I get up at 5am every day to go to Starbucks at 6am every day. The "stillness buzz" of my apartment bugs me. I go to Starbucks and ignore everyone - but I still feel part of the mix.
I could, you know, go to the office, but everone interrupts me there. It's not lonely, but unproductive.
The trick is to be productive, but to feel like a human in the mix. For me, Starbucks does that.
Some kind of optimized noise is a weird concept, but I've found that it really works, from time to time. Especially if I'm doing something that requires a great deal of concentration rather than just "production".
The core of the UX is the Focusmate session, a structured, 50-minute video interaction, where you and another user act as accountability partners for one another.
You'll find lots of solopreneurs as well as a handful of sole founders, but above all, you get human interaction without compromising productivity.
Disclaimer - I'm the founder. I was a sole founder for a lonnnng time and doing these sessions was my saving grace.
I've found being around others helps tremendously compared with working solo. I believe there have been academic studies into this as well. Being around other people who are "productive" (whether they really are or not) helps my mindset. I would study in the quiet chunks of the library with other people around me, particularly leading up to big exams.
I've been a regular at a couple of different Starbucks locations over the past few years, and surprisingly, communities of people do develop over time. There are other regulars that you start to recognize, say hi to as you stand in line, and catch up with. I've met fascinating people by working at Starbucks. Engineers, managers, musicians, nurses, all friendly and equally happy to have someone else to talk to. Plus, there's the baristas, who I've also found pleasant to talk to.
Some days, though, you are alone at Starbucks, but it's a different kind of alone than working at home all day every day. You're surrounded by people, and when the alternative is zero social contact during your work day, it can make a difference.
Or ... maybe not lonely. But want to feel a lively "buzz" that isn't from music or putting on movies in the background.
Maybe weird. But I don't like sitting in my quiet apartment alone working. (I'm not particularly lonely - I just like the energy better when I'm "out")
In some theoretical parallel universe somewhere, and maybe even in the future of this one, I'm imagining people with private (tiny) airplanes flying out to some backwater dot county nobody knows about, just to code at one of the coffee shops there.
Because people are really forward in rural areas.
Hm, now I see the bugs in this idea; poor internet speed for one, compounded by the fact that said person is likely going to want to move out there permanently...
We are not solitary animals; we evolved to be part of tribes and bands. There's a part of us that's just not happy unless there's other humans around.
And it's perfectly cool if we never interact with them. That's fine. Maybe sometimes all we want is to have someone around to be faster than when a lion comes out of the shadows and takes the slowest person down. Even if that, or some metaphorical equivalent of it, is exceedingly unlikely in a coffee shop.
Not sure why that never dawned on me.