work extra hard to carve out meaningful time with them. Because in the end, it won’t be the miles you ran or the meetings you nailed that echo in your mind. It’ll be the laughter spilling out onto the sidewalk, the drink passed across the table, the night that didn’t need a reason to be beautiful, but was nothing short of sublime.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.
— Sonnet 30