This NY Times article about restaurants struck a nerve with me. Quick preface…
I’ve always told my parents that I never thought college was primarily about learning algebra, physics, or whatever else class I didn’t want to take.
The main reason? The learning was an excuse. An excuse to get a bunch of interesting, weird, maybe smart people together in person together and see what happens.
In this day and age you can look up anything on the internet. You don’t need any long winded lecturer, mindlessly writing formulas about Stokes theorem or gravitational lensing (with chalk, of all things) all for the low low cost of 200k.
So why are we paying your tuition, is a fair question parents might have. My strong view is that, simply, learning is a convenient excuse to get people together, and see what happens. And by the way — it’s worth it. That’s when and where the magic happens.
My answer is a bit disappointing to parents, whose mindset in the decades past was that money could buy privileged and exclusive knowledge. That’s what they were investing in. This is obviously wrong in this day and age.
So when a NY Times article comes out, as the pandemic recedes, about the real reasons we eat at restaurants it doesn’t surprise me. We were never there primarily for the food. We were there, with food as an excuse, to be together.
Given improvements in the pandemic, I am adamantly against the dispersion and working from home principle. Why? Well, I’ll use the same lens of thinking about restaurants and university excuses. The best experiences are always together, and working on hard problems at companies create magic valid only in the in-person scale.
Eating, learning, and working are all in some subtle way, excuses for us to be together, in person. That dynamic should never be lost, and in fact, protected at all costs.
I shudder to think what a generation of folks, young and old, will look like learning algebra online at home in their basement, doing work over zoom, and ordering seamless for dinner on Friday. The magic will be gone.
Getting together in person — for work, for education, or food, is always a good idea. They are good excuses for something more important.
