Do Yourself a Favor and Go Find a ‘Third Place’

To me, the ideal hangout has a few components: spontaneity, purposelessness, and a willingness among all parties involved to go wherever the conversation leads them.

The term, which was coined by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg in the 1980s, essentially refers to a physical location other than work or home where there’s little to no financial barrier to entry and where conversation is the primary activity. The historical examples that Oldenburg cites in his book The Great Good Place include French cafés, German A... See more

Ultimately, she said, a world made up of atomized, physically isolated people is a world without a true shared reality—which is a recipe for civic disengagement, misinformation, and perhaps even political extremism.

what’s happened during the COVID era as the continuation of a trend that began in the middle of the 20th century. When city dwellers were largely confined to crowded tenements, they were forced out into the world, which often meant hanging out with strangers in taverns. But as time went on, leisure became privatized. Living conditions improved; peo... See more

They had no reason to expect we would share common ground. But we managed to have a perfect, no-stakes interaction after two years in which many people haven’t taken a chance on anybody.

The ersatz third place is a consequence of a culture obsessed with productivity and status, whose subjects might have decent incomes but little recreational time.

Unstructured quality time with friends is replaced with a scheduled series of continuous catch-ups. Subsequently, these overscheduled people lack meaningful ties with their neighbors, and so they patronize spaces to make those connections even less frequently.

After all, cities are where people are supposed to have serendipitous encounters—as the writer and critic Jane Jacobs said, “The metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.” By comparison, the cliché goes, people become more atomized the farther they move from urban environments into the clinical, safe,... See more

Do Yourself a Favor and Go Find a ‘Third Place’

We need physical spaces for serendipitous, productivity-free conversation.