Blip 001: Croissants and coffee on the porch

Hi there. It’s 5 days from the projected last frost date here in the deep south, which is a relief. Fun fact about houses built in 1880, they are difficult to keep warm.

Another fun fact about houses from that era, at least around here: They have magnificent porches. And for the last couple months, I’ve been serving croissants and coffee on the front porch every Saturday.

It might sound like a casual event (I hope it does), but in fact it’s been painstakingly designed to meet some challenging requirements.

For one: There’s no booze. I like booze, and even brew it myself, but I don’t want people getting intoxicated at my house and driving home, because that raises the risk of an extremely recent technological innovation known as the “car accident.”

For most of humankind’s time on earth, the worst a drunk traveler could do would be to fall off their horse. Dangerous, maybe fatal. But motor vehicles allow us to scale up the death toll by two orders of magnitude.

Some other design decisions: It’s outdoors (because pandemic) but can’t be rained out. It’s casual, recurring, consistent—always okay to stop by, always okay to skip it. It requires no serving dishes or utensils, so cleanup is easy. And, crucially, it’s the only place in town where you can get croissants.

Technically you could buy them at Wal-mart:

Grain collected by a ginormous combine harvester, processed to remove the germ and the bran (and thus most of the nutritional value), then enriched to add a few nutrients back. Shipped to a factory and formed into a dough by underpaid (possibly underage) humans and heavy machinery. Baked, wrapped in a clear plastic box made of fossil hydrocarbons that will remain on earth for another 450 years. Loaded onto a truck and driven here (also by fossil hydrocarbons), placed on a shelf and up for grabs at only $3.99.

A miracle of modern technology and supply chain sophistication. But they don’t taste very good.

So my front porch on a Saturday morning is the one place in town where you can get a fresh baked croissant, made from scratch.

Which is still a miracle of (relatively) modern technology, even without the industrial ovens and uniform packaging. Humans have only been enjoying croissants for a couple hundred years.

Coffee, on the other hand, has been around a good bit longer. People just like you and me (minus the smartphones) were drinking it in Mecca at least as far back as the 1400s, and it’s been in North America since the 1600s.

So: croissants (a relatively new innovation), coffee (a much older discovery), and … hanging out on the porch.

An ancient practice. Hanging out and sharing food is so timeless, we were doing it before we were even called humans. Even chimpanzees and vampire bats do it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t subject to change.

In fact, most of us are hanging out way less than we used to. We may even be witnessing an all-time low point for the practice of hanging out.

At least in America, at least according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who bring us this rather disturbing fact:

On an average day 20 years ago […] 38 percent of Americans socialized or communicated with friends. By 2021, that number was down to 28 percent.

Most days, most Americans don’t hang out or even communicate with friends.

So while worldwide coffee and croissant production seem to be on the rise, the whole “enjoying them together” thing is on the decline.

To paint in broad strokes: We’re making it easier to get stuff, but harder to find the time to enjoy it.

I’m not sure where the balance point is. We might encounter a hard minimum for social time, and even swing in the other direction. Maybe in 500 years, humans will spend half their days relaxing on porches, enjoying a more highly evolved descendant of the croissant. (I assume coffee will still just be coffee.)

There seems to be an upper bound for leisure time as well. To put it as nerdily as possible, researchers have observed a “negative quadratic relationship between discretionary time and life satisfaction.” People like to be productive. We can’t just lounge all day.

Still, in the grand sweep of history and prehistory, we’re currently working more—and socializing less—than ever before. If you’d like to help turn the tide, I want to encourage you to start your own weekly-ish meetup. And if you’re ever in the neighborhood on a Saturday morning, stop by for a snack.