Name: Ode To Public Benches | Escape Into Meaning
Uploaded: 2026-01-24T17:17:21.000Z
Duration: 2 min 42 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Public benches offer an escape from the relentless flow of metropolitan streets.

For the most part, cities encourage you to move from point A to point B without pause.

That's what the majority of city dwellers are doing outside heading to work, to the store, the gym, a restaurant, heading home.

If you do pause in New York City, for example, you run the risk of being trampled by the herd.

The bench allows you to step away from that herd.

It transforms the surroundings into a place to be instead of just a place to pass through.

The simple act of sitting radically alters your relationship to the city and to the people you share it with.

Like public parks, where you find lots of them, benches don't require consumption.

Unlike almost all other destinations in a city, city benches also the best places on Earth to people Watch one of my favorite pastimes, the Parade of Humanity, is endlessly fascinating, and

from the bench you can watch it with the special anonymity cities provide.

Under that invisibility cloak, you can really see others without being preoccupied by their perception of you.

my mind is too busy during social interactions to observe the people I'm interacting with.

Mostly I'm just trying to make it through the conversation without embarrassing myself.

There's a tranquility to people watching I rarely have when socializing public benches disappear into the background with whomever is on them, and

in that camouflage, the bothersome ego can disappear too.

I hope you enjoyed that little excerpt from my essay on Public Benches, which it's one of my personal favorite essays in the book.

If you haven't pre ordered Escape into Meaning yet, which comes out in 15 days by the way, Crazy it is the best possible way to support this project.

You can find the pre order link in the description below.

There's going to be a couple more of these excerpt videos in the days to come, and

there's going to be a full nerdwriter video by the end of August.

Thank you, thank you to everybody who's already pre ordered the book.

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Ode To Public Benches | Escape Into Meaning

conscious

perception

majority

description