I had three chairs in my house;
one for solitude,
two for friendship,
three for society.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Look at this shit.
Emerson Street, Palo Alto. A driveway. And in that driveway, a lineup of chairs that looks like someone staged an intervention for ergonomic seating and nobody showed up.
They’re just standing there, office chairs, stools, the forgotten furniture of knowledge workers who’ve moved on to standing desks or yoga balls or whatever the hell comes after you’ve optimized your lumbar support into oblivion. No “Free” sign. No prices scrawled on cardboard. No explanation whatsoever. Just chairs. Waiting.
This is pure Ionesco. This is The Chairs relocated from Paris to Silicon Valley, where the absurdist playwright’s fever dream becomes someone’s actual Tuesday afternoon. In his play, an old couple spends ninety minutes arranging chairs for invisible guests who never arrive, building toward a message that’s never delivered. Here on Emerson Street, we’ve skipped straight to the punchline: the chairs themselves, arranged with mysterious purpose, tagged with numbers that signify nothing, existing in a void between utility and disposal.
Who did this? Some engineer who finally cracked? A startup that pivoted into oblivion? Did they sit in these chairs while building the future, coding the disruption, only to discover the future didn’t need their asses in seats anymore?
The photograph captures it perfectly, this quiet surrealism that Palo Alto has mastered. The absurd isn’t performed here; it’s ambient. It’s in the air like eucalyptus pollen. Ionesco would recognize this immediately: objects multiplying beyond reason, systems that organize chaos into more chaos, the creeping sensation that meaning has evacuated the premises but left the furniture behind.
Thoreau said he had three chairs: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
These people need a dozen just to process the void.
That’s not philosophy. That’s Palo Alto.