Loosen regulation of street food, introduce outdoor stalls where you're encouraged to eat with strangers by design, grant licences to allow places stay open later and pedestrianize all the things.
Try spending time in Bangkok or Ho Chi Minh city/Saigon and feeling lonely. It's near impossible. Day and night is a sea of mostly friendly humanity because life is primarily lived outdoors.
Sadly, in the West we've made this abnormal (although the climate doesn't help). Our real-life is atomised. There is no third place†. And the online world we retreat to is increasingly drenched in pointless conflict. Kinda bleak.
Lawrence Osborne puts it nicely:
> Anyway, I think that’s one of the attractions of Bangkok. It’s not just f—king. It’s just the fact that you’re in contact with other people...the street makes you feel like you’re back in the human race, and alive again. Last night I went for the first time to the store called Whole Foods in Union Square. And there was this enormous line and it was like 1984. Every line was being called out by number in this soft automated female voice. It felt like being squeezed through a tube of toothpaste. It was so horrifyingly anonymous. And I was standing in this line thinking, I don’t like this. I wish I could be back in Bangkok and be treated like a human being.
Wut? Just move life (back) to the streets.
Loosen regulation of street food, introduce outdoor stalls where you're encouraged to eat with strangers by design, grant licences to allow places stay open later and pedestrianize all the things.
Try spending time in Bangkok or Ho Chi Minh city/Saigon and feeling lonely. It's near impossible. Day and night is a sea of mostly friendly humanity because life is primarily lived outdoors.
Sadly, in the West we've made this abnormal (although the climate doesn't help). Our real-life is atomised. There is no third place†. And the online world we retreat to is increasingly drenched in pointless conflict. Kinda bleak.
Lawrence Osborne puts it nicely:
> Anyway, I think that’s one of the attractions of Bangkok. It’s not just f—king. It’s just the fact that you’re in contact with other people...the street makes you feel like you’re back in the human race, and alive again. Last night I went for the first time to the store called Whole Foods in Union Square. And there was this enormous line and it was like 1984. Every line was being called out by number in this soft automated female voice. It felt like being squeezed through a tube of toothpaste. It was so horrifyingly anonymous. And I was standing in this line thinking, I don’t like this. I wish I could be back in Bangkok and be treated like a human being.
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place