Typing Alone And Bowling Together
Yes, we're screwing up our traditional Third Places by working in them. But maybe if we get together around our hobbies once again, we'll find a new path to a rewarding Third Place experience.
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My Substack post on Monday about the seeming demise of Third Places evoked an unusual amount of response from readers – maybe because everybody struggles with balancing the twin stresses of work and home and finding some way to escape those every now and then.
The responses ranged from a defense of breweries are a true third place (from an Oregonian, of course) to the question of whether we have entered a new generation of “bowling alone”.
The most interesting comment came from Rod Stevens, who lives on bucolic Bainbridge Island near Seattle. Here’s what he wrote:
People still go to coffee shops because they are social places, but people are not interacting with those around them. In the office, they see people face-to-face in meetings and over the water cooler. At home, it’s just them, their dog, and the screen. They’re going out to say hello to the barista, sit down with other people just a few feet away, and look across the room at the pretty woman or handsome guy. Better a neighborhood place for this than strict isolation.
This got me thinking. I’ve moved around a lot in my career (Upstate NY to DC to LA/Ventura, back to DC, to San Diego, to Houston, and back to San Diego) and I’ve gone through long periods of loneliness as a result. And I think Rod is right: for me, during those times, working in a coffee shop or having dinner alone was a break from the loneliness, even if I wasn’t having a Ray Oldenburg-type coffee klatch with my friends (because I didn’t have any friends). It was therapeutic to get out of the house.
Typing Alone In Public
This type of experience is especially important for people who live alone – and that’s a lot of people. Almost a third of all American households now consist of a single person living alone. That’s more than double the number in 1960 and quadruple the number in 1940, when many single people still lived in boarding houses and similar situations. (Boarding houses actually served as Third Places, bringing people together in a home-like setting.)
Still, if you’re working on your laptop with your earbuds on in a coffee shop, even if you’re saying hello to the barista and eyeing an attractive person across the room, that’s still not really a Third Place experience, is it? I guess what I mean to say is, it is and it isn’t.
And I do think my friend Michael Milch, who’s the mayor of a small city in Oregon, was right when he kind of asked me to distinguish between coffee shops, where people work a lot, and brew pubs, where they often don’t:
On Saturday my wife and I visited a brewpub in Canby, Oregon, that was an adaptive reuse of the former city library. I saw a lot of laughter and conversation but no laptops (although it might look different on a weekday).
Maybe people drink coffee to work and they drink beer to relax. Although I’ve been guilty many times of drinking beer at a beer with my laptop open (especially at airports).
I think one of the fundamental Third Place questions these days is who do you hang out with? Because in writing Bowling Alone a quarter-century ago, Robert Putnam was right that so many of our traditional ways of connecting socially were going away.
If anything, it seems like this trend has only grown during and after COVID.
Many folks, including both myself and my wife, created social circles that revolved around our kids – but the percentage of American households with children at home has declined from more than half to less than a third in the last 50 years.
So How Do You Build A Social Circle These Days?
And, of course, lots of other folks have traditionally built social circles revolving around work and “the office”. But the office is going away. That’s why so many folks are sitting in coffee shops on their laptops. And because they are all working individually – or with a remote work community – they’re not interacting with each other and getting to know each other the way folks in an office do.
So maybe the new Third Place is what my Substack pal Diana Lind has called “The Hobby Economy”. As Diana has put it:
We’ve been assuming the reason that people like … experiential stores is because they are exciting enough to compete with online entertainment and distractions.
But I think they are evidence of something else bubbling up:
