Seeking Aliveness

I'm starting a coffee shop with the goal of crafting a lifestyle that makes me feel alive

Prior to his trip to Vienna, my friend Anish had never been a huge fan of churches. I remember the skeptical look he gave me when I suggested we hit up St. Stephen’s Cathedral while he was visiting me there. I think he was envisioning one of those run-of-the-mill red brick churches surrounded by a parking lot that American suburbs are littered with.

Besides being a cathedral, Stephansdom was, much to Anish’s amusement, as strikingly different from the average suburban church as one could imagine.

One of the many cool things about Stephansdom is that it slowly reveals itself to you as you ride the escalator to street level from the subway station. I think Anish had forgotten that we were on our way to visit the cathedral, because he was fidgeting his way around Google Maps as we stepped on to the escalator, looking for dinner places for later. I nudged him to look up, and within moments, he was starstruck. As the ancient stone building unveiled itself in front of his eyes, they grew wider and wider with awe. Dinner would have to wait - the beauty in front of us was more important.

I remember that moment so vividly because it produced a very noticeable change in presence within Anish; a moment ago, he was living entirely in the future within his head, and now he was here, focusing on something in his immediate environment.

That’s the thing about beauty - it’s captivating. It interrupts whatever process is running in your mind and brings your attention to what’s in front of you. I agree with Isabel - beauty is a feeling of high attention.

As someone who struggles with being present, I’m no stranger to this phenomenon. I remember being unpleasantly preoccupied when I first visited the newly opened La Cabra on Lafayette St last summer. I had moved to New York City for an internship, and on that particular weekend, I was looking for a coffee shop to work on my side project from¹.

I now have no idea what I was preoccupied with that day, because I forgot about it as soon as I stepped inside. I was awestruck with the beauty I was surrounded with.

I knew in an instant that this was exactly my kind of place - the Scandinavian wood panels, the smell of cardamom, the muted colors, the stone tiles on the espresso bar, and the care that went into making coffee - everything about it was perfect. I was very excited…

…to open my laptop and reduce all of the beauty around me to a bokeh behind the screen.

And then I noticed the ‘No Laptop’ signs on the tables.

In an instant, I felt all the admiration and excitement that was building up inside me evaporate. I was about to leave, but, falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy, I stayed and got a cappuccino and a cardamom bun.

Forced to be offline, I decided to make the most of my time there. I spent way too long studying the color and texture of the stoneware, the notes in the coffee, and the way people interacted with the space. In stark contrast to the city outside, no one seemed to be in any hurry; some people were talking to their friends, others were reading a book, and some were even just sitting there idly, taking everything in.

I took an hour to simply observe the space around me, and I'm glad I did. The depth of its beauty might have otherwise escaped me.

La Cabra’s space is naturally beautiful. Natural, as in in accordance with nature, the way things are meant to be. In nature, form follows function, every single time, and nothing exists without a reason. Despite the minimalism at La Cabra, it was apparent that a lot of thought went into the design of the space, and that there was a reason behind every choice that was made.

I was curious.

What’s with the minimalism? Why do the lampshades hang so low? Why is the space overwhelmingly brown and silver? Why do they insist on donning their staff in pastel-brown aprons and having them bring drinks over to your table? Why did they carve out space for seating at the bar?

“So that people may feel at home,” one of the baristas informed me, when I posed these questions to him. “Everything we do stems from Hygge.”

“Hygge?”

“It’s a Danish word that encapsulates feelings of coziness, comfort, and…” he shrugged and waved his hands around as if he were hugging the air. “Conviviality. Togetherness, you know?”

That made sense.

Minimalism usually fails when it becomes the goal, when it’s introduced for its own sake. At La Cabra, minimalism works - it makes the space more beautiful - because it emerges as a natural extension to Hygge, the lifestyle that the space embodies.

Isabel writes about this phenomenon in the context of people. She argues that embodying a certain personality, being, is ultimately what begets timeless beauty. You can't look beautiful without being healthy. You can't play soccer beautifully unless you integrate consistent training into your identity and lifestyle.

I think that’s true for places and objects as well; lasting beauty rarely occurs in isolation. It usually arises as a result of several upstream inputs, such as the memories that are made there, the stories that are shared, and how it’s lived in. Ultimately, the beauty of a place comes from how it makes you feel.

At La Cabra, I felt warm, cared for, and at peace in a manner that was strangely uncharacteristic to New York City.

If spending just an hour in a small space can evoke such profound feelings of tranquility in me, I thought, what must it be like to actually live this lifestyle every day?

At the end of the summer, I was set to head to Vienna for a semester. I liked the idea of Hygge so much that I booked a flight to Copenhagen in the winter just to experience more of it.

And boy did I get to. Hygge is woven into the fabric of Copenhagen, and nowhere is it more evident than in coffee shops.

There’s just something otherworldly about the feeling of having a hot cup of coffee and a flaky croissant next to a window amidst a sea of chatter and laughter in a warm, dimly-lit coffee shop that’s 5 steps below street level as it pours outside. It’s a unique kind of warm aliveness - cozy, yet invigorating at the same time.

I think a big part of this feeling of aliveness comes from the heightened perceptiveness that coffee brings about in you. When you take your eyes off of the screen, as I was forced to do at La Cabra, you suddenly start noticing the little details in and stories behind the people and things that inhabit the world around you. You come to realize that the world is actually quite beautiful and interesting - and that in order to notice this beauty, all you need to do is pay attention. As someone once said, “there are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see”.

And coffee certainly opens my eyes, but it does more than that - it also expands my consciousness. I like to think of my mind as a library, each room filled with memories and thoughts. Drinking coffee feels like turning on the lights in rooms that were previously dark. The caffeine flows through the library, illuminating it with clarity. It's as if each sip helps me navigate the stacks more efficiently, pulling books off the shelves and leafing through pages I had forgotten existed.

Coffee also sharpens my ability to encode new memories, carefully placing fresh volumes on the shelves of this library. And as I traveled through Europe, almost never without a cup of coffee in my hands, I kept on making memories.

By the time I boarded my flight back to Chicago, coffee was no longer just a vehicle of caffeine for me. It was a gateway into exactly the kind of life I wanted to live - a life filled with interesting people, riveting conversations, optimism, laughter, beauty and passion.

I’d been given a taste of the good life, and my mind was a moodboard of warm memories that I wanted to relive. Nostalgia had never hit me harder.

So when I came back from Vienna, I was determined to find a vocation that would let me experience that lifestyle, even if only periodically.

Broadly speaking, I think the biggest question I want to try to answer in my lifetime is how we can live better. And at the time, I thought the best way for me to explore that question was to leverage my computer science background and work as a SWE at a health tech firm.

If I spend most of my time building software that gives people greater insight into their health, I thought, I’ll be working on something meaningful, and I’ll be able to occasionally take some time off to experience that lifestyle of peace, vitality, and beauty.

So I spent the next few months doggedly chasing opportunities in health tech, more motivated than ever. I interviewed at a few places, whipped up a design for my own health tech app, and even built a custom website for WHOOP. I was trying to make recruiting fun.

And yet, something felt…off. I started getting burnt out easily. I started noticing that my heart wasn’t fully in it. That there were increasingly more mornings where I’d wake up dreading the day that lay in front of me. I started noticing a consistent, nagging feeling at the back of my mind - the feeling that I was capable of much more, that I was telling someone else’s story, that I was postponing myself.

Memories of my time in Europe often washed over me, pulling me into a wistful reverie. I found myself longing for those days when I’d go for a run at dawn and wind my way through the city to a small cafe. There, I’d join my friends at a table in the cobblestone alleyway, savoring my brunch as the chimes of church bells peppered our conversations.

Nevertheless, the semester went on, and I continued my pursuit of a post-grad desk job. My time at college was drawing to a close, and I wanted an excuse to hang out with all of my friends one last time before we all went our separate ways.

So on a random Sunday morning in April, I set up a pour-over bar in my apartment and had a bunch of people over for coffee and pastries.

Conversations were flowing, records were spinning, and the air was infused with the scent of cinnamon and coffee. Even though I was on my feet and an empty stomach continuously for five hours, I didn’t feel tired. On the contrary, brewing drinks for my friends by hand and seeing them smile was quite rejuvenating. It was one of my favorite experiences; it felt exactly like Europe, but much more familiar.

If only I could start my own coffee shop.

As soon as that thought crossed my mind, I was struck with an interesting realization. There hadn’t been a single week since coming back from Vienna during which I hadn’t thought about opening a coffee shop. I had thought about it on the flight back, at night as I lay in bed, while at class, and on my evening walks. I’d never meant to think about it, it always just happened naturally.

I’d always tell my friends that running a coffee shop was my alternative to retirement, but it had always been a distant dream, something that would be nice to have some day. Because obviously, given that I had spent 4 years and a fortune learning computer science, that I have no experience in coffee, that I have a mountain of debt, and that I don’t know the first thing about starting a business, let along running one, it would be foolish, crazy, risky, and delusional to try and start a brick & mortar business at this point in time.

However, considering the fact that my mind had been naturally and consistently gravitating towards the idea of starting a coffee shop for the last six months, I figured it would behoove me to at least give it my full, unabridged consideration.

There was so much to unpack from this idea. Like most ideas in their infancy, this one was messy, muddy, and vague. It felt right, but I didn’t know exactly why. Deep down, I knew that I still cared deeply about the question of how to live better, I just needed to figure out how starting a coffee shop would help me explore that. I needed to connect all of the individual threads of ideas that I valued - beauty, connection, craftsmanship, health, and more - and weave them into a larger tapestry.

That’s what I have largely spent the last few months doing, and this essay is a result of that. My writing will hopefully serve as a sort of sanity check, a way for me to scrutinize my thought process, motivations, and ideas under a microscope, lest I be fooling myself.

I’m fully aware that the odds are stacked against me, and that I’m more likely to fail than to succeed. But I don’t think failure is quite the right word to use here.

As I’ve come to realize, choosing to spend the next year (or more) trying to start a coffee shop is an asymmetric bet. Even if I am unable to get this idea off the ground, I anticipate that holistically, I will be in a much better position than I am in today. The downside is small in comparison to the upside.

I know that the process won’t be easy; nothing worth doing ever is. But unlike the pain of Leetcode hell, this is a pain I’m willing to bear, and that makes all the difference. All things considered, exploring ways to live better through the vehicle of a coffee shop is more aligned with my values and piques my curiosity more at this point in time than exploring ways to live better through software does. It’s more meaningful to me, and I firmly believe that I can bear any pain or suffering as long is it has meaning.

In fact, I’ve noticed that when I bear heavy burdens, and when my actions are fueled by meaning, that very suffering becomes something to look forward to. Strangely enough, it makes me feel alive.

There’s something Martha Beck said that resonates with me a lot: “When I ask people what they want, they make me a list: a better job, a better relationship, a better car, whatever. But then, when I ask them, when you wake up in the middle of the night, and you’re alone, what do you yearn for? And it’s a completely different list, and very it’s short, and almost everyone lists the same things. Peace, belonging, freedom, love, happiness.” Things you can’t touch or buy.

I’m the same way! What I yearn for is the experience of feeling alive.

So if this journey has a North Star, it is that. It is not critical acclaim, or the acquisition of a 2,000 sq. ft space, or a million dollars in MRR, it is that feeling of aliveness.

And what’s beautiful about the experience of feeling alive is that it is always the effect of something else. There is no shortcut to such a feeling, you cannot simply feel alive.

You feel alive when you lift heavy, when you paint, when you plunge into cold water, when you apply yourself to a challenge, when you run, and when you dance. You feel alive when you use your body the way it was intended to be used, and when you push it to its limits.

You also feel alive when you slip into a hot tub after a crushing workout, when you walk through an old European town, when you laugh heartily, when you take the first bite of a perfectly flaky croissant, and when you embrace someone you love in a tight hug. In order to feel alive, you must balance the pain with pleasure.

But no matter what the activity, whether it’s pleasant or painful, in order to feel alive, you must always be present, attentive, and connected to the world around you.

In many ways, a coffee shop embodies the very essence of what it means to feel alive. It's a space where beauty, attention, and connection converge, creating the perfect condition for presence and creativity.

If I am to successfully create such a space, a space that brings people into the present moment, instills them with warmth, and encourages them to connect to the world around them, I must be able to understand how to do so, either analytically or intuitively.

By nature of the venture, then, this journey of building a coffee shop is less about milestones and more about the process of learning how to craft a lifestyle that makes people feel a certain way. So for the next year, that’s what I’ll be doing.

With love,
Neel

1. That’s right - despite the fact that I love coffee, and despite that fact that I’m a sucker for beauty, I used to have a strange habit of paying attention to neither of those things when I’d visit beautiful coffee shops. Go figure.