From the Armchair to the Hour of Magic: Habit as a Form of Knowing.
An essay on attention, provincial towns, and the people who choose to leave the house.
"Ernu excavated the everyday, Teodorescu articulated the province, Lungu ironised inertia, Braniște photographed the interior void. Neill maintained a habit, Collins measured a flywheel, Clear mapped a mechanism, Sullivan observed a shift in attention. Each saw the same thing through a different window."
Where This Begins — Or: How a Man in an Armchair Wrote a Manifesto Without Meaning To
Before I write anything of my own, I need to give the floor to someone else. Cristian Stăncescu published a short text on cojocarupetru.info — something between a Friday evening diary entry and an inadvertent provocation. It carries no philosophical pretensions. It cites no one. It is simply the account of a man who went out and found something there.
I reproduce it here in translation, because it is the foundation on which everything that follows rests.
"Oh, there's nothing to do in this Botoșani of ours!" — How many times have you heard that? Do you say it yourself? Let me ask in return: what are you doing to have something to do in Botoșani? Sitting in the armchair, watching your favourite series, waiting for something to happen — a miracle, perhaps — that's unlikely to work. You searched online for something you were interested in, didn't find it, and gave up, didn't you?
Go out. Walk around. Step into a café. Find the shade of a terrace. Socialise. You'll discover there's a public speaking and leadership club — Toastmasters Botoșani. You'll find that people gather at the "La Mâțe" café to discuss ideas and meditate, not merely to order coffee. You'll learn you can play backgammon and chess in the park, that you can learn to dance and feel the rhythm of Latin American music in your body, that you can learn to paint, to sing, to sew, to... Everything begins with wanting to step outside your little box.
Today I accepted an invitation. At 18:45, I was at the place where the Piața Volantă — the Flying Market — takes place every Sunday. Irina Ghilian welcomed me and led me into a beautiful, warm, welcoming room. Some of the exhibits sat quietly in their places, ready to be admired and tried. Others were still finding their spot on the tables. Everything was arranged thoughtfully, by category.
The presentation began, and for me, the hour of magic began. Amway products, marketing programmes, water purification systems, supplements, vitamins... "I've shed fifteen years off myself!" I closed my eyes. What would it be like to shed fifteen years off myself? I became more attentive.
— How do you wash your fruit and vegetables? What products do you use?
— What water do you drink?
The demonstrations and explanations began. Did you know there are varieties of cherry grown exclusively for their vitamin C content? Acerola cherries! I felt like I was watching Teleenciclopedia. You know that feeling — when you don't want it to end?
I looked around the room and asked myself: where are all the people from Botoșani who say there's nothing to do here?"
— Cristian Stăncescu
That is Stăncescu's. From here, the text is mine.
Not because he gets anything wrong — quite the opposite. But good texts do what good doors do: they open and stop at the threshold. What follows is an attempt to step through.
[Cultural note 1 — Piața Volantă / The Flying Market]Literally "the Flying Market" — from the French volant*, meaning mobile or itinerant — this is an informal pop-up market common in Romanian towns, typically held in community halls or cultural centres on weekend evenings. It combines product demonstrations, small-scale commerce, and social gathering in a format that has no precise equivalent in British urban culture, though it sits somewhere between a village hall craft fair, a John Lewis demonstration evening, and a neighbourhood assembly. The warmth of the room is not incidental to the experience — it is constitutive of it.*
[Cultural note 2 — Teleenciclopedia]A beloved Romanian television programme that ran in various formats from 1963 onwards, presenting documentary content on science, nature, history, and culture in an accessible, wonder-driven register. For generations of Romanian viewers it represented a particular quality of curious, non-commercial attention — the experience of being genuinely informed rather than sold something. Stăncescu's comparison is deliberate: the Flying Market produced the same quality of receptive alertness. The closest British analogue in terms of cultural affection might be early Blue Peter or Horizon at its best — programmes watched for the pleasure of noticing things.
The Armchair as Epistemology
There is a philosophy embedded in the phrase "there's nothing to do in this town." It is not a statement about the town. It is a statement about the speaker, rendered in the third person to appear objective.
The person sitting in the armchair is not, in truth, saying that the town is empty. They are saying that they do not know where to look, that they have not looked in some time, or that they decided at a certain point the results would disappoint anyway. Psychologists call this learned helplessness. Martin Seligman, who first described the phenomenon in the 1960s, showed that organisms subjected to repeated negative stimuli — regardless of their response — eventually stop trying, even after the situation has changed. The dogs in his original experiments stopped searching for the exit even when the door stood open.
The armchair is not a furniture problem. It is a problem of mental models.
The phrase "there's nothing to do" operates as a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you do not search, you do not find; if you do not find, you confirm there is nothing to be found; if you confirm it, you stop searching. The circle closes, comfortably.
Stăncescu breaks it with a single unremarkable gesture: he goes out. He has no elaborate plan. He has an invitation and the time 18:45. That is all. And it is precisely in that simplicity that the text has its force.
The Invisible Inventory of a Provincial Town
Botoșani is a city of roughly 90,000 people in north-eastern Romania, close to the borders with Moldova and Ukraine.
[Cultural note 3 — Botoșani's geography and cultural inheritance]The region belongs to the historical territory of Moldavia — not to be confused with the Republic of Moldova, which is a separate state — and shares a cultural identity distinct from Transylvania or Wallachia. It is the birthplace of three figures considered foundational to Romanian culture: the poet Mihai Eminescu (roughly analogous in cultural weight to Shakespeare for the English, though the comparison flatters neither), the composer George Enescu, and the painter Nicolae Grigorescu. A town with that genealogy carries a particular burden of retrospective greatness — the temptation to locate vitality in the past rather than the present.
The population figures, however, do not show everything. They do not show what I see in my own neighbourhood: approximately forty per cent of nearby flats are unoccupied. The lift in my own building is largely silent during the day — it moves in the early morning and again in the evening. Two peaks of presence, and between them a long, low quiet. Emigration has left its mark not as a statistic but as a perceptible physical absence: doors that no longer open, lights that no longer come on, a building rhythm that has thinned gradually, year by year, without announcement.
[Cultural note 4 — Romanian emigration]Between Romania's accession to the European Union in 2007 and the early 2020s, an estimated 3.4 million Romanians emigrated, predominantly to Italy, Spain, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The phenomenon has disproportionately affected smaller towns in Moldavia and other peripheral regions. In Romanian public discourse this is sometimes called "demographic haemorrhage." The practical consequence — visible in any provincial town — is that the age cohort most likely to generate civic initiatives (roughly 25 to 45) is substantially absent. When Stăncescu asks "where are the people of Botoșani?", part of the honest answer is: in Turin, in Munich, in Leicester.
This is the structural reality behind the phrase "there's nothing to do here." Not laziness, not failure of imagination — but a town that has lost a significant portion of its active population to other countries and that struggles to maintain the social density needed for a civic ecosystem to remain visible.
And yet.
This reputation — for being a place where nothing happens — is, setting the statistics aside, largely false. Its falsity cannot be verified through argument. It must be verified through a walk.
There is a public speaking and leadership club, Toastmasters Botoșani, that meets regularly. There is a café called "La Mâțe" — literally "At the Cats" — where people gather to discuss ideas and meditate, not merely to order coffee. There are Latin dance classes, painting workshops, chess groups in the park, a weekly Flying Market where Irina Ghilian receives visitors in a room described as warm and welcoming.
There is a well-kept public park — one of the few places in the city where human presence regenerates naturally, without a specific occasion. There is the Cornișa AquaPark complex, with swimming pools, water slides, and amenities that many larger Romanian cities cannot match. There are café terraces along the main boulevard, and at its far end, where spring installs itself with a regularity that contradicts any narrative of emptiness. There is a cinema, a recently renovated theatre — one of the few in the Moldova region operating with a genuinely modern auditorium rather than the memory of one — restaurants serving local Romanian cuisine in the town centre, pizzerias, gyms, saunas.
[Cultural note 5 — The boulevard and the terrace]In Romanian provincial towns, the main boulevard — invariably broad, typically tree-lined, a legacy of communist-era urban planning — functions as the primary social artery. Café terraces along it are not simply places to drink coffee; they are the visible surface of civic life, the place where a town demonstrates to itself that it is still inhabited. The emptiness or fullness of a boulevard terrace on a May evening carries the same diagnostic weight in Romania that the state of the high street carries in Britain.
There is, in other words, a functional urban inventory — unspectacular, consistent, genuinely present — and a civic ecosystem that pulses modestly, steadily, without fanfare, remaining almost entirely invisible to those who do not leave the house.
The paradox is this: the fewer people who use these spaces, the truer the phrase "there's nothing to do here" begins to seem. The void is self-generating. A park without people looks like a sad park, not like a good park that nobody knows about. An empty terrace in May does not look like somewhere worth visiting — it looks like evidence that others have already decided it is not.
The question worth asking is not why these things exist. It is why they are so little known, and why knowing about them does not more easily become frequenting them.
The answer concerns the architecture of attention in the digital era. The platforms we use most — TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Netflix — are optimised for a single parameter: time spent. Their algorithms are not interested in your local life. They are interested in retention. The Flying Market does not send push notifications. It has no recommendation algorithm. It does not measure engagement.
The physical town, with everything in it, is competing against a billion-dollar infrastructure designed to keep you in the armchair. It is not a fair contest.
Varoufakis Wrote About Technofeudalism. Stăncescu Went Out at 18:45 on a Friday.
I do not want to overdramatise a Friday evening outing. But I am not willing to underdramatise it either.
Yanis Varoufakis argues, in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023), that the major digital platforms have constructed a new form of feudal relation — not between landowner and serf, but between cloud owner and the user who produces content and attention without being paid for either. We do not buy and sell on the major platforms. We work for them, unpaid, every time we scroll, every time we like, every time we spend an hour on YouTube watching something we did not quite choose.
Our attention is the commodity. The armchair is the factory.
When Stăncescu goes out and attends the Flying Market, he performs — without knowing it — an act of economic non-compliance. Not dramatic, not ideological, not programmatic. He simply redistributes an hour and a half of attention away from a global algorithm and towards a local, human, unoptimised space.
Cory Doctorow called the inverse phenomenon enshittification: the gradual degradation of platforms that, having captured user attention, begin extracting increasing value whilst offering decreasing quality in return. What was once a garden becomes an extraction. What was once community becomes content.
The Flying Market has not enshittified. It cannot. It has no algorithm.
A.S. Neill and the Question of Wanting To Go
Alexander Sutherland Neill founded Summerhill School in Suffolk in 1921, on the premise that a child who chooses to learn something will learn more deeply and durably than one compelled to sit at a desk. Summerhill was not anarchy — it was a structure in which freedom of choice was taken seriously, with all its consequences.
[Cultural note 6 — Summerhill]Summerhill remains operational in Leiston, Suffolk. It is one of the oldest progressive schools in the world and has been the subject of periodic regulatory disputes with Ofsted, the UK schools inspector, largely because its model of radical pupil autonomy does not map onto standardised assessment frameworks. Neill's central claim — that intrinsic motivation produces deeper learning than external compulsion — has been broadly validated by subsequent research in cognitive psychology, though it remains contested in education policy circles. For an international reader: Summerhill is to British progressive education what Montessori is to its continental equivalent, though more radical and considerably more controversial.
Neill's principle was simple and counterintuitive: coerced participation produces resistance; chosen participation produces engagement.
Stăncescu responded to an invitation. He was not sent, not persuaded by a marketing campaign, not given a discount voucher. He chose. And that choice — small, apparently trivial — entirely changes how the brain processes the experience that follows.
Research associated with Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's self-determination theory shows that intrinsic motivation — the kind arising from genuine curiosity or personal interest — produces a qualitatively different form of attention than extrinsic motivation. The person who goes somewhere because they want to creates a different kind of memory than the person who goes because they feel they ought.
This is why the Flying Market became "the hour of magic." Not because an Amway product demonstration is inherently remarkable — though acerola cherries and water filtration systems are, as subjects go, perfectly legitimate. But because Stăncescu was there with open attention rather than defended attention.
Jim Collins and the Flywheel — Why the Second Outing Costs Less
Jim Collins introduced, in Good to Great (2001), the metaphor of the flywheel: a heavy wheel, difficult to set in motion, but which, once moving, requires progressively less effort to keep turning with each push. Momentum accumulates. The wheel does not lurch into speed — it builds it, quietly, through repetition.
Applied to local civic life, the mechanism works as follows. The first outing costs the most. You must overcome inertia, uncertainty, the vague discomfort of an unfamiliar space. The warm room of the Flying Market is not guaranteed before you arrive — it exists only as a promise, and promises require energy to honour.
But if the first outing yields something — not necessarily revelation, merely the experience that the effort was worth it — the flywheel begins to turn. The second outing costs less. The tenth is already a habit. And habit is, as we shall see from James Clear, eventually identity.
The problem with towns like Botoșani — and the problem is not unique to Romania — is that the first outing often remains the only one, because there is no social infrastructure to confirm it was worth it and to invite a second. The informal network — a friend who says "I went and it was good" — is more powerful than any poster or advertisement. But it requires social density: people who have gone and who tell others.
Stăncescu publishes. This is a form of infrastructure.
James Clear and the Habit Loop in Civic Space
Atomic Habits (2018) describes a four-step mechanism that governs the formation of any habit: cue — craving — response — reward. Strong habits do not require willpower; they construct environments in which the desired behaviour becomes the path of least resistance.
Apply the framework to Stăncescu's Friday evening.
The cue was the invitation — a concrete, specific external signal. The craving was curiosity, probably combined with some fatigue with the armchair. The response was leaving the house and arriving at the Flying Market. The reward was the experience of flow, of live attention, of not wanting it to end.
If this loop repeats, it becomes habit. If the habit deepens, it becomes identity — "the sort of person who goes out on Friday evenings and discovers things." And identity reshapes behaviour more fundamentally than any New Year's resolution.
The problem specific to small towns is that the loop often breaks at the cue stage. Invitations are infrequent, informal, difficult to find. There is no aggregator of local events operating with the same algorithmic commitment that Netflix applies to recommending series. The Flying Market happens every Sunday, but how many people in the town know that?
Your favourite show's algorithm knows when you are home. The Flying Market does not.
The Shift in Attention — What Stăncescu Formulated Exactly, Without Intending To
Michael Sullivan, in his work on the attention economy, distinguishes between consumed attention and invested attention. Consumed attention exhausts itself without leaving significant cognitive traces — scrolling, passive viewing, purposeless browsing. Invested attention produces new connections, unexpected associations, durable long-term memory.
Stăncescu writes, at one point: "I became more attentive."
It is a short phrase, almost incidental. But it describes precisely what Sullivan calls a shift in attention. Not "I listened more carefully" or "I found it more enjoyable" — but a modification of the baseline state of attention itself. From defended attention — waiting not to be bored — to open attention: available to receive.
This transition is, paradoxically, harder to achieve at home than outside it. One's own armchair is too familiar, too comfortable, too controlled. The Flying Market's room carries a degree of novelty that keeps attention in a state of positive alertness.
The novelty does not need to be spectacular. Acerola cherries are quite sufficient.
Eight Witnesses — The Same Phenomenon, Eight Different Frames
There is a Romanian tradition of taking the everyday seriously as literary matter. It is neither new nor thin. And this essay would not be honest if it convoked only Western voices to validate an experience that took place in Botoșani, on a Friday evening, at 18:45.
Vasile Ernu excavated the everyday. Născut în URSS — Born in the USSR — is a subjective, personal archaeology: a puzzle assembled from disparate pieces selected by the caprice of memory — themes, objects, catchphrases, legendary topoi. Each fragment-text can be read separately, but the whole only becomes visible by assembling piece after piece. Ernu proposes no key of interpretation, no moral or value judgement — he induces a familiarisation. This is exactly what Stăncescu does with the warm room and the acerola cherries: he does not explain, does not persuade — he familiarises.
[Cultural note 7 — Vasile Ernu and Born in the USSR]Vasile Ernu (b. 1971) is a Romanian writer of Bessarabian origin who grew up in Soviet Odessa. His debut, Născut în URSS (Polirom, 2006, now in its fifth edition), won the Romanian Writers' Union prize for debut and has been translated into Russian, Italian, Spanish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Polish, and Georgian. The book is a hybrid: part memoir, part cultural essay, part sociological field report on the texture of Soviet daily life. Its method — fragmentary, non-judgmental, deeply attentive to the material culture of ordinary existence — has no precise equivalent in British non-fiction, though it shares a sensibility with Geoff Dyer's documentary essays or certain sections of Ryszard Kapuściński's reportage. Ernu is also a co-founder of CriticAtac.ro, Romania's principal platform for left-wing public intellectual debate.
Cristian Teodorescu articulated the province. In Medgidia, orașul de apoi — Medgidia, the Afterlife City — a writer deliberately chooses a marginalised provincial town and treats it as serious literary material, observing the everyday moments, friendships, and small conflicts that make a community vivid and complex. Teodorescu demonstrated, a decade before Stăncescu's text, that the question "where are the people who say there's nothing to do?" has a legitimate literary precedent. That the province deserves to be looked at directly — not with pity, not with nostalgia, but with the same attentiveness one would give to any place worth understanding.
Dan Lungu ironised inertia. A sociologist and writer simultaneously, Lungu constructed in Raiul găinilor — The Chicken Paradise — a small universe contained within the limits of a single street, a neighbourhood in which gossip, dark humour, envy, and the characteristically Romanian attitude of haz de necaz — finding comedy in misfortune — govern daily life. The book reached the French bestseller lists and was declared book of the month in Germany in 2007. The small world of a Romanian provincial town proved universal precisely through its unembellished specificity. Lungu neither idealises nor condemns — he observes, with sociological patience and an exact sense of comedy.
[Cultural note 8 — Haz de necaz]Haz de necaz — literally "fun from trouble" — is a phrase that does not translate precisely into English. It describes the distinctively Romanian cultural reflex of finding irony, dark humour, or sardonic amusement in adversity rather than expressing direct complaint. It is related to, but not identical with, gallows humour; it carries less bitterness and more philosophical resignation. In British terms, it resembles the capacity to laugh at the rain, though with a sharper edge. Lungu's fiction is built on this sensibility.*
Lavinia Braniște photographed the interior void. Interior zero — Interior Zero — is a novel that uncovers a drama concealed beneath the surface layer of everyday banality: the absence of purpose, the corrosive need for external validation, the sensation that life is pressing down and one is barely managing to stay upright. This is Stăncescu's armchair before the invitation arrives — not a comfortable armchair, but one in which you no longer know what else to do with yourself.
These four writers did not write about Botoșani. But they wrote about the same phenomenon — Romanian provincial daily life, the void that fills or does not fill, the inertia that breaks or does not break — from angles different from Collins or Clear, but with equivalent seriousness.
Neill maintained a habit — that of voluntary choice as the precondition for genuine engagement. Collins measured a flywheel — the cumulative logic of initiatives that consolidate through momentum rather than sudden transformation. Clear mapped a mechanism — the cue-craving-response-reward loop that converts isolated acts into identity. Sullivan observed a shift in attention — the transition from passive consumption to active presence.
Eight windows. The same thing seen through each.
Stăncescu may or may not have read any of them. It does not matter. He lived what they described, on a Friday evening in Botoșani, at 18:45. Theory and practice meet sometimes without announcing the appointment.
What unites all eight perspectives is a shared conviction, articulated differently by each: change does not precede action. It follows it. You do not wait for the right conditions to leave the house — you leave the house, and the conditions become visible. This is perhaps the most counterintuitive idea in all eight frameworks. And perhaps the most readily verifiable. It costs one Friday evening.
The Geography of Luck — Or: Why Those Who Find Things Do Not Have a Different Town
Constantin Noica, the Romanian philosopher, wrote about rostire — a concept with no precise English equivalent, occupying the territory between "naming," "articulation," and "bringing something into fuller existence through language."
[Cultural note 9 — Constantin Noica and rostire]Noica (1909–1987) is one of the most significant Romanian philosophers of the twentieth century, almost entirely unknown in the Anglophone world outside specialist circles. His work concerned the ontology of language — particularly the idea that existence achieves its fullest form only when properly named and integrated into a framework of understanding. He spent years under house arrest during the Communist period, which lent his insistence on the power of language a dimension his Western contemporaries rarely needed to consider. His concept of rostire is roughly adjacent to Heidegger's notion of language as the "house of Being," though developed independently and with a distinctly Romanian inflection. Noica's relationship to Communist authority is complex and contested in Romanian intellectual history — he collaborated to a degree, was persecuted to a degree, and ran an informal philosophical school in the 1970s and 80s that became a significant formation ground for the generation of Romanian thinkers who came of age under late Communism.
For Noica, a thing achieves its fullest existence only when articulated, named, integrated into a language of understanding. A town that is not rostit — not observed, narrated, given form by its own inhabitants — remains, in significant measure, inexistent to those inhabitants themselves. The town does not simply exist and await description. It comes into fuller existence through the act of being described with care.
There is a Romanian literary tradition that has taken this problem seriously. The anthology Cartea orașelor — The Book of Cities — sets sixteen Romanian towns alongside each other, each observed, inhabited, and narrated by a different contemporary writer. Not monuments to national pride — real cities, with their abandoned cinemas, their peeling paint, their lakesides over which the wind raises only a shiver of movement. Angelo Mitchievici writes about Eforie Sud as a place where "traces of another time are visible throughout the whole city. Part of it has fallen into decrepitude, died, fossilised." It is not a reproach. It is a gaze that takes the place seriously without tidying it up for visitors.
Teodorescu chose Medgidia. Ernu chose Chișinău from memory. Mitchievici chose Eforie Sud. Each decided that their small town merited a sustained, undefended gaze — without the anaesthetic of comparison with larger cities.
Stăncescu chose Botoșani. And wrote a few hundred words that do the same thing, at smaller scale, that this entire tradition does: they bring a place into fuller existence through attention that asks no permission.
There is a geography of luck — an idea I have explored previously at petrucojocaru.ro — that has nothing to do with latitude or longitude. The people who find interesting things in their small towns do not inhabit a different town. They inhabit it differently. Their attention functions as an inverted filter: rather than confirming absence, it seeks presence.
Botoșani today has a café where people meditate together. It has a public speaking club. It has a Sunday market with supplements, vitamins, and presenters who speak about cherries as though something significant depends on the telling. It has, in other words, exactly what any other Romanian provincial town has — a mixture of limitation and possibility, emptiness and function, loss and persistence.
The difference is not in the offering. It is in the looking.
Counterarguments and Limits — Where Individual Responsibility Ends
I should be honest about the edges of this argument.
It is easy — sometimes self-serving — to transform a structural problem into a problem of attitude. "Go out" is good advice, but it is not an urban plan. Botoșani has real, intractable difficulties: crumbling infrastructure, the accelerating emigration of its young adults, a healthcare system under chronic pressure, and a public administration that is digitally modernised on paper and manually operated in practice. None of these are resolved by Toastmasters.
There is also a selection problem in Stăncescu's text — and, by extension, in this essay. The people who respond to invitations and attend Flying Markets are, by definition, those who already possess a certain availability. Those who do not leave the house do not all do so from inertia or learned helplessness. Some are exhausted from working two jobs. Others have young children and no one to leave them with. Others live with social anxiety or depression — genuine medical conditions for which going out is a real effort rather than a simple choice.
The armchair is not always inertia. Sometimes it is recovery.
This must be held in mind when reading a text like Stăncescu's — and like this one. Enthusiasm is not itself a problem. Enthusiasm without context becomes moralism.
Personal Reflection — What It Means to Narrate a Small Town
I live in Botoșani and have been writing about Botoșani for several years. Not from nostalgia, not from reflexive local loyalty. From a conviction — tested and retested — that a place changes more readily through narration than through infrastructure. Not because narration substitutes for the motorway or the hospital. But because narration shapes how people inhabit a place, and that shaping has real consequences for what gets built, maintained, and used.
The lift in my building is mostly silent between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon. The flats around mine, roughly forty per cent of them, stand dark and closed. These are facts I know the way you know the weather — not from statistics, but from daily proximity.
And still: across the park, the AquaPark is open. The theatre has a new auditorium. The boulevard terraces fill on warm evenings. Irina Ghilian is probably preparing a room somewhere for next Friday.
Eminescu, Enescu, Grigorescu — three figures considered foundational to Romanian cultural life — were born in this county. I do not raise them as arguments for pride; that would be a tired gesture. I raise them as evidence that the terrain has, at particular historical moments, produced people with an exceptional capacity for attending to the world. Something in the structure of this place — the slow rhythm of the Moldavian plain, perhaps, or the long absence of spectacular distraction — seems to have favoured a particular quality of seeing.
That quality has not disappeared. It has, in many cases, emigrated. What remains still carries its trace.
The task of those who write about small places is not to glorify them. It is to make visible what exists and passes unnoticed. Stăncescu did this with a warm room, exhibits arranged by category, and a woman named Irina Ghilian who received visitors with an open manner. He did it without intending to do anything significant. That is precisely why it worked.
Open Conclusion — The Room Is Still Warm Next Friday
I do not know whether Stăncescu returned to the Flying Market. I do not know whether he bought anything, or whether he remained only an observer. I do not know whether his text persuaded anyone to leave their armchair.
I know that he wrote it. And that this writing — modest, concrete, unheroic — belongs to what Cory Doctorow might call an unenshittified space: a place where a person recounts what they experienced, without a recommendation algorithm, without an engagement metric, without a sponsor.
Ernu would say he excavated a texture of daily life that would otherwise have vanished without record. Teodorescu would say the province merits a sustained gaze. Lungu would raise an eyebrow and ask, with irony and warmth: did you genuinely not know? Braniște would say that the interior void does not dissolve on its own — you must walk out of it, with your feet, through a door.
Neill would say he chose freely. Collins would say the flywheel received a push. Clear would say the loop was activated. Sullivan would say attention shifted.
I say the room is still warm next Friday. The question is whether you will go.
Bibliography and Sources
Stăncescu, Cristian. Original text published at cojocarupetru.info/blog/despre-botosani.html
Cojocaru, Petru. "The Geography of Luck." petrucojocaru.ro/techno-feudalism/geografia-norocului
Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Bodley Head, 2023.
Doctorow, Cory. "The 'Enshittification' of TikTok." Wired, January 2023.
Clear, James. Atomic Habits. Avery, 2018.
Collins, Jim. Good to Great. HarperBusiness, 2001.
Seligman, Martin. Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death. W.H. Freeman, 1975.
Deci, Edward L.; Ryan, Richard M. Self-Determination and Intrinsic Motivation in Human Behavior. Plenum Press, 1985.
Neill, A.S. Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood. St. Martin's Press, 1960.
Noica, Constantin. Rostirea filozofică românească [Romanian Philosophical Articulation]. Ed. Științifică, 1970. (Untranslated into English; secondary literature in English includes Michael Finkenthal's The Fence and the Neighbour, 2000.)
Ernu, Vasile. Născut în URSS [Born in the USSR]. Polirom, 2006 (5th ed., 2024). (Translated into Russian, Italian, Spanish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Polish, Georgian; no English translation currently available.)
Teodorescu, Cristian. Medgidia, orașul de apoi [Medgidia, the Afterlife City]. Humanitas, 2011. (Untranslated into English.)
Lungu, Dan. Raiul găinilor [The Chicken Paradise]. Polirom, 2004. (Translated into French as Le Paradis des poules*, Jacqueline Chambon, 2005; German edition Das Hühnerparadies declared book of the month in Germany, December 2007. No English translation currently available.)*
Braniște, Lavinia. Interior zero. Vellant, 2016. (Translated into German and Polish; no English translation currently available.)
Cartea orașelor [The Book of Cities]. Anthology. Polirom, colecția "821.135.1 — Scriitori români contemporani." (Untranslated into English.)
Local sources consulted: stiri.botosani.ro / botosaninews.ro / botosaneanul.ro / monitorulbt.ro
Ten Questions Worth Keeping, and Considered Answers
1. Why is "there's nothing to do here" a statement about the speaker rather than the town?
Because the town does not change according to who observes it — but its visibility does. The phrase functions as a mirror, reflecting the attention of the person who utters it rather than the reality of the place. Someone who does not search confirms that nothing exists; someone who searches — and finds Toastmasters, a meditation café, a Flying Market — refutes the same phrase without constructing a counterargument.
2. What does technofeudalism have to do with going for a walk in Botoșani?
The connection is attention. The major digital platforms are optimised to absorb as much time and attention as possible, redirecting it away from the local, physical, and unoptimised towards a virtual space administered by others. Going out and attending a local event is, structurally, an act of attention redistribution — with economic and civic consequences, even when not perceived as such.
3. What did Stăncescu discover beyond the acerola cherries?
He discovered that open attention functions differently from defended attention. He entered the room without large expectations and left with the sensation that he did not want it to end. This is not a reaction to a product — it is a reaction to a quality of presence that the armchair at home cannot reliably produce.
4. How does Collins's flywheel operate in a civic context?
The first event you attend costs the most — the energy to overcome inertia, the uncertainty of an unfamiliar space, the risk of disappointment. If the experience rewards the effort, the second event costs less. The tenth becomes routine. The routine becomes identity. And identity reshapes behaviour more profoundly than any resolution.
5. Why does voluntary choice (Neill) matter more than frequency of participation?
Because intrinsic motivation produces a qualitatively different form of engagement than extrinsic motivation. A person who goes somewhere because they want to produces a richer memory, a more durable connection, and a higher probability of returning than someone who goes from obligation. The quality of presence matters more than the quantity of attendances.
6. What is the difference between invested and consumed attention (Sullivan)?
Consumed attention exhausts itself without leaving significant cognitive traces — scrolling, passive viewing, purposeless browsing. Invested attention produces new connections, unexpected associations, durable long-term memory. Stăncescu crosses from the first to the second at the moment he writes "I became more attentive" — a transition he formulates with precision, without Sullivan's vocabulary.
7. Where does individual responsibility end and structural responsibility begin?
Individual responsibility covers what is within one's control: whether you go out, whether you search, whether you participate. Structural responsibility covers what falls outside individual agency: infrastructure, emigration, administrative resources, economic conditions. The two do not exclude each other. The error is assuming one substitutes for the other — that sufficient positive thinking compensates for an underfunded hospital, or that good infrastructure makes personal initiative unnecessary.
8. What does it mean to "articulate" a town in Noica's sense, and does a Romanian tradition of this gesture exist?
For Noica, things achieve their fullest existence only when named and integrated into a language of understanding. A town not narrated by its own inhabitants — with concrete detail, with genuine observation — remains an abstraction, a backdrop. Stăncescu's text articulates Botoșani: not praising it, not defending it — making it present, with its warm room, with Irina Ghilian, with exhibits arranged by category. There is an entire Romanian literary tradition of this gesture: Teodorescu with Medgidia, Ernu with Soviet-era Chișinău from memory, Lungu with his small, vivid neighbourhood, Braniște with the interior void. Cartea orașelor is evidence that this is not a singular practice but an ongoing collective literary project.
9. Can a short text have civic consequences?
Yes, but indirectly and over time. A short text recounting a real experience can trigger recognition in a reader — "I could do that too" — and reduce the perceived cost of a first action. It guarantees nothing. But narrative shapes perception, and perception influences behaviour. The narrative infrastructure of a place is as real as its road infrastructure, and sometimes easier to build.
10. What remains after the page is closed?
A question. The next time you say "there's nothing to do here," are you certain you have gone out to verify it? Not once, not with large expectations — simply: have you gone out, looked, and stayed long enough to become more attentive?
Author's Note
How the Idea Evolved
This essay began with a few hundred words written by Cristian Stăncescu — a diary entry, not a manifesto. The task I set myself was to take that text and treat it for what it actually is: a case study for psychological, civic, and economic mechanisms that far exceed their local context.
The initial structure evolved. I wanted, at different moments, to write a purely theoretical text and a purely narrative one. I arrived at a hybrid — an essay in Montaigne's sense: an attempt, not a demonstration. Each section grew from the previous, not from a rigid plan.
Tensions and Limits
The first tension is the risk of romanticising provincial life. I attempted to contain this in Section XI, where I acknowledge explicitly that the armchair is not always inertia and that structural problems do not dissolve through attitude. Whether I achieved sufficient equilibrium is for the reader to judge.
The second tension concerns using large intellectual frameworks — both Western (Varoufakis, Clear, Collins) and Romanian (Ernu, Teodorescu, Lungu, Braniște) — to validate a small experience. There is a risk of inflation, something like citing eight philosophers to explain why it is good to drink water. I tried to make the connections useful rather than decorative. The first version of this essay lacked the Romanian authors entirely — a failure of cultural anchorage that was subsequently corrected. A text about Botoșani that convoked only Western voices to legitimate itself was, in itself, a form of inverted intellectual provincialism: the assumption that Varoufakis validates better than Teodorescu. He does not validate better. He validates differently. Both are necessary.
The third tension is the most fundamental: my perspective is not neutral. I am from Botoșani, I write about Botoșani, and I have an interest in presenting it as a living place. This is an acknowledged bias, not an eliminated one.
Admitted Subjective Errors
I have probably idealised the quality of flow that Stăncescu describes. We do not know what happened afterward — whether he returned, whether he bought anything, whether the text changed anything in his behaviour or his readers'. I treat a Friday evening text as evidence — which it is, but fragile evidence. Initially I put Sunday evening because that is the heavy moment — and for anyone who has played the strategy game StarCraft with its iconic expression 'It is a good day to die! But the day (and the game) is far from over' understands... those legendary experiences. But I kept Friday because that is when the action took place according to Stăncescu's original text and the note at first publication that read: 'The action was yesterday, Friday!'
A brief note on the StarCraft reference, should you want to use it as a cultural note in the essay or elsewhere:
[Cultural note — StarCraft and "It is a good day to die"]
StarCraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 1998) is a real-time strategy game that became a defining cultural phenomenon, particularly in South Korea where it developed a professional competitive scene before esports was a recognised category. The phrase "It is a good day to die" is associated with the Zerg faction's warrior ethos — the acceptance of sacrifice as tactical necessity within a larger battle still unfolding. For a generation of Romanian players who came of age in the late 1990s and 2000s, StarCraft was not merely a game but a shared reference landscape. The phrase carries the specific weight of choosing a difficult moment deliberately — Sunday evening, the end of the week, the hour before rest — because difficulty is also a form of seriousness.
I also used the word "resistance" to describe leaving the house in relation to digital platforms. It is a strong word for a small gesture. I left it deliberately, but I acknowledge the rhetorical inflation.
The Aesopic Arguments Explained
[Cultural note 10 — Șopârlă as Aesopic device]The Romanian word șopârlă literally means "lizard." In Romanian literary and journalistic tradition it refers to an argument embedded inside apparently neutral description — a technique of indirect speech developed partly under Communist censorship, when writers learned to say one thing openly while meaning something else for attentive readers. The tradition draws on Aesop's fables, in which animals enact moral arguments too dangerous to state directly. The post-Communist generation inherited the rhetorical habit even after the original necessity disappeared. A șopârlă is present in a text for readers who notice it; invisible to those who do not. In this essay's context, the term is used to name arguments that are present but not explicitly announced.
Aesopic argument 1 — the section on Varoufakis and technofeudalism, applied to a Friday evening walk. The embedded argument: leaving the house is a political act, not merely a personal one. I did not state this explicitly, to avoid transforming a simple gesture into a declaration of principle — but the connection is there, for those who want it.
Aesopic argument 2 — the reference to Noica and rostire. The implicit argument: texts written by a town's inhabitants about their town are a form of civic construction, not merely personal journalling. To write about Botoșani is to bring it into fuller existence — but saying so directly would sound grandiose.
Aesopic argument 3 — the armchair as "factory" in the technofeudal context. The term appears once, as metaphor. But the implication is serious: passive consumption of digital content is a form of unpaid labour for the major platforms. Stăncescu, by going out, declines that labour for one evening.
Aesopic argument 4 — the absence of Romanian authors from the essay's first version, followed by their explicit reintegration and the acknowledgement of that error in the author's note. The buried argument: the Romanian provincial intellectual who seeks validation exclusively through Western voices reproduces, without realising it, the same reflex of local devaluation that he criticises in the person watching television on the armchair. To summon Ernu and Teodorescu alongside Collins and Clear is not a gesture of diplomatic balance — it is a correction of intellectual honesty.
Rhetorical Tools Used
Implicit anaphora — "Neill maintained... Collins measured... Clear mapped... Sullivan observed... Ernu excavated... Teodorescu articulated..." — a cumulative rhythm that prepares synthesis without announcing it.
The rhetoric of inversion — "Change does not precede leaving the house — it follows it." The idea that the effect precedes the perceived cause is counterintuitive and more memorable in this formulation than in a straightforward claim.
Concrete before abstract — in each section, I began with a concrete detail (the warm room, the acerola cherries, the time 18:45, the silent lift) before ascending to generalisation. This is a stylistic discipline, not an accident.
The rhetorical question as invitation — rather than concluding, I preferred to leave open questions at the close of several sections. This is a technique borrowed from the essayistic tradition rather than the argumentative one; it returns agency to the reader.
A Call to Action — What You Can Do Tomorrow
1. Go out without a precise destination. Choose a direction, not an endpoint. Walk into the first café that seems interesting. Stay as long as you like. Do not set expectations.
2. Look for a local event you have not yet noticed. Check the social media pages of your local council, library, cultural centre, or community hall. Not necessarily to attend — but to see what exists in your town that you have not yet placed on your map.
3. Talk to someone you do not know. Not a networking pitch — a plain conversation. The person selling vegetables at the market knows things about your town that Google does not index.
4. Write something about what you found. It does not need to be public. It does not need to be long. A paragraph, a note, a message to a friend. The act of narrating an experience consolidates it and makes it available to others.
5. Repeat next month. Not next week — that may be too much. Next month. The flywheel needs time to build momentum.
What to Avoid
Do not seek validation before going. If you wait to be convinced it is worth it, you will not go. Worth is verified after the fact, not before.
Do not compare your town to larger ones. "In London there's X, in Berlin there's Y" is irrelevant to the decision you face now, in the place where you are. Towns are not won or lost in comparison — they are inhabited or not inhabited.
Do not arrive with an agenda of disappointment. Defended attention produces exactly what it fears. If you go ready to confirm "there's nothing here," you will find nothing.
Do not turn a good evening into a mission. Stăncescu did not leave the Flying Market with a civic project. He left with a good impression and wrote it down. That is sufficient.
Do not wait for a perfect ecosystem. Civic ecosystems are imperfect by definition — heterogeneous, uncoordinated, sometimes disappointing. Perfection is the wrong criterion. Authentic presence is the right one.
Methodological Note
This essay is, in the first instance, a work of literary non-fiction, not an academic study. References to Varoufakis, Clear, Collins, Neill, Sullivan, Ernu, Teodorescu, Lungu, and Braniște are used as interpretive lenses, not as citations in the strict scholarly sense. The connections proposed are plausible, not demonstrated.
The text by Cristian Stăncescu has been translated from Romanian into British English by the author of this essay. The translation aims for fidelity to register and tone rather than literal precision; some adjustments were made where direct translation would have produced awkwardness in English.
Local sources (stiri.botosani.ro, botosaninews.ro, botosaneanul.ro, monitorulbt.ro) are not cited directly in the text but informed the general context of civic life in Botoșani municipality.
The reference to ”The Geography of Luck” links to an earlier essay by the same author, with which this text is in dialogue.
All psychological observations (Seligman, Deci and Ryan) are accessible summaries of verifiable academic theories, not original interpretations by the author.
[Cultural note 11 — On publishing this essay in English]This text was written for cojocarupetru.ro, a Romanian-language editorial site whose primary audience is Romanian. Publishing an English-language version is a deliberate choice: to make an argument about provincial Romanian life available to international readers who may recognise their own towns in Botoșani. The argument is not specific to Romania. It applies to any post-industrial provincial town in any country where digital platforms have accelerated the withdrawal of attention from local civic life — where the lift is silent during the day, where the percentage of unoccupied flats rises year by year, where a warm room on a Friday evening is both entirely ordinary and, for someone who walks into it, exactly what was needed. The names change. The armchair does not.