Coffee and Resonance
On Wednesday morning, coming back from a run in a -1° Cologne, I dipped into a little coffee shop on my street to warm up. I hadn't brought my phone, so I had to resort to just looking around as I awaited the bean juice. My eyes caught a magazine on the window sill - Standart, Vol. 36.
The essay that stole my attention - pictured above - perfectly resonated with my experience as I was reading it. Ben Wurgaft goes on to contrast the experience of smartphone-ordered takeaway coffee pickup in his busy California home with the deliberately slow service in a Kyoto café called Canvas. The outcome - a your hands on a barista-crafted cappuccino - is the same in either case. Yet the texture of experience on the way there is fundamentally different.
One has you in full control, sliding over the smooth glass surface of your touchscreen, in & out the shop in two minutes, in no danger of being caught up in your surroundings. It's a perfectly frictionless interaction, orchestrated flawlessly via glassy control centers: You touch a screen to order, it pops up on the Barista's order screen and he touches a screen when the coffee is made. The texture of this entire exchange is as smooth as scrolling your phone with your thumb.
In contrast, being a guest in a traditional coffee house feels a very different. Walking into this shop on a Wednesday, I had no choice but to make contact with my surroundings. As a guest, you wait until someone comes to take your order, so you might even find a magazine lying around. Instead of scrolling through a gallery of drink options, you get a conversation. Since you didn't order in advance, you might even have to wait for your order. The texture of this exchange, then, is a lot less smooth. Like running your finger over a knitted carpet, there are plenty of opportunities to get caught: By a magazine, by the eyes of your neighbor that happens to grab coffee here too, in a conversation with a human.
And on this cold winter morning in Cologne, I got caught. By the coffee first, the magazine second, the conversation third. Chatting to the barista after I'd finished my cup, we got talking about the funky fermented flavors in the roast. Soon enough, he excitedly disappeared into the back only to reappear with the funkiest cold brew I've had in my life - something like a Cherry Liqueur. He'd made this one for himself, it wasn't even on the menu. Yet here we could share this stoke, he got appreciation for his work and I got to stroll home warmed-up, well-caffeinated and with my cup so full from the interaction that I could hardly stop grinning.
Granted, the nature of this example is rather trivial. The texture of one's bean juice acquisition will scarcely change their life. But it reflects a phenomenon that might. This place, its people, the magazine - they resonated with me. Which is a reasonably common phrase in English, so I'd never really paid any attention to its etymology. But on Wednesday, I got curious.
There's the obvious connection to Resonance as a physical concept, where an object encountering its natural frequency in external vibrations will absorb that energy and start vibrating in that same frequency. But Human Resonance seems to be a tad more complex than that.

Physical Resonance is a one-way street: A vibrates and makes B resonate. Which is how Human Resonance starts too: Something environmental matches something internal. But unlike a tuning fork, we're not constrained to simply mirror the external. Entering into Resonance as a human is opening a lively two-way street - entering into a reciprocal relationship that affects both.
Which, of course, is entirely impossible if you refuse to make contact with the world. Drawing on the work of Sociologist Hartmut Rosa, our two ways of achieving caffeination illustrate the opposites in a continuum he terms "Weltbeziehung" (= "relationship to the world"). On one end, we have Alienation: a cold, distanced, controlling interaction with an equally foreign world made to be bent to one's will somehow - Rosa calls this a "relationship of no relationship". On the other end, we have the vibrant, entangled, spontaneously cooperative and unpredictable relationship that constitutes Resonance. It doesn't take a Psychology Ph.D. to predict which of these two reads like a maintaining factor of mental distress, and which like a facet of a flourishing human life. So then, how does one resonate?
It's tempting to think of Resonance as a matter of what one does: You might find parallels in someone apathetically choosing Uber Eats over paying their local pizza man a visit. Or consider a power walker rushing through the park for cardio benefits, compared to the retired couple he just passed on their leisurely stroll. A middle-manager "preparing for a meeting to explore the possibility of submitting a joint grant application to finance a social project" (this example comes straight from Rosa) compared to a professional gardener tending to the bushes. And in all those cases, we might expect one to be much more conducive to Resonance than the other is. Yet it's equally possible to imagine an apathetic gardener and entirely immersed middle-manager.
Instead, the witty reader might propose, Resonance may be a matter of how one does things: Two people might spend their day wandering through a new city - one slightly stressed all day because they want to tick all the sightseeing boxes, one deeply immersed in checking out alleyways, reading signs and talking to locals. They are effectively doing the same thing, as are the two cappuccino acquirers we started with, but their experience will be fundamentally different. And surely, there may be clear Resonance Killers, like time pressure: If you're 10 minutes late to an appointment, you probably won't lose yourself in the beauty of a sunset. Yet, even in the absence of time pressure, there's no way to guarantee Resonance by doing things a certain way. It takes two to tango, or in Rosa's words: Resonance must always be understood as a relationship, not a subjective state that can be achieved by doing something.
Which is all wonderfully vague. On Wednesday I might have felt entirely enveloped, where my relationship to the world seemed to breathe so naturally - but sure enough, days come around where I feel like an alien thrown into a cold and foreign world, entirely disconnected in a desert. So what do we do? How does Resonance arise - and for that matter, how does Alienation arise? Can we link this to certain personality traits or habits, societal structures or social norms? Lastly, what's the link to Mental Health?
Well, that's what I'm currently trying to figure out. I only started reading Rosa's work on Wednesday (sparked by the café experience), so I've got a lot to learn still - and I plan to write more of these as I find out how all this fits into the world of Psychology. What's clear, I believe, is that Resonance requires making real contact with the world around you. If the texture is perfectly smooth, if there's nothing to get caught in, odds are pretty slim. And until I know some more, it'll just be a cool exercise to notice when Resonance arises, so maybe I can spot some patterns myself.
Best wishes,
Johannes :)
PS: If you've read this far & you feel like sharing, feel free to send me a message about something that resonated with you recently. I know these can be super specific sometimes and I love hearing about all of it. Thank you!
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