I love traveling. Not the airports, not the packing, not the passport-fumbling — the actual dislocation. The moment you realize the way you’ve been living isn’t the only way, or even the best one. That’s what I go for. Adventure is part of it, sure. But the real prize is watching another culture do something ordinary — buy bread, hail a friend, argue about football — and thinking, huh, we don’t do it like that.

Croatia handed me one of those moments almost immediately. And it came in the form of a coffee.

The four-hour cup

If you’ve never been, here’s the thing you need to know: Croatians do not “grab a coffee.” They have coffee. There is a difference, and the difference is roughly three and a half hours long.

Cafés spill onto sidewalks. Tables cluster in the sun. People sit. And sit. And sit. They talk, they smoke, they order another espresso, they order a beer, they wave at someone crossing the square, they lean in for a longer story. Nobody looks at a laptop. Nobody is on a call. Nobody appears to be optimizing anything.

There’s even a name for the ritualized version of this: špica, the Saturday-morning coffee ritual where locals dress up and head to their favorite café between roughly 10 and 2 to see and be seen. Zagreb, the capital, has over 4,500 cafés — one for every 175 residents. The first Croatian café opened in 1748 on Ban Jelačić Square. This is not a trend. This is infrastructure.

The Croatian phrase ajmo na kavu — “let’s go for coffee” — is not really about the coffee. It’s an invitation to give someone a chunk of your afternoon. Maybe your evening. Possibly your night. And here’s the part that will make an American HR department sweat: no waiter is going to give you the check-adjacent side-eye when your cup has been empty for two hours. You can nurse an empty cup all day and nobody will rush you out. The café doesn’t exist to move you through it.

The part I want to be careful about

Here’s where I need to slow down, because I’m about to draw a line between two things and I don’t want to overclaim.

Croatia is, by nearly every measure, a strikingly safe and socially connected country. It ranked 12th on the 2024 Global Peace Index, with a homicide rate under one per 100,000. According to recent Eurostat data, just 1.4% of Croatians reported encountering anti-social behavior in their neighborhoods — the lowest figure in the EU. (For comparison, in Greece that number was 20.9%.) Interpersonal trust in Croatia, measured on a 0-to-10 scale, climbed from 3.8 in 2019 to 6.3 in 2023 — now above the EU average. And roughly 90% of Croatians report having someone they can rely on when they need help.

None of that is caused by coffee. Let me be plain about it: correlation isn’t causation. Croatia’s safety and social trust have deep roots — a small population, tight family networks, post-war rebuilding, cultural norms that predate the espresso machine by centuries.

But I do think the café culture is a visible expression of something the research world has spent decades studying: what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “third places.” In his 1989 book The Great Good Place, Oldenburg argued that healthy communities need somewhere that isn’t home (“first place”) and isn’t work (“second place”) — a neutral, low-stakes venue where people encounter each other regularly, without an agenda. Cafés, pubs, libraries, barbershops, front stoops. Places where conversation is the point, and where social status gets leveled at the door.

Croatia has these in abundance. They are baked into the architecture of daily life. And the countries that hold onto their third places tend, on average, to hold onto their social trust too. Again — correlation, not causation. But it’s a correlation worth sitting with.

What we’ve traded away

Meanwhile, back home, we are in what the U.S. Surgeon General has formally called an epidemic of loneliness. Roughly half of American adults report feeling lonely. Social isolation carries a mortality risk comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. And per the most recent American Time Use Survey, the average American now spends about 35 minutes a day socializing — down from 45 minutes twenty years ago, with the steepest drop among 15-to-24-year-olds, whose face-to-face social time has nearly halved.

We didn’t lose those ten minutes to nothing. We lost them to screens, to remote work, to the closure of neighborhood gathering spots, and — I’d argue this is the executive coach in me talking — to a cultural belief that being unavailable is a status symbol. That over-scheduling is virtue. That a calendar with breathing room in it is a calendar that isn’t earning its keep.

Croatia’s café culture is a quiet, daily rebuke to all of that. It says: your relationships are not a rounding error. Sitting with your friend for three hours is not “wasting time.” It is, in fact, the point.

What I’m bringing home

I’m not going to insult you with a listicle of “five ways to Croatian-ify your Tuesday.” You don’t need that, and I don’t believe in it. But I do want to name a few things I noticed in myself when I got back:

I noticed how often I default to “let’s grab a quick coffee” — grab, quick — as though the goal is to minimize the transaction cost of seeing someone I love. I noticed how many of my calendar slots are 30 minutes long because 30 minutes is the container, not because 30 minutes is what the conversation needs. I noticed that I’ve stopped having places I go without a purpose.

That last one is the one I want to change. Not because I think one American café-sit is going to move the needle on our loneliness data. But because I don’t want to be the person who visited a whole country full of people sitting outside talking to each other and came home and immediately opened her laptop.

If the leaders I coach are burning out — and they are — some of it is workload, and some of it is that they have systematically deleted every unstructured, unproductive, unaccountable-to-anyone hour from their lives. The Croatians are onto something. It’s not the coffee. It’s the permission.

Ajmo na kavu.

Love,

Certified Professional Coach and Psychologist

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How often have you wished for that person in your life who listens deeply, doesn’t judge you, and doesn’t try to fix you? That person who holds space for you to talk through your struggles, your hopes, and dreams so that you can live the personal and professional life that you truly want? I’m that person. Yes, I’m a psychologist and a professional life and leadership coach but my superpower is listening, deep, empathic, compassionate listening. If you’ve been seeking a professional listener who will help you live the life you truly desire, let’s set up a time to talk. My email is Lisa@LisaKaplin.com.