It was freezing in Buenos Aires this summer, but every evening when I hopped off the bus at the Botanical Gardens and rushed down Calle Armenia, I passed the same diminutive old woman seated outside at the same diminutive cafe, always with the same glass of red wine, cigarette, and little white dog. She is probably sitting there now. 

At 5 p.m. or 6 p.m., Argentinians indulge in merienda, a daily snacktime to hold the country over until their very late dinner, usually around 10pm. Like other national rituals, merienda is often social and often outside. In Palermo, the gentrified dollhouse neighborhood where I lived for the summer, an Aussie-themed, millennial pink cafe would reliably fill up with chic young professionals, hunched over their espressos, leaning in to catch every word from their companions. In the quieter, less affluent suburb of Vicente López, where I worked, the endless proliferation of cafés was noisy and softly glowing like Christmas lights. Merienda also seemed to transcend the generational partitions one might expect in social spaces. Septuagenarians in tweed peacoats assumed seats at trendy spots that advertised avocado toast, and clusters of teenagers filled up the dusty, no-frills taverns where Borges allegedly once wrote. The old and the young might not have been sitting together, but their arms brushed at tables spaced inches apart. Even those who sat alone, like the old woman on Calle Armenia, were inevitably surrounded by people.

Weekday socializing wasn’t confined to merienda, at least not at the legal nonprofit where I was interning. At lunchtime, we’d stroll to the vegetable stand at the corner and banter with the vendor about which oranges looked freshest, then return to the office kitchen to chat while we chopped tomatoes and boiled pasta water. We set the table and ate together, family style. Lunch could be a two-hour affair, lasting until the conversation, rather than the food, was finished. 

Sometimes the other American intern and I would join our co-workers for merienda or drinks after work. It’s so unhealthy, we complained of this lifestyle, picking at deep-fried quince jam-filled pastelitos and twirling the paper umbrellas in our pomegranate-sized cocktails as if they weren’t a source of enormous pleasure, as if the American fixation on optimizing our diets has given us anything other than eating disorders and less brainspace for more interesting preoccupations. With this exceptionally gracious team of mostly 20-something women we’d known for only a few weeks, we talked about sex, therapy, death, and other topics Americans like me typically reserve for our closest friends and our moms. Why don’t Americans protest anymore? my boss asked bluntly. It was precisely the kind of question we’re conditioned not to ask at Thanksgiving dinner. At one gathering, a co-worker told the other American intern to buy his long-distance girlfriend a vibrator from a brand she liked. She seemed taken aback when he blushed and abruptly changed the subject.

It isn’t even that intimacy was expedited. Rather, a ravenous appetite for knowledge of each other was presupposed, abstracting discomfort out of potentially uncomfortable terrain. 

The individualized American way emerged for me in higher resolution after my time in Argentina. I thought about my internship in New York the previous summer where, in spite of the rapport amongst the staff, we scarfed down disposable bowls of Cava slop alone at our desks. I am nearly done with college, and recently graduated acquaintances ominously warn about the loneliness that awaits, about the jarring transition from eating chocolate and giggling about boys on your best friend’s couch on a Wednesday evening to seeing each other only on the weekends. But when does skipping spontaneous reunions to save money or be healthy or crank out a few more work emails become self-isolation? When does optimization make us dysfunctional, responsibility make us neglectful–when does the perpetual project of bettering the self just undermine the self and unmoor us from each other?

While the economy has somewhat stabilized, Argentina has seen inflation skyrocket over the last two years. I still saw chalkboards outside of cafes advertising discounts for a café y dos medialunas (the half-moon shaped almost-croissants that are a national obsession). But pastries that would have cost $0.25 USD in 2022 now often cost as much as they would in the U.S. Going to the gym was more expensive in Palermo than it was in Pennsylvania; so were books and sweaters. Plane tickets, gelato, toothpaste, a steak dinner—they all cost American prices. Salaries, however, aren’t comparable. Lawyers in Buenos Aires, like the women I worked for this summer, make an average of $4.2 million Argentine pesos a year. That’s about $28,000 USD. Other professions, even prestigious ones like IT and engineering, are making a whole lot less.

But even as purchasing power decreases dramatically and coffee and pastries get more expensive, Argentines keep buying them, and they keep buying them together. At age 26, my effusive boss had no plans to move out of her parents’ house. Finding an apartment was an impossible task, she told me matter-of-factly as we rode the 152 bus to my neighborhood, where she was meeting friends for drinks. Yet relative to the luxuries that many Argentines have deemed non-negotiable, an apartment in Buenos Aires is affordable—rent averages less than $800 USD per month, far less than it would in New York City. A room of one’s own, it seems, does not merit sacrificing one’s social life.

If only you forfeited your iced lattes, you might be able to afford a home one day. American Gen-Zers hear prescriptions to that effect so often that it has become an overwrought TikTok joke. Fuck it, we respond. The future is precarious and the present often untenable; we’ll keep our little treats. But we rarely challenge the underlying assumption that saving is a self-evident good. What if it’s not inherently irresponsible to want coffee with friends more than a house—to pursue a life of less stuff and more connection?

My fellow intern and I used to talk of how much we miss Buenos Aires, which is amusing because when we were there, we complained about it constantly. It was too cold, it got dark at 5 p.m. (we had plummeted back into winter just as the Northern Hemisphere was emerging from it), we had no friends in the country except for each other, the cheese-heavy diet made pooping a constant struggle, the appliances in our apartments kept breaking, nothing was as cheap as we’d been led to believe, nights out started far too late, we couldn’t figure out how to recharge our public transportation cards, we wanted spicy food and just a few more people with whom to speak English. Despite it all, and at the risk of overgeneralizing, I think we yearn for the way Argentines turn out while Americans retreat inward.

Unlike in America, social life in Argentina doesn’t require expensive justification—no trendy dinner reservations are needed as a pretext to hang out. Social life unfolds in public parks, where capybaras scamper behind bushes and teenagers swap cigarettes and pass around a communal gourd of mate, the bitter tea that is central to national identity. 

The only analogous social milieu that I’ve found in the U.S. is that of a liberal arts college campus. At Princeton, we live outside both out of necessity and desire. Dorm rooms are too cramped and lack air conditioning. And there is a higher concentration of people we love per capita than we’ll most likely ever experience again. We can walk two minutes to a friend’s room, and if they’re not there and we’re feeling woebegone, we can stroll aimlessly around campus and be guaranteed a pleasant encounter. While our college years are drenched in iced lattes, our socializing isn’t preconditioned on spending; it’s also found in sun-soaked afternoons chatting on Cannon Green.

Sometimes I marvel at how three minutes of small talk next to the leg press machine or in line at the coffee shop elevate my mood even more than the conventional remedies for malaise—eight hours of sleep, a run, an SSRI. I think we fundamentally need the constant, unstructured social interaction that the Argentines have mastered and the American infatuation with productivity has bludgeoned out of our spirits. I suspect not even the most reclusive of introverts can be content without it.

In America, we default to the grind. Because ruthless advancement is a solitary pursuit, we view togetherness as an indulgence, reserved for the weekends, once all possible tasks have been checked off the list. 

Capitalism has been fruitless even for its winners; 20-something investment bankers are quite literally dying at work. The lifestyle I saw in Buenos Aires vindicates the radically different values that we all recognize to be better in theory but can’t commit to in practice—except during our four years in college, which many of us will reminisce on as our best. Americans treat this time as an anomaly, a blissful shelter from real life, instead of a model for how to organize the rest of our lives. As an American at an elite university, I’m saturated with the presumption that our blatantly obsolete priorities are the ideal, even as my peers and I spend our days like the Argentines. I needed to inhabit an alternative form of professional adult life for three months to realize it is not only better for us—it works better, too.

I don’t mean to glamorize a life of less, but rather to suggest dethroning material abundance as our automatic highest aspiration. I go to college with the offspring of American kings and foreign ones too, and my coworkers in Buenos Aires still seem to have fuller lives. They had committed partners, or at the very least, they had sizable rosters. They were still close with the people they’d known at age three. No one lived more than an hour away from their families, and everyone went home for asado, the epic hours-long roast of many meats, every Sunday. 

If I saw the same old woman alone in the same cafe every day in America, I’d probably assume she was lonely. I’d probably be right. But I’m more optimistic about the woman on Calle Armenia. I didn’t hear anyone talk about a loneliness epidemic in Argentina.

Frances Brogan wants to small talk.