Greetings from Ireland where a heavy snowfall has paralysed large parts of the country. In the capital, however, we have been treated only to icy rain, generally freezing conditions, as well as wind and greyness. My mind has begun to wander to Sicily and Spain…
Gentle Reader,
In medical school, I learned about how fluid can ‘third space.' This third spacing phenomenon describes the process of fluid exiting blood vessels, but not entering cells. Instead, the fluid goes into this ‘third space’ which is a kind of no-man’s land, causing swelling and interfering with cardiovascular function and so on.
I learned to fear the third space. In recent times, especially with remote work, I have begun to hear talk of ‘third spaces’ or ‘third places’ in a positive light, or as potential places to hang out, which are neither home nor the workplace.
Many of my friends are talking about this.
writes about this in ‘Where do we Hang Out?’Let’s start by labeling the “places” in which we spend our time. According to sociologist Ray Oldenburg, we can divide it into three categories:
First Place: Home
Second Place: Work
Third Place: Anywhere that’s not home or work.
He has a point. Especially with the advent of remote work, where are we going to hang out? What can we ‘use’ as a third space, and what should we do there?
Remote possibilities
Remote work changed the game in ways which helped us to learn about ourselves. I embraced it initially, and took myself off to warm places and profited from total flexibility.
It was fantastic. After a while, however, I began to feel…weird.
What was this feeling? It was a certain morsel of self-loathing mixed with a vague derealisation. Was I really working? I barely knew my colleagues, all of whom worked in an office in another country. I was leaving the house less frequently, and so my world became smaller, and I developed that icky sticky itchy feeling which comes over the body after a day of doing nothing but sitting around. I had meetings quite often but a zoom conversation, in terms of socialising, when compared with an in-person meeting, is the equivalent of juicing your vegetables instead of eating them. The feeling is not substantial, thin on calories, and in no way satisfying.
If I did leave, it was usually to go to a gym where, also, I spoke to nobody. I had not realised that my workplace previously had been a secret source, not just of friend groups, but of social interaction in general, in a way which is hard to replicate.
What do I think now? Well, I don’t think that feelings of isolation should mean we should throw remote work out the window. There are people and types of work to which remote work is fundamentally more suited, such as:
Part-time work
Work for those with families
Work for those who cannot afford to live in or commute to the city where the office is
Work for those with a very busy social life or whose social life is generally extremely dialled in and fulfilling already
Work for people who simply like working remotely.
For me, at this juncture, I personally think a hybrid option would be the best, but I’m actually fully back in the office and not finding it a problem.
This is all besides the point. The takeaway is that the workplace has been replaced as a place to hang out, in many employment roles, and we don’t have a good replacement. Or even for those who work in-office, the third space, or general place to socialise, has been on the decline.
Third space ideas
The third space or third place (I personally prefer ‘space’) should be about integration. Modern life has become terribly siloed. As mentioned above, we go to very specific places to do very specific things. For example, you go to the gym to lift weights, whereas in the old days it was more common to join a sports team or do something more integrated. Now, people attend a gym, put their earphones in, and walk around a brightly falsely lit room for a couple of hours, lifting iron and pulling at machines, and then go home.
Looking at this model, it hints at what we can do to make these places into true, integrated third spaces. Just about any activity you do, such as working out, dancing, reading a book…can be done together. But this doesn’t go far enough, because you need to do something else, afterwards.
I’m a fan of bi-modal activities. Eg, you do a group writing activity, discuss the work, but then afterwards you all go to the pub or for a coffee together. Bonding activity followed by general consolidation.
It turns out it ain’t that easy to organise. Bridging the gap between someone you do a general activity with, and becoming a friend of that person, is difficult. When you do the same thing with the same person in the same place, it’s hard to move past that part of the relationship unless you get coffee or do something else afterwards.
It’s not an easy problem to solve. Imagine a gym puts on a yoga class, followed by a 30 minute hangout. People will feel weird – why do I want to sit and talk to these people who I have silently stretched sweatily beside for the last hour?
Humans are supposed to be around one another, but the structure of modern society has made it difficult. People generally need a pretext to meet.
Decreasing friction
Since people feel weird being compelled to hang out in some cases, and since people are busy and have jobs to do and families to take care of, the best hope for the third space seems to be in making it entirely frictionless.
Living in a city or somewhere with vibrant streetlife makes this much easier, as Brian points out.
I have no desire to doom scroll IG or binge Netflix because every time I walk downstairs I feel like I’m “refreshing the timeline” of my neighborhood. There’s always life in the streets with people hanging out and enjoying themselves.
People won’t bump into one another if they live in isolated houses in the country or friends won’t meet if they live in opposite ends of a traffic-addled city. If your friends don’t live near you…the pressure is on.
This is why it’s nice to integrate a third space into your routine somehow, as you will get to know the people there. The classic example is a cafe, where you can get to know the employees or the other regulars, provided you don’t live in some central business district where everyone stares at their laptops.
If you want to decrease friction, you have to be extremely mindful of where you live.
Make it compelling
If it is too hard to defrictionalise, you must simply make your third space or shared activity so good that others can’t ignore it.
Anne Helen Peterson from Culture Study wrote about a breakfast club which has been running for one hundred years in LA.
This organisation has the benefit of having a licence to meet in an Auditorium for the last 50 years, something unthinkable today for a simple breakfast club. They meet on Wednesday mornings where they have breakfast together and have a presentation from a new guest speaker every week.
What makes it so successful?
From my reading of Peterson’s article, the club has a few advantages and virtues which act as a kind of glue, and which make it sustainable.
They serve breakfast. Literally everybody likes breakfast.
They have leased a building for fifty plus years.
There’s a new topic every week
There’s space to exercise and move around, which they do before breakfast
There are many in-jokes and rituals which bond the members together.
Reading the above, you can see how it could be hard to emulate this. Not every Tom, Dick and Harry is able to draw a speaker every week.
As for how to get something like this up and running, from humble beginnings in the modern era, I think you need a lot of imagination and maybe some luck, too.
The bottom line
When I began to read about the breakfast club, I was pretty excited about the idea of an organisation lasting so long, and having such a rich history. But to be honest, I felt a little deflated after reading the particulars, after finding out that it would be a reasonably heavy lift to get something like this going in the modern age.
In the end, I came to three firm conclusions about third spaces.
The first is that where you live is so incredibly important. It can be the difference between isolation and abundance, between sadness and joy, even between life and death…and I say this as somebody who appreciates the benefits of country living. But if you can’t walk out your door to somewhere easily reachable for others too, you will struggle to third space effectively.
The second conclusion is that finding or making a good third space is very difficult. There aren’t very many places which exist which you can even get access to, in any kind of multi-purpose or free-reign capacity. Most profitable organisations, such as gyms, aren’t true third spaces, in the sense that I suggest, and those who wish to set up a regular get-together, in the age of high rents, will probably be haggling with bars and cafes and booking tables and hoping that they get the numbers right, for their events. It requires a bit of work, and a lot of pretext to get people together.
My third conclusion was that, although the home ‘the first space’ is, by definition, not a third space, it might be the easiest way forward for many. If you are fortunate enough to have a home with space for people to gather, maybe you can set up a rolling Sunday pizza evening, no invite necessary, or a weekly coffee chat, or some kind of automated activity. The barrier for letting people into your home is higher, but if it’s people you already know and trust, it could become a beautiful thing.
If you have any ideas about third spaces, please share them in the comments, and don’t forget to subscribe to get my writing into your inbox weekly.
I agree that "making it work" in third spaces is a little more difficult than it sounds at first, even in highly social cultures like Spain. Here yes, people socialize a lot in third spaces, in cafes, in front of the church, in plazas, but I feel it's always tight-knit groups of people who seem to have known each other since first grade. Even if there are third spaces and they are full of groups of people, how do you penetrate and integrate into one?
Also yes - where you live is so important! I moved out of the big city into a smaller suburb with the main purpose of finding more community. And I did find it; the size of the town makes encounters easier somehow, the social circles overlap so much more than in very big cities.
You are so right about living in the kind of place that provides this kind of interaction. And it is not just a question of having a lot of people around. There needs to be a culture of conversation in the bars, cafes and clubs.
Age makes a difference too. I know a lot of people around 30 years old who post Covid lost the ability to engage in spontaneous conversation.