The Country That Doesn’t Believe in Takeout

Why Spain Sits and America Sprints

Spain is an incessant creation of a reality that exceeds every attempt at definition.

—María Zambrano

In Spain the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.

—Federico Garcia Lorca

Above: It’s easy to slow down when your surroundings look like this.

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I’m freshly back from two weeks sprinting through Spain—sprinting, because that’s what we Americans do.

We treat vacations like competitive eating: inhaling as much as possible, as quickly as we can without vomiting. Then, with full mouths and fuller stomachs, we turn around and brag about our speed, breadth, and depth.

My days were long, my visits short. A handful of planes, trains, and automobiles dragged me to nearly a dozen destinations while walking tens of thousands of steps below monuments and spectacles that had witnessed hundreds of thousands of people gawk at them just like I did.

Madrid to Valencia to Barcelona to Manresa to Montserrat to Barcelona to Torreciudad to Zaragoza to Madrid to Rome (yes, a brief detour to Italy was in order) to Madrid to Toledo to Madrid, oh my! My pace made The Fast and the Furious’ Vin Diesel look like a contemplative monk.

Somewhere across Spain’s golden plains, I discovered the great fault line between Americans and Europeans wasn’t the architecture or the food or the fact that everyone somehow looks ten years younger than their passport says despite drinking and smoking like it’s a team sport.

It was takeout.

Not the food, but the concept.

Try, as an American, to order a coffee para llevar in Spain. Watch the confusion ripple across the barista’s face like you just asked him to perform a small miracle.

Try to explain that, no, you do not plan to sit, you do not plan to savor, you do not plan to enjoy the ceramic cup they’re offering you, you do not plan to admire the peaceful setting.

No, instead you want the coffee in a flimsy paper cup, with an ill-fitting recycled plastic lid, so you can drink it while walking to your next thing, which you will also rush right through.

First comes the confusion. Then comes recognition, followed by a sigh so deep it carries the moral weight of a civilization.

Finally, shoulders slumped, the barista defeatedly murmurs:

“…okay.”

Neither enthusiastically, nor acceptingly. Just with the resignation of a man watching an otherwise functional adult choose oblivion.

And in that moment, staring at the universal Spanish Look of Confused Resignation™, I realized: I was missing the point of the country I was sprinting through.

You don’t come to Spain to “do” Spain.

You come to Spain to be in Spain.

But Americans don’t know how to be anywhere. We only know how to process places.

We “do” Sagrada Familia.

We “do” Casa Milà.

We “do” Plaza Mayor.

As if eternal spaces were errands or beauty was an item on a grocery list.

Meanwhile, Spain sits. Spain meanders. Spain closes in the afternoon not out of laziness, but out of clarity. Fast food in Spain isn’t fast. But it is fresh. And the life lived around it is fresher still.

Everything Is Smaller There, Except the Life

Apartments? Smaller.

Appliances? Smaller.

Cars? Smaller.

Garbage cans? Somehow comically small.

But the lives?

Bigger. Fuller. Looser.

People actually sit down. They talk. They finish their coffee in the café, like their ancestors did before them. Meanwhile I’m mainlining mine like an addict because my schedule says I have a dozen more “must-see” items before sundown.

America loves convenience because it gives us the illusion we’re winning something.

Europe has the suspicious confidence of a culture that doesn’t think time is chasing them.

Sure, everything is bigger in Texas, but everything is right-sized across the Atlantic.

At one point after I ordered a bocadillo to go, a bartender in Madrid looked at me with the expression of a man who had just seen a dog drive a car (This may have been because I mispronounced llevar as lavar so that it sounded as though I was asking him to wash my sandwich, but I digress).

“¿Para llevar?”

“No, no,” he clarified, tapping the counter. “You…sit.”

He spoke as if it were an intervention.

And in that moment, it hit me: Europeans don’t do takeout because they don’t believe life is something to be optimized.

Americans, meanwhile, treat time like a hostile foreign power that must be conquered through ruthless efficiency and reckless abandon.

Spain was a masterclass in this cultural divide. Every café was filled with people who had nowhere better to be. Couples lingering over coffee like they were paid by the hour to feel content. Elderly men reading newspapers at a glacial pace. Nobody multitasking. Nobody walking with the frantic “I’m late for something” gait that every American has perfected.

Meanwhile, I’m over here trying to get an iced latte in a to-go cup so I can power-walk to the next cathedral as though I’m late for a meeting with God Himself.

Americans save time so they can schedule more “stuff” in the future, while Europeans spend time like they won’t get any more if it. One of these attitudes is correct.

The American Disease of “To Go”

The real sickness isn’t that we want takeout. It’s that we want everything to be takeout.

Friendships, relationships, entertainment, food, spirituality, attention—if we can consume it quickly, jamming it in while walking to something else, we’re in.

We panic at the idea that someone might seat us. That we might wait. That the thing we’re consuming might require us to stop sprinting or doing for ten minutes.

Spain made me realize how utterly insane this is.

Europeans don’t value their time any less than we do; they just don’t conflate speed with value.

They don’t believe the highest form of life is maximizing output.

They don’t believe that being busy is a personality trait.

They don’t think that shaving 90 seconds off your coffee run is the same as achieving self-actualization.

What they do believe in—sometimes infuriatingly, but always refreshingly—is the dignity of presence.

If you’re eating, you’re eating.

If you’re drinking a coffee, you’re drinking a coffee.

If you’re talking with someone, you’re actually talking with them, not powering through your conversation like it’s another calendar invite or pointless Zoom meeting.

The Old World protects its time by refusing to let it be chopped, packaged, and auctioned into a thousand frantic pieces.

The New World willingly sells it to the highest bidder.

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My entire trip can be distilled into a single moment:

I’m at a bar in Valencia. I’m jet-lagged, sweating, and hungry in that “American abroad on too little sleep and way too much ambition” way. I ask for something to go. The bartender blinks slowly, shakes his head, and gestures to an empty stool.

“Sit.”

It neither suggestion, nor hospitality, but a worldview packaged in a small, simple moment.

A worldview where a meal is not fuel, coffee is not an errand, time is not a battlefield, your soul is not a productivity tool.

A worldview where life is lived in time, not against it.

And so I sat.

And the food was better.

And the moment was better.

And I was better, somehow, someway, for having been forced—gently, but firmly—to remember that I am a human being, not a delivery mechanism for my sightseeing or my online presence.

America optimizes life. Europe inhabits it.

We build apps to help us save time so we can fill that time with things that will make us feel like we’re constantly behind.

They build lives with enough margin to enjoy the things we keep saving time for but never actually do.

In America, we treat leisure like a luxury.

In Europe, it’s the unspoken baseline of being alive.

In America, a meal is something between tasks.

In Europe, a meal is the task.

In America, time is something we spend.

In Europe, time is something they have.

In America, we live for proof we were in a given moment.

In Europe, they live for the moment itself.

They understand deep in their bones that, per Hank Stram, “Yesterday is a cancelled check. Today is cash on the line. Tomorrow is a promissory note.”

And the thing I realized somewhere between Madrid and Toledo is that maybe the reason Europeans don’t rush is not because they’re slow but because they don’t hate the place they’re going next.

Europe isn’t perfect—not even close—but it resists the great American flattening. It refuses to treat humans like productivity machines. It remains suspicious of the idea that efficiency is a virtue.

And nowhere is this meaningful resistance more visible than in the humble act of refusing to hand you your lunch in a paper bag.

I suppose that’s why it’s so hard to get takeout in Spain.

Not because Spain is slow, but because Spain is alive.

And, in the politest way possible, it was trying to show me the one thing I’ve never known how to do well: stay still.

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Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom