There are two factors here:

1. The people I go on coffee breaks with, mostly talk about things I’m not interested in. Things either related to work or investing.
2. As a result of this, or tangential to it, most of us are mostly on our phones now. We hardly look at each other.

/how it used to be

While I was working in Gurgaon, we did not have coffee breaks. We had a breakfast break, and a lunch break. We would go to the canteen on the second floor. We would order food, or open our lunch boxes and eat. After the lunch break, we would go down, walk in the shade of the building and talk (bitch and moan, basically.)

There was no free coffee while I worked in Gurgaon. So there was no coffee in our breaks. We did sometime go and have coffee at CCD, but that was a special occasion thing.

We did not use our phones during these breaks, even though these were the same group of people I mostly always went on these breaks with.

/how it goes now

Since moving to Helsinki, i go to a great office space with standing desks and ergonomic chairs. The coffee machines are OK. This is the routine now: twice a day we go for coffee breaks.

During the breaks, as I mentioned earlier we sit and look at our phones. Someone might say something, and then we might chime in, but almost always, we have the phones in our hands.

I don’t like it. I tried to not do it. But I returned to it eventually. I said I would talk to people more often. And I am doing that. But still there is this thing that I’m not good at. About allowing myself to be bored. This thing is so damn addictive.