The hidden barrier to finding your Third Place and how to overcome it
(Author’s note: This essay has been a work-in-progress December 2023-March 2024; future edits likely forthcoming. In late 2023, I started writing essays about some of the third places I’ve belonged to over the years, to glean the lessons about how to recreate that experience. The essays aren’t online, because I wrote them as part of the curriculum for Platonic Action Lab™, a group program I run for adults who want to cultivate hyperlocal and hyperspecific friendships and community. That curriculum may later turn into a book which is why the essays aren’t online at the moment. You can consider the essay that appears below as your free sample. :)
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🙋🏾 Hiya. I’m back today with another audio blog / mini bloggy podcast episode. It’s about 25 minutes, perfect to listen to while you’re washing dishes or folding laundry. Pop in your earbuds and tap the Play button to listen to it, or scroll down if you prefer to read it.
Cheers,
Kat
Kat Vellos, author of We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships
Transcript
Over the last four years as I’ve coached people through the process of cultivating friendship in adulthood, and especially while developing my group program, Platonic Action Lab™, I realized that I’ve had access to an understated and underestimated form of wealth that many people have never known: third places.
In my life, I feel really lucky and privileged because I’ve not only had access to, but fully belonged to, multiple third places that were accessible via an easy walk or less than 10-minute drive. These were places where I knew several things for certain:
I was welcome there, and would likely be greeted by name.
I would see at least one person, and usually multiple people, that I knew by name and who I felt some level of affection for.
I could stay for as long as I wanted.
While a purchase would be appreciated, and almost always occurred, it wasn’t a requirement for my presence.
It would be easy to immediately enter a conversation: either one already in progress or one that I could initiate without hesitation.
If I had an idea or invitation to share, there would be a positive and willing audience there to encourage it and/or participate in it.
I’d likely share smiles and laughter with the people around me, but if I was having a crappy day, I’d also be able to get a hug and could talk about my feelings.
(You can use the list above to evaluate the third places in your life too.)
Decades before I even knew that the term “third place” existed, I was experiencing it and benefitting immensely from it. The term was coined by urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg in 1989 in his book The Great Good Place, which I lately encouraged my Connection Club members and PAL students to read. I’ve combined the many definitions and descriptors that Oldenburg provides in his book into one definition here:
“The third place is a generic designation for a great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work. …They are neutral, leveling, easily accessible, with an unpretentious low-profile and a playful mood, where the structure is loose, laughter is frequent, and a collection of regulars make the space come alive through the primary activity, which is conversation.”
— Ray Oldenburg
(Note: While this isn’t a direct quote, I’ve placed this text in quotation marks because the words are Oldenburg’s and he spread them throughout the book, which itself serves as a 334-page definition of the third place.)
Frequently third places are at coffeeshops, bars, low-key restaurants/cafes/diners, bookstores, barbershops, hair salons, and bodegas. But third places can be free places too, like parks, plazas, libraries, skateparks, playgrounds, and sport fields.
But! Just because an establishment is one of those types of businesses doesn’t automatically make it a third place. For example: When I purchase a $7.50 oatmilk latte at an excessively minimalistic and sterile coffeeshop where identically modern and uncomfortable metal chairs practically shove me out of themselves, and no one is talking because they all have earbuds in while they tap away on laptops or scroll on phones, and where I worry that making conversation or laughing half a decibel too loudly would make every patron and staffperson shoot daggers of side-eye in my direction, I am NOT in a third place. I’m on the set of an attractive Instagram photo, but this setting lacks the spirit and soul of a third place.
An ode to Third Places I have known and loved
In college and my early 20s, I had two third places.
Backstreets Coffeehouse and Bar, where I became a Regular in my junior year. After graduation, I cemented my Regular status by hosting a twice-monthly poetry reading there for four years with countless visits sprinkled in between.
My other third place was a variety store in town that had everything from rental DVDs, t-shirts, cards, posters, and most importantly, friends working behind the counter. Sometimes I just went to hang out and talk, sometimes we held community meetings there. And for one delicious month, it served as the drop-off and communal dinner spot for a vegan cooking circle that six of us participated in.
In my 30s, I had four third places.
Freshy’s was open from early morning til late night and was within walking distance to where I lived, so I could hop in there 7 days a week almost any time of day or evening and find fellow neighbors and staff that I’d become friendly with.
At The Lizard Lounge, I read books on quiet afternoons, had my first astrology chart done, and later hosted a music and trivia night (DJ Kat Attack!).
When I lived in an intentional community with 125+ other weirdos, our third place was called The Point, and it was a small piece of land that dropped off into the Pacific Ocean below. Its only manmade features were a rustic wooden bench and a tree swing that someone made out of ropes and a piece of wood.
The fourth third place was a weekly pizza night hosted at my friend Dave’s house; An ever-rotating and unpredictable cast of attendees meant that there were always new people to meet and make pizzas with, and the possibility of running into someone you already liked. Dave created a Third Place in his kitchen (you can do this too!). If you met someone there that you wanted to hang out with again, all you had to say was, “I’ll see you next Thursday, right here!”
In my 40s, my third place is… well, I haven’t exactly found it yet because a global pandemic kept me in the house for the majority of the time since my 40th birthday. But now that I’m getting back out there, plugging into my next third place is a top priority. The latest contenders are a park I walk to almost every day, and two microbreweries within walking-biking distance. Each of these has the bones of a third place but some of the additional ingredients are still a bit shaky.
I didn’t always have third places, but even in my restless teen years, I sought them out. I spent my middle- and high-school years marooned in suburbia in the classic American way: We had no cell phones, no public transportation, I didn’t have a car, and there weren’t even sidewalks to safely walk on once you stepped away from the main thoroughfares. When I got a bicycle and a friend with a car, we sped towards the closest third places that we suburban teens could find: Dunkin’ Donuts, Taco Bell, Borders Bookstore, and my friends’ houses afterschool before any of our parents came home from work.
In college, my main third places were the small, grassy quad surrounded on all sides by dorms, and the art-n-design studios where me and the other artsy nerds hung out until they kicked us out to lock up for the night. Then I found Backstreets, and it was smooth sailing on the Third Place Seas for the next decade or so. My third places were temples of belonging, self-expression, surprise, and connection. And I naively assumed that no matter where I went to live next, I’d always be able to plug into another one. I also assumed that everyone else had their third places, too. But sadly, this isn’t true, especially for folks living in the United States.
I want this for you, too
During January and February 2024, I coached a few dozen students in Platonic Action Lab to cultivate new and deeper connections in their lives. Third-place awareness and third-place cultivation are two of the many suggested activities I provide for my students because I know firsthand how powerful and life-changing it can be to have a third place in your life. I want every one of my students, followers, and readers (like you!) to believe that you can seek, find, and create this for yourselves too.
One of my recent Platonic Action Lab students was a guy who’s enthusiastic about getting around on his bicycle. For his homework, he set out to do some research about potential third places that were bikeable from where he lived; he considers 4-miles to be a bikeable range. Before starting his research, he guessed that he might find 25 places. His research uncovered 23 parks, 15 coffee shops, 13 breweries and pubs, 4 coworking spaces, 4 community/event venues, and 4 rec centers within 4 miles of his home: 63 places total! Before you start skeptically scoffing that he must live in the trendiest part of Brooklyn or something, I’ll have you know that he lives in a small-to-medium size town with a population of only 100,000 people. All 63 of those establishments aren’t automatically third places (because: see the criteria in the definitions provided above), but they all have the potential to be.
Every person deserves a third place. You deserve a third place. You deserve not just one option, but multiple options for places that could be your third or fourth or fifth place, where you can seek playful comfort and camaraderie whenever the stresses and boredom or work and home become too much. (You deserve these 27 other places too.)
Even our favorite fictional characters on TV have third places. Screenwriters know that characters’ lives would seem too restrictive and boring without third places to break up the monotony and add both familiarity and an element of surprise. I mean, seriously, can you imagine if the plot of a character’s life looked like some of ours?:
“In this episode, Samantha wakes up and puts on yesterday’s sweatpants then walks to the living room where she works hunched over a laptop until the windows are dark. She ate leftover salad for lunch, then warms up a frozen pizza for dinner before retiring back to the couch to scroll Netflix for 47 minutes before declaring to her houseplant that there’s nothing to watch, then huffs off to bed to scroll TikTok until 1:27am and falls asleep with the phone in her hand. Roll credits.”
No! That is not how we write a life story worth tuning into.
Take some inspiration from the shows you watched growing up, or in the case of this bullet list, some of the shows I watched when I was growing up:
The teens on Saved By The Bell had The Max.
Homer has Moes.
Seinfeld and crew had Monk’s Cafe.
The Beverly Hills 90210 “kids” had The Peach Pit.
The gang on Friends had Central Perk.
The core lessons all of these shows taught me were:
A) You’re supposed to have friends
B) You’re supposed to have a reliable hangout (outside of your home) where you regularly spend time with your friends to relax, wisecrack, meet new people, talk about life, and be there for each other.
So when you get to adulthood and realize that you’re somehow supposed to make do without a third place in your neighborhood or in your life, an itty bitty cranky spiky form of loneliness starts scratching away at the corners. Something ain’t right. It’s like a sitcom that doesn’t have a jingle. It just feels …wrong. Like something’s missing. And something is indeed missing: the transitional spaces in your life, between work and home, where you can easily scoop up buckets of connection with friends and friendly strangers.
Where did our third places go?
As I wrote about in my book, We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships, in the 1920s, cities overtook rural areas as the place where most people lived and wanted to live. As the population swelled into a crowded and often festering density, the necessity of third places became immediately obvious, usually in the form of bars and saloons. Although, let’s be real, these places were just for men, and mostly white men at that.
There were also plazas and town squares, and even the bustling street could function as a third place, as the bootleggers during Prohibition figured out, selling swigs from bottles hidden in their boots, and shooting the shit with anyone who wanted to hang out outside.
Hanging out was what you did when you weren’t grinding away in a gruesome factory or stuffed into a matchbox-sized apartment with your beloved wife and 37 children. So if you were a man, the saloon was where you went. Until Prohibition, when you either went to a church, a soda fountain, or a speakeasy. From what I’ve heard, the speakeasy was loads more fun … when you weren’t accidentally getting poisoned drinking methanol or getting raided by the coppers.
As time marched on, Prohibition was cancelled because it was a ginormous failure. We got legal booze back. We got more cars… and an automobile lobby… and an oil and gas lobby. Later, mass adoption of automobiles shifted national and state priorities from designing spaces that worked for the needs of carless people, to designing spaces that worked best for the needs of cars and the people devoted to those cars. Cue: suburbs. (Also, white flight but we’re not gonna get into that right now.)
Car culture with its parking minimums, is one reason you don’t have more third places. Even dense urban areas give away a tremendous amount of land to parking. In Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains The World, author Henry Grabar references a study showing that if 25% of New York City’s curbside parking was reclaimed for other purposes, it would be enough land to create:
13 new Central Parks
500 miles of bus lanes
38 million square feet of community space
Better visibility at intersections
5.4 million additional square feet for restaurants, businesses, and the arts
Loading zones and trash collection space
And one full block for play and outdoor learning in front of every one of the city's 1,700 public schools.
🤯 Seriously. So, just imagine how many third places could be created in your neighborhood if so much space wasn’t dedicated to cars.
And as comfy-cozy as the idea of third places is, it’s inextricably tied to a topic that’s as sterile and formulaic as you can get outside of an operating room: the bureaucratic halls of order that write and enforce zoning laws. As highways spread across the land, so too did the rules about how to build the suburbs, exurbs, and strip malls that litter the space in between. 🪄 Voila! Zoning laws, my friends, are an even bigger reason why your neighborhood is devoid of thriving, jubilant, numerous third places that you can easily walk to. (Don’t fall asleep! Stay with me here.)
Zoning was intended to bring order and structure (and sometimes racial segregation, heyyy) to the way towns and cities are built. In some ways, it’s looking out for you. For example, zoning makes sure that a polluting factory isn’t located right next to your kids’ school or your bedroom window. But zoning is also the reason why you’ll rarely see a grocery store, cafe, bar, or restaurant on the ground floor of an apartment building or in a neighborhood of houses. Zoning was intended to protect people, but far too often, zoning is overly restrictive in its allegiance to order. Attempting to change zoning laws, or even getting a single zoning variance, can be an expensive, tiresome, and demoralizing process.
It’s because of zoning that we end up with labyrinthine roads unfurling towards the horizon in an ocean of low-density single-family housing. It’s because of zoning that we have apartment complexes with dozens of fortresslike buildings housing thousands of residents, yet there’s no place to grab a drink or a sandwich where you can spend time chilling out with other residents. If you want to hang out together, you have to do it inside your apartment, or jazz up an impersonal common area, or get in your car and drive someplace else.
If you want to have a couple of drinks then stumble home, you’re not allowed to because someone decided that it would be safer and better for you to drive home from a pub, rather than have a pub within walking distance of your 900 sq ft bungalow or 3-story apartment building in an area zoned as Residential.
If you want to meet the people living around you, and there’s no obvious outside-of-home gathering space for people to meet, mingle, and bump into each other without planning six weeks in advance… well, you’re on your own. We CAN figure this out on our own, but damn it would be a helluva lot easier if the built environment was designed to make that kind of connection natural, easy, and effortless.
🤔 It’s almost like our built environment was designed to guarantee frustration, loneliness, and isolation. And isn’t it an interesting coincidence that when people are socially isolated, distrusting, and fearful of each other, it makes them easier to control? (Hm… I wonder why anyone would want that? Anyyyyyhoo…..)
Listen. You deserve third places to gather, find community, support, connection, solidarity, comfort, care, and joy. The countries we Americans love to visit all have them:
Cafés in Paris
Pubs in the UK
Bier-garten in Germany
Izakaya and akachochin in Japan
Plazas, tapas bars, and food halls in Spain
Open-air street markets throughout Africa and Asia
Oceanside malecons and tree-lined bench-full boulevards all over Latin America
What kind of third places do you wish YOU had in your neighborhood? Let’s discuss…
A new vision for third places
a.k.a. Your neighborhood belongs to you and you belong to it
a.k.a. Choose to belong
If I rubbed a multicolor bejeweled glass lamp at a yard sale and a genie popped out to give me three wishes, one of them would definitely be to wake up the next morning with nationwide, human-centric, creatively compassionate zoning guidelines instantly approved in cities that would provide people with ample third places, all within walking or non-vehicular rolling distance of everyone, along with free public transportation so reliable and comprehensive that you could go from coast to coast on transit without ever needing to check a transit schedule. I suppose that’s three wishes right there, but if I cram them into one run-on sentence, can it count as one? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Until municipal-improvement wishes start magically materializing, we have to take connection into our own hands. This is one of the tenets that I’ve been instilling in every student enrolled in Platonic Action Lab.
I want you to start believe this, too:
Connection is available to you in every cardinal direction, if you’re willing to search it out.
Your spaces may be imperfect but they belong to you.
Your city and your neighborhoods belong to you and everyone around you.
You are allowed to inhabit the spaces outside your front door.
You are allowed to become a regular on your sidewalks, streets, parks, and local establishments.
There is value in letting your face be a familiar sight.
There is value in learning the names of the people who live and work near you.
There is value in knowing what places are open near you, where you might discover that you feel more and more welcome and more and more comfortable the more you show up there.
There is value in believing that you can use a space in more than one way.
You are allowed to talk to people.
You are allowed to get to know the people living near you.
You are (usually) allowed to hang signs and flyers.
You are allowed to extend invitations. You can put them on telephone polls, and bulletin boards, and in coffeeshop windows if they say it’s ok to, and you can even post online about it if you want.
You are allowed to draw on the sidewalk with chalk if your neighborhood doesn’t have telephone poles for stapling a friendly announcement or invitation on. (Do what you would do if you were having a yard sale.)
You are allowed to leave a friendly invitation on a neighbor’s doorstep the same way that Jehovah’s Witnesses prostelytizers feel entitled to leave their junk mail anywhere they please (but you might have to gussy up your invitation so it doesn’t get mistaken for junk mail since we are so dang accustomed to being sold something, and an invitation from a real human is so rare, that it’s easy to miss.)
You are allowed to tell people about your new club or event or gathering more than once, because people are shy and afraid and they really want to come but they might need more coaxing to trust that it will be a fun and safe and friendly vibe when they arrive.
You are allowed to choose to belong in the places around you.
You are allowed to see, really see, who and what surrounds you. It’s often far more interesting and affecting than whatever is on Netflix.
You are allowed to ask local businesses if they’d be ok with you hosting a monthly thing there if you want to get people together but feel too nervous to bring them into your home.
You are allowed to have a little get-together in the driveway or front stoop if you feel too nervous to bring people into your home.
You are allowed to put money in a parking meter and then use that space for whatever safe and legal activities you want for the duration of time that you’ve made it your own.
You are allowed to live life differently than how the built environment that surrounds you dictates what your behavior and activities should be.
The crazy thing about most third places is that they’re places where monetary transactions do occur, but if you do it right, your monetary transaction will be the least important emotional experience you’ll have there. We need to support our local businesses happily without our dollars for the value they bring to our lives. We need them to survive. So yeah, you’re gonna need to buy some of their stuff on a regular basis. But the space can be more than transactional — it needs to be if it will ever transform into a third place.
And the people running these establishments have a surprising amount of control over whether that place becomes a third place or not. Their attitude and openness can transform a generic business into a third place. If they’re not warm and welcoming, encouraging loyal customers to become regulars, and encouraging community-building between their regulars and new faces alike, all they’ll do is create an environment that’s inhospitable, spiritless, boring, transactional, and unlikely to ever develop the soul that gives life to a third place. (If you run a local business, please be the kind of businessowner that encourages this kind of thriving and connection in your patrons and neighbors!)
What to do if you want a third place
If you’re reading this post, you’re probably an individual who wants a third place. To find and create a third place (and remember: the quality of your presence is what helps to create it), you have to start somewhere, and I don’t mean crawling back under the covers. I’m sorry but you’ll need to leave the house. Trust me,… when this works, it will be soooo worth it.
Get off your couch and pay very close attention to where you live and what potential third places you’ve been ignoring around you. Like my student did, become a detective in your community, researching a list of all the possible places that might possibly have the potential to be a third place. Then start checking them out to see how they meet the Oldenburg criteria above. Also, you can’t just show up and be a passive observer / receiver / customer —you need to do this stuff too if you want a deeper sense of belonging.
There’s no need to dress up. As Oldenburg points out, nobody gets dressed up to go to their third place. Don’t focus too much on looks, yours or the place’s. Your future third place might even be a little plain or shabby, which means it will always accept you as you are, even in your sweatpants and baggy t-shirt.
Edge case: If you live in a void of capitalism where there are no parks and absolutely no places of business that can function as your third place — first of all, please tell me where to find this mythical land of no-capitalism — and second of all, you still have options!
If you’re truly in need of a third place and there’s zero places near you to function as one, you have the option to collect a crew of people and make a Society of The Traveling Third Places, wherein you each rotate minimal hosting duties at each other’s abodes. Whenever you join a gathering that’s not held at your place, consider that other place your temporary third place. This is clever, because what you’ll actually end up with are two, three, four, five, or more third places that are infused with the love and personality of the friends with whom you’re running this collective experiment in place-independent thirdspacery. You can get as creative with this as you want. When you host:
You can make it a potluck.
You can turn your living room into a temporary coffeeshop.
You can turn your kitchen into a panini cafe.
You can turn your garage into a makeshift saloon like Ray Oldenburg did.
Go for it. Get creative. Get cute.
In the absence of abundant external third place options, you can try any of the ideas above, or remix them to create new versions.
You can create makeshift third places in your and your friends’ apartments, homes, and mini-communes. If you all happen to have the same commute, you can even turn your bus or train car into your third place.
The warmth and belonging we feel in a well-loved third place doesn’t only occupy that businesses that are so frequently the site of our third places. The same cozy vibe can also be found in homes that we live in and share with others, and that we occasionally offer as a third place for the people we invite into it.
While our own homes can’t function as our own third places, with some creativity and courage, we can turn them into third places for others. And vice versa. Don’t get caught up stressing about how perfect or stylish your house is. You’re going for a feeling, not a style. I love the way Anne Helen Petersen described this in a recent essay titled The Anti-Airbnb Space, railing against the deadening sameness of Airbnb’s soul-shrinking Airspace aesthetic:
“When people talk about warmth, or comfort, or coziness, they’re not actually talking about blankets or fires or throw pillows. They’re talking about the undeniable, absolutely irresistible evidence that a place is beloved. That feeling has no defined aesthetic. It resists trends and appears at all price points. An algorithm can’t sense it. It often doesn’t come across in photos. But that feeling, the feeling I have in this space right now, writing on this window seat? It feels like a home. Maybe not my own. But someone’s.”
— Anne Helen Petersen
We have to take action now because one of Oldenburg’s predictions is already coming true about what happens to people who go too long without access to a third place:
They forget how to use it.
They forget how to connect with each other in those spaces when they finally get access to them.
They forget how to make conversation (ask me how I know).
They forget how to strike up a chat with a stranger.
They forget how to trust.
They forget how to play together, in spirit and in conversation.
They forget how to let themselves be fully alive in the presence of people who they’re not yet close with, but by being fully alive in their shared presence, they make the closening easier and more relaxing to traverse.
This is no recipe for an exhilarating future. So you know what to do. Get out there and start co-creating third place spirit in the places around you.
Oh, and one last tip before I go. If you live in a city in the United States, that means that you have a governor, and a mayor, and some city council members. Ask them to allow multi-use zoning in more areas, so that the kinds of businesses that could become third places (aside from making life more convenient in general) can begin to pop up in areas that currently only allow residential use like houses or apartments.
Dear reader, do you have a third place?
What about the third places you’ve loved and lost before?
And what is the third place dream you hold for your future?
What are you going to do to bring it into the present?
XO,
Kat Vellos
Author of We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships