The Cafeteria Conspiricy

The strangest thing happens to me when I visit the cafeteria at work. People will come in from out of town and we’ll go to lunch with about 10 people. But there’s nowhere that we can find for 10 people to sit together. There will be a number of seats in a row and then one or two people there to break it up.

It’s like everyone is intentionally spreading out across the room as far as they can. It feels like there’s a conspiracy to keep us from finding a table.

What’s Really Going On

It’s not a conspiracy, of course. It’s just what people do. Quietly, unconsciously, we optimize for personal space. We sit in the middle of a table when there’s no one else there. We leave a buffer seat. We don’t want to crowd other people and want to have enough space for ourselves.

Once I noticed it in the cafeteria, I started seeing it everywhere.

In elevators, for example, one person stands in the center. A second enters, and the first shifts to the side. A third enters, and suddenly we’re arranged in a triangle. A fourth, and it becomes a diamond. No one speaks. No one plans. But we all know the dance.

Or in the park, a new bunch of people come in with their picnic blanket, looking for some open space. Everyone already there is spaced out, each group trying to own as much territory as possible.

The Same Pattern Repeats: Voronoi Diagrams

This repeated pattern of space usage is called a Voronoi diagram. A Voronoi diagram divides space into regions around each point—each region representing the area closest to that point and no other. It’s a way to map territory. Influence. Personal bubbles. You can see what these lines would look like in the park example at the top of this post.

The concept was formalized in the early 1900s by a Ukrainian mathematician named Georgy Voronoy. Voronoy was working on abstract geometry and number theory. But the idea goes back much further. As it turns out, the Voronoi distribution can be found in natural patterns all around us—from the way seeds are spaced in a sunflower, to the way crystals grow and divide space at the atomic level, to the layout of basalt columns in volcanic rock.

Voronoi diagrams show up everywhere once you know how to look for them:¹

• Geography: Mapping the area closest to each city, or showing which water well serves which part of a village.

• Urban Planning: Figuring out the best locations for hospitals or fire stations so everyone’s covered as efficiently as possible.

• Nature: Even honeycombs follow a Voronoi-like logic—hexagonal cells formed to maximize strength and storage while minimizing wasted space.²

The Conspiracy of Optimization

And yet… in a way, it is a kind of conspiracy—just not the kind with secret meetings or whispered plans. It’s more like an unconscious coordination, as if everyone in the cafeteria is part of a single organism, moving in quiet agreement to distribute itself evenly and leave the least amount of usable space behind. Without speaking, without even noticing, each person contributes to a collective pattern that makes it almost impossible for a large group to gather. It’s a kind of social physics—elegant, efficient, and maddening when all you want is ten chairs together.

Notes

1. For more examples of Voronoi diagrams, check out Voronoi diagram in architecture ↩︎
2. I used to think that bees would make honeycombs in a hexagonal shape as some sort of instinct, like a spider weaves a web. As it turns out, bees just build cylindrical wax tubes—stacked side by side like drinking straws. The heat from their bodies softens the wax, and the natural tension between each tube pulls the structure into a perfect hexagonal grid. It’s not deliberate. It’s physics. The shape emerges not because bees know geometry, but because the world, when left alone, tends to optimize. It’s not quite a Voronoi diagram—those divide space based on proximity to seed points—but it springs from a similar instinct: do more with less, without wasting space. ↩︎