Leo’s sneakers squeak against the polished linoleum of the Galleria, a sound that feels 12 times louder than it should in the oppressive silence of a Tuesday afternoon. He’s shifting his weight, trying to find a rhythm that doesn’t look like loitering, but his ankles are tired and his friends are still 22 minutes away. He eyes a planter-a large, circular concrete basin holding a dying fern-but the edge is topped with a series of jagged metal spikes. They call them ‘pig ears‘ in the trade, a charming little euphemism for ‘don’t you dare sit here.’ He looks at the security guard, who is already adjusting his belt, and Leo decides to just walk. He walks in circles, a 12-year-old ghost in a cathedral of commerce, because in this neighborhood, if you aren’t spending, you aren’t existing.

I’m thinking about Leo because I spent the morning in a boardroom with hiccups that wouldn’t quit, trying to explain the 102-degree rule of lumbar support to a group of developers who only cared about turnover. It’s an embarrassing thing, really-to be mid-sentence about the ‘human-centricity of urban flow’ and then have your diaphragm betray you with a sharp, involuntary gasp. It makes you feel small and physical in a room full of glass and steel. My name is Cora Y., and I am an ergonomics consultant, which is a fancy way of saying I spend my life measuring how much a chair can hurt a human body before they decide to stand up and leave. I’m good at it. I’m 42, and I’ve spent the better part of two decades perfecting the art of the ‘uncomfortable comfort.’ It’s a contradiction I live with every day: I love the idea of people gathered together, but I get paid to make sure they don’t stay too long.

The Myth of Digital Retreat

We talk a lot about ‘third places‘ in sociology-those spots that aren’t home (the first place) and aren’t work (the second place). They are the pubs, the libraries, the town squares, the places where you can encounter a stranger and realize they aren’t a monster. The common wisdom is that the internet killed them. We all just retreated into our screens, right? It’s a convenient lie. It shifts the blame onto our personal choices rather than the physical environment we’ve been forced to inhabit. The truth is, we didn’t leave the third places; they were taken from us, piece by piece, bolt by bolt, until there was nowhere left to lean without a receipt.

Dismantling the Civic Fabric

This isn’t just about grumpy teenagers in malls. It’s a systematic dismantling of the civic fabric. When you remove the benches from a park-replacing them with those individual, ‘armrest-divided‘ seats that prevent anyone from lying down or even sitting too close-you aren’t just ‘deterring the homeless.’ You are signaling to every single human being that this space is for transit, not for being. You are telling the elderly woman who needs a break after 22 steps that she is not welcome in the sun. You are telling the young couple that their intimacy has no place in the public eye. We’ve turned our cities into a series of corridors. We are always on the way to somewhere else, because the ‘here’ has been made deliberately hostile.

I remember a project in a mid-sized city back in 2012. They wanted to revitalize a plaza that had become a ‘problem area.’ In the language of urban planning, a ‘problem area’ is usually just a place where people are being too human without a permit. My job was to select the furniture. I looked at the data-the foot traffic, the dwell times, the demographic heat maps. If you look at Liforico, you can see how this kind of data is supposed to be used to understand the heartbeat of a location. But the developers didn’t want a heartbeat; they wanted a flatline. They wanted 52 individual pillars instead of a bench. They wanted the lighting to be a harsh, high-frequency blue that makes the skin look sickly and discourages lingering. I did what they asked. I justified it as ‘safety.’ And then, 12 months later, I walked through that plaza and felt a cold, sharp stone in my stomach. It was empty. Not just empty of ‘problems,’ but empty of life. Even the birds seemed to avoid it.

The Price of Isolation

We are currently facing an epidemic of loneliness that is costing us billions in healthcare and tearing the social contract to shreds. We wonder why people are so polarized, why they only talk to people who agree with them. Well, if you only ever exist in your house, your car, your office, and your private gym, you never have to deal with the messy, beautiful reality of a stranger. You never have to negotiate space with someone who has a different life than you. The third place was the training ground for democracy. It was where you learned that the guy who likes the wrong football team also has a really good joke about his 22-year-old lawnmower. Without those spaces, we lose the ‘weak ties’ that hold a society together. We become a collection of isolated silos, connected only by the fiber-optic cables that we blame for the problem we physically built.

I find myself getting angry about it lately, which is probably why I’ve been getting these hiccups. It’s a physical manifestation of a guilty conscience. I’ve spent so long obsessing over the ‘ergonomics of efficiency’ that I forgot the ‘ergonomics of empathy.’ A human being isn’t just a set of measurements (though I can tell you that the average hip breadth for a 62-year-old male has increased by 2 percent over the last decade). A human being is a creature that needs to loiter. We need to be able to stand in a place for no reason at all. We need to be able to sit on a wall and watch the world go by without a security guard asking us for a ticket.

I once saw a group of kids-maybe 12 of them-trying to have a birthday party in a public park that had been privatized by a management firm. They had a cake, but the ‘rules of conduct’ posted on a 72-inch-high sign forbade ‘unauthorized gatherings of more than 2 people.’ Within 12 minutes, they were asked to leave. They didn’t put up a fight. They just packed up their plastic forks and went back to their respective bedrooms. They probably went on Discord. They probably played a video game where they could at least sit together in a virtual tavern without being harassed. And then some columnist will write 1222 words about how ‘Gen Z is killing the park industry.’ No, we killed the park. They just found a place where they were allowed to exist.

The Simple Prescription

It’s a strange thing to be a part of. To be the one who knows exactly how to make a space feel ‘premium’ while simultaneously making it feel ‘uninviting.’ There’s a specific kind of pebble-dashed concrete that looks very modern but is impossible to sit on for more than 2 minutes without it feeling like you’re being grated like a block of parmesan. I’ve recommended that material 22 times. I’ve told myself it was for ‘durability.’ It wasn’t. It was for ‘exclusion.’

If we want to fix the civic rot, we don’t need more apps or more ‘social media engagement.’ We need benches. We need big, wide, wooden benches that don’t have metal bars in the middle. We need libraries that are open until 12 at night and don’t treat you like a criminal if you fall asleep over a book. We need parks that aren’t ‘curated experiences’ but are just patches of grass where 52 different people can do 52 different things without a permit. We need to stop treating the public as a liability and start treating them as the purpose.

My presentation this morning failed, by the way. Between the hiccups and my sudden, unplanned rant about the ‘tyranny of the individual chair,’ the board decided to go with a different consultant. Someone who is 12 years younger and doesn’t have a problem with ‘pig ears.’ I think I’m okay with that. I went and sat on a very uncomfortable wall outside the office and just stayed there. A security guard came by after 12 minutes and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was practicing. He asked ‘Practicing what?’ and I just said, ‘Existing.’ He didn’t know what to do with that, so he just walked away. It was the best 22 minutes of my week.