What people talk about on a bench

A useful clarification: we cannot read the conversations. There is nowhere they'd be readable. What follows comes from what people email us, and from sitting down ourselves.

First finding: not much happens, and that's fine. A typical bench is three people, four messages in twenty minutes, and long silences nobody tries to fill.

The three recurring conversations

The weather, obviously. One in two opening messages on a bench is about rain. It's an opening protocol, not a topic.

Then: "where are you?" — which nobody ever really answers, because the app has already given a distance and being precise would ruin the game.

And then, late at night, something else. People tell things they don't tell elsewhere. A redundancy, a diagnosis, a doubt. They know that in two hours it won't exist, and that the person across from them can never cross-reference it with a name. That's exactly why the app exists.