This is an attitude I see from many of my friends and I fundamentally disagree because I think so many of those &#x27;other places&#x27; are stifling and non-inclusive.<p>A restaurant is a place where speaking more loudly than a certain amount will earn you ire from others. You&#x27;re surrounded by other groups that aren&#x27;t your group. There&#x27;s a prescribed format. It&#x27;s a ritual, you know? There&#x27;s a sandbox out there, and the format is &#x27;let&#x27;s go and do X, for X hours, and that&#x27;s it&#x27;.<p>I hate restaurants, and cinemas, and cafes, and stuff. Just give me a roof and we&#x27;ll make the fun. But the roof doesn&#x27;t exist, because as a society, we decided that capitalism and the building of private castles is how it&#x27;s going to work. Railing against that as an individual is terribly hard.<p>The problem with it, is that if we decide as a society that these paid, gated experiences are how we&#x27;re going to socialise, then everyone who doesn&#x27;t work hard enough is excluded. That&#x27;s how we get things like socio-economic groups. If you socialise in restaurants, then your friend circle reduces to the people who can afford to socialise in restaurants.<p>If it&#x27;s non-deliberate, then it&#x27;s sad. If it is deliberate, then it&#x27;s the &#x27;ego thing&#x27; that I tried to speak of in the first post - it&#x27;s about us not realising that we are humanity, we don&#x27;t need to battle each other and assert dominance, we can just be, you know? Individual, yes, but one, too.<p>We need public spaces and gatherings because otherwise the ultimate endgame is that people retreat into ever-smaller niche groups until we just sit on our own.