SFGATE: Here's the story behind San Francisco 'listening stations' you see on busy city streets
Nearly five years ago, Traci Ruble had an idea. It started in her sleep.
“I had a dream of putting a therapist on the sidewalk with their hands up going, ‘What is happening here? What is going on in our culture?’” she said by phone recently.
Ruble, a psychotherapist, witnessed the alienation of postmodern existence firsthand. Before receiving a masters in counseling psychology, she worked in publishing and tech. Back then, “you were expected to be a machine not a person,” she said.
She noticed the people around her were fundamentally lonely — alienated from their colleagues, neighbors and personal drives and desires. What they lacked was connection, she hypothesized, but with demanding jobs and busy lives at home, where could they find it?
Ruble wanted to bring it to them in the lowest-stakes, most-traversed environment: a city sidewalk.