What's Your Third Place?
I give you Snake and Jake’s Christmas Club Lounge, my third place in New Orleans as a college student. I am honestly shocked they have a website.
What’s Your Third Place?
If you’re not even sure what your first or second place is, do not fret.
According to the late Ray Oldenberg, first places are your home place, second places are your workplace, and third places are where you go to connect with people, blow off steam, and have a good conversation.
This can look like many things to many folks: coffee shops, bars, gyms, barber shops/salons, diners, libraries.
Why Third Places Matter
According to Oldenberg, Americans put too much pressure on their home and work life to fulfill their social needs. (Let me just mention that he wrote this in the 1980’s, so I imagine this is way worse now.) Think about it, for some of us, our partners and families are often our only social relationships.
So, we look to our colleagues for outside social stimulation and connection, which can lead to working longer hours and serving as a false sense of social connections. I have plenty of colleagues that I adore, but we are primarily joined by a shared responsibility to fulfilling the duties put forth by our workplace.
A consequence of limiting our social connections to our family and work life is that we become disconnected from our local communities, simply because we don’t spend time in them, making it easier to have really one-dimensional perspectives of people who live around the corner from us. We become robots, if you will, venturing from home to work to home to work, and occasionally to a work-related happy hour.
Disconnection leads to fewer social networks, and fewer healthy social networks in a town or place makes tackling civic challenges harder and harder to do. Social networks create trust, an essential ingredient in any healthy community.
Third places, in other cultures outside of the US, provide that balance that we Americans so often talk about and that always seems just out of grasp. They are scarcer here in the US, due to post-World War II zoning laws and our increased obsession with automobiles.
Drum Circle at Pritchard Park in Asheville, North Carolina. Every Friday evening since 2001.
Third Places have Six Crucial Qualities, which I’ll unpack over the next several months. Ideally, understanding these qualities will not only help us identity places in our towns that embody them, but also help us to individually recognize how important these often-underrated qualities are.
So, I repeat, What’s Your Third Place? Drop a comment below.
Juke Joint Chapel at The Shack Up Inn, Clarksdale, Mississippi.
And for my nerd-soul-sibs, here’s a good reading list:
The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community – Ray Oldenberg
Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories about the “Great Good Places” at the Heart of Our Communities - Ray Oldenberg
Community: The Structure of Belonging – Peter Block
Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives – Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters – Priya Parker
How to Know a Person – David Brooks
How to Do Nothing – Jenny Odell
Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life – Eric Klinenberg
Bowling Alone: Revised and Revisited: The Collapse and Revival of American Community – Robert D. Putnam