Reclaiming the Third Place

December 19, 2024 5:00 PM

“Each year we find ourselves having less social interaction, and we are starting to realize that getting to know people outside of home and work does not just happen on its own,” he said. “We have to be intentional about meeting and talking to others.” from Gen Z Grew Up Chronically Online. Now, They're Craving 'Third Places.

The article opens with a mention of Ray Oldenburg, writer of The Great Good Place, probably one of the three books that shaped my view of the world, which studies the need for a third place outside work and home that allows people to interact with others as a necessary part of society. It also namechecks Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.

Along the way, it mentions increasing commercialization of public spaces, hostile architecture, and includes this tidbit: “In eastern Europe, where many large cities were rebuilt after the second world war, research shows that socialist cities have significantly more shared green space than cities rebuilt under capitalism in the west.”

posted by Ghidorah (39 comments total)

I remember when we Gen X were hot shit and everyone cared about what we did.

Gen Z's turn to get thrown on the trash heap is coming. They just don't know it yet.
posted by Lemkin at 5:04 PM on December 19, 2024 [3 favorites]

I remember when we Gen X were hot shit and everyone cared about what we did.

Gen Z's turn to get thrown on the trash heap is coming. They just don't know it yet

What does this have to do with the article and, as the first comment, set a helpful and curious tenor of discussion?
posted by rhymedirective at 5:10 PM on December 19, 2024 [70 favorites]

I know this is mentioned in the article but the big one for me is zoning. If you're in a built-up urban area then there's no shortage of third spaces for you within easy walking distance but if you're in the suburbs, exurbs, or rural areas then your options are much more limited and they all involve a drive.

Just this week my city (Toronto) was going to vote on allowing small shops and cafes to operate in residential areas but they postponed the vote for further consultation because of pushback from some councillors and neighbourhood groups. Great, keep everyone in their own homes and don't encourage interaction with neighbours. Hopefully after the consultation they'll actually vote for it to happen because I think it would be a good change.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 6:00 PM on December 19, 2024 [21 favorites]

I wonder too how much of this is the pervasiveness of surveillance. You now have to deal with whatever you do being recorded and potentially shared to a much greater degree. When I was a teenager I felt like we could do stupid or silly stuff as a group without having to consider the consequences beyond a parent yelling at us, and that was only if it was really dumb or we got caught.
posted by Carillon at 6:05 PM on December 19, 2024 [10 favorites]

Came to write the same, any portmanteau. Over the last few years, as Denver's public transit has declined in quality and suffered infinite complaints from suburbanites, I've become a lot more interested in density and zoning fixes. I want my friends living close to me, and to become friends with those living close to me.
posted by McBearclaw at 6:09 PM on December 19, 2024 [6 favorites]

I like my little neighborhood here in Pasadena, but lord does it need more third spaces, more comfortable hangs. It's absolutely true that people generally need to get out more.
posted by drewbage1847 at 6:20 PM on December 19, 2024

One of the weird side effects of not having third spaces is that when one pops up, sometimes they get way too big way too fast. There is a street art fair in a city I used to live in - lots of great art but the crowds were totally overwhelming. A similar thing happens at a rural art fair where I live now. The cat video festival held at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (maybe 6 years ago?) was explosively big.
posted by Emmy Rae at 6:26 PM on December 19, 2024 [9 favorites]

What does this have to do with the article and, as the first comment, set a helpful and curious tenor of discussion?

Nevermind, some of my generation have this chip on their shoulders. it's embarrassing.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 6:34 PM on December 19, 2024 [3 favorites]

I wonder how much of people's desire to see each other offline has to do with the commercialization of everything on the internet. Once upon a time "surfing the web" was much more like strolling the block or just sitting on a bench and world-watching. Now everything is on my phone and my phone is in the grip of the corporations. When I get an email, it's probably from a company welcoming me to their "family" because I bought a pair of sunglasses or whatever, and I have to dig for the important ones. When my phone rings, it's probably a scam but I still have to answer because I own my own business. When I get a text, it could be from a friend or more likely from a politician asking for money. When I go on instagram, I see ads for the product I just looked at on my computer. So yeah, being in a third space that isn't a series of ads or demands for my attention, time or money is relaxing and a relief.
posted by Emmy Rae at 6:36 PM on December 19, 2024 [12 favorites]

socialist cities have significantly more shared green space than cities rebuilt under capitalism in the west.”

Traveling and living in former Yugoslavian countries, I was very struck by how much livelier their public spaces in general are as compared to the US, and how much more inter-generationally inhabited. People of all ages could be found hanging out in plazas and parks, and cafe culture was such that you didn't have to spend lots of money to have a leisurely conversation with friends over coffee.

As I understand it, some of this is driven by housing pressure - houses and apartments are expensive, and not large, and that creates incentives for folks to be out of the house. But to have a number of options for spaces outside your home that are conducive to just idle, social time seems like it would've been a big draw even if homes were more spacious.
posted by EvaDestruction at 6:46 PM on December 19, 2024 [25 favorites]

honestly in my own case as a millenniums, the internet functioned as a "third place" in a lot of regards for me just because of growing up in a highly isolated housing development, and the internet wound up being a major way to interact with other people in a casual way outside of school or part-time work

I can't imagine how much worse it must be for generations growing up in even more extreme versions of that sort of built environment
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:00 PM on December 19, 2024 [6 favorites]

It’s not just a planning thing in ex Yugo countries, although absolutely, but the social organization is important too. there’s a strong sense of community there. Partly because although some young people do leave, some stay (especially in non-EU countries), and they’re just not as mobile as in North America.

(In Toronto, I met a bunch of great people in my thirties, and most of them took off to other cities for work or other adventures. Those who didn’t, settled in to take care of their new babies. In ex Yugo countries, multigenerational households + established communities = a ton more help with childcare, so people are often freer that way.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 7:23 PM on December 19, 2024 [7 favorites]

Third Place vs. Right to the City (YT, 55min)
posted by Grimp0teuthis at 7:51 PM on December 19, 2024 [4 favorites]

Back when I was in high school, college and in my first jobs, there were late-nite places - mostly local diners, but also coffee houses and pizza joints - that we were able to go to at night and just, you know, make weird jokes, talk shop and figure out the world in the confines of a comfy booth.

These places were cheap - we're not talking expensive lattes - and for a couple of dollars per person, you could sit with several of your friends and grab coffee or tea and get just enough grub to keep you going until midnight, after which you'd all scatter off and work through whatever tomorrow held.

This wasn't some sort of weird boomer '50s ideal, this was something present all the way through the '90s into the aughts, and in many ways was still around all the way until COVID. It's difficult beyond COVID to pinpoint the specific economic and social changes that resulted in things changing - clearly people stopped going out enough to make casual late-nite dining possible - but those days do seem to be clearly gone.

This change has to be very, very tough for young adults who want to hang out, outside of the shadow of their parents, without the cover of an online game to hold them together. I wish I held the answer to what the third space might be that the diners, coffee shops and pizza places had for me and my friends.
posted by eschatfische at 8:31 PM on December 19, 2024 [19 favorites]

If you're in a built-up urban area then there's no shortage of third spaces for you within easy walking distance

Until the city gets successful, and all the real estate is too expensive for anything but bars that turn the music up so people won’t sit around and talk. Or! Worse! Bank branches that have “community” in their ads and big plate glass lobbies with couches and low tables and no people in them. Several of those on my local high street.

We could try having a meetup in one.
posted by clew at 8:55 PM on December 19, 2024 [11 favorites]

My favorite people in the world outside of my own family are the knitters and crocheters we've lured into the community around our yarn shop. Especially our "Nerd Night" friends who are mostly in their twenties and almost entirely queer. Building a place for them to gather and make friends feels really important and gratifying. Honestly we only sell yarn as an excuse to have a place for people to bond and be together. It's been great to offer more outside of crafting too, board game nights and D&D campaigns. Last year we finally got to do our first post-Covid retreat, and getting to connect this young generation with some of the elders from our morning weekday groups was really awesome.

When the hurricane hit, my main work for the first few days was trying to text everyone I could and make sure people were safe and could get what they needed. When "customers" tell me I'm like their family, it makes me tear up. Third spaces are life-changing, and I feel lucky to be able to provide that for some people. But I don't do it selflessly--I benefit as much as anyone, because I get to meet all these amazing and creative folx!
posted by rikschell at 8:57 PM on December 19, 2024 [20 favorites]

"... the need for a third place outside work and home that also allows people to choose not to interact with others as a necessary part of society".

Are we really having 'less interaction year on year'? We're talking on here, these are real relationships, real friendships too, and the 'spaces' are no different to the spaces of; letter-writing, barbed wire bush telegraph 'networks' in 1870's Kansas, HAM, Morse-code (I knew a navy radio-op in the 70's who spoke of talking to people across the wider North-Atlantic, he regarded many as friends).

Third spaces that are not consumer habitat are feared by what passes for our civilisation (to shop is to 'take part'). We urgently need real spaces. Most of Christianity has fallen to heresy (evangelicalism) so churches are not the spaces they were. Many countries have what (as a traveller) feels like third space until you pause long enough to see who isn't there. Glad to see Third Place vs. Right to the City posted here, a competent evisceration of Oldenburg.

Unless a space is fully owned by a/the collective (and who have real collective aims - e.g. not bad-faith religious ones, libertarian etc.) it will never function as a real-space, as there will always be people who are excluded. Occupation is insufficient as the state has legal violence as a fall-back.
posted by unearthed at 10:25 PM on December 19, 2024 [4 favorites]

Volunteer-run donation-based nonprofit makerspaces/hackerspaces try to be functional community spaces in many cities, and sometimes they do this really well. It's been pretty tough since the pandemic though, at least for mine. People moved away, or picked up new responsibilities, or bought their own equipment, or kinda just got used to being home a lot, so it's been hard to rebuild the critical mass of volunteers and donations we need to be sustainable.

An interesting thing is that even in one of the most expensive cities, our commercial rent is not that high - small "flex" space has been a little more than $3 per sq ft per month, so you can run a place like this for less than $3000/month in rent, utilities, insurance, and other core costs. But unpaid labor is in short supply because almost everyone around here needs to work full time or more.

The other volunteers and I keep trying though, because it continues to feel important to offer affordable community-oriented space where people can learn things, try new skills, meet people, and just be outside home/work without needing to buy anything.
posted by dreamyshade at 10:37 PM on December 19, 2024 [9 favorites]

One thing that I found while looking this up is that a new edition of The Great Good Place is supposed to be published in February 2025, with new material added by Karen Christensen, who, honestly, I'd never heard of. It turns out she and Oldenburg met, and he asked her to put together the new edition before he passed away in 2022. As I said, the original is one of the books that formed my view of the world, but I am interested to see a book published in 1989 updated to include online spaces and social media.

Looking at something like Australia's decision to ban young people from social media, which eliminates access to vital, if online, potential third places for kids outside the mainstream, who benefit from finding others like them, even if only online, I'm curious to see how the book tackles that. Had I had something like what we have now, maybe my third place as a teen wouldn't have been restricted to the handful of weekends a year there were science fiction conventions in Detroit?
posted by Ghidorah at 10:40 PM on December 19, 2024 [1 favorite]

I think there’s some key factors about these third spaces that people are touching on:
- a reason to be outside your house (walkable neighborhood, your house is too small and you need to get outside, your kid or dog needs to go out, it’s on the way to groceries)
- fairly inexpensive or free
- spontaneity (don’t have to pre-plan to meet people there but you can go there and if people show up even better, so you can over time see familiar faces)
- something that draws you there - playground, dog park, nice views , a fountain
- seating of some sort even if it’s just flat rocks and grass

Where I live they’re building a LOT of medium and high rise buildings and each one of them has to have some kind of commercial space on the main floor and third space are in to the main floor (inside or out). So there’s a lot of cool architecture plans incorporating hang out area (aka a modern version of the Italian town square / piazza). I’m really looking forward to it.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 11:25 PM on December 19, 2024 [1 favorite]

I’m really looking forward to it.

I have to admit, I come at this article from the viewpoint of living in Japan, and having watched the various trends in urban planning and the loss of public spaces, I'm feeling a lot more dread than optimism:

- fairly inexpensive or free

It feels like this is the big one that's being lost in Japan. Corporate takeovers of public spaces aren't exactly everywhere yet, but the trend is there, and growing. It's hard, and getting harder, to just exist in public without the need to pay or purchase, let alone gather. Add in the punishing heat in the summer, and the cold in the winter, there is a serious lack of places to gather indoors without the need to pay to be there.

- seating of some sort even if it’s just flat rocks and grass

Japan is not a sit on the grass country. People just don't do it, even in the rare parks where the grass isn't fenced off. If people here are going to a park like that, they'll bring a blanket, or a tarp. It's very rare to see people sitting on the ground here. Meanwhile, hostile architecture is really taking off. If there is a flat bench anymore, it will have magically sprouted an armrest in the center, to prevent unhoused people from sleeping there. More likely, though, there will be something that suggests the concept of a bench, but is angled to make sitting there for longer than five minutes deeply unpleasant (for example, Hibiya park, right in front of a very pretty pond and old stone wall that would be a really nice place to sit and read, but not on those benches), or just a couple horizontal bars to lean against, but not sit on. There are fewer and fewer places to sit for free, and more and more for profit businesses setting up shop on public land with ample seating, if you buy a coffee.

New buildings are being put up all over the place, and yes, many of them have shops and restaurants on the first floor, but that's still only the monetized version of existing in public, and it's just kind of exhausting anymore.
posted by Ghidorah at 12:26 AM on December 20, 2024 [10 favorites]

Any restaurant in Austin that has both alcohol and a children's playscape is wildly successful. They usually serve burgers or tacos and have a huge yard with picnic tables and some kind of playground that a child can exhaust themselves on. I think part of the appeal compared to a non-commercial space such as a park is that you can convince your childless friends to hang out there as well. Every time I visit one, I think "how can we get this kind of energy directed at our public spaces?"
posted by tofu_crouton at 4:19 AM on December 20, 2024 [7 favorites]

Istanbul and many other Turkish cities are rapidly losing the tea gardens that used to be public gathering spaces. Some still exist but many have been taken over by restaurants and coffee shops so you can no longer bring your own food or buy from street vendors like you used to be able to.

I wonder how much this is allowed to happen because it means fewer gathering places for people who don't like the current regime.

The coastal villages often have bylaws preventing restaurants from essentially privatising beaches by covering them with tables and beach chairs so you can only visit the beach if you're paying for food and drinks. But many places ignore these laws.

Cape Town City center bows to tourist pressure for safety by eradicating public outdoor spaces, you can't sit anywhere to take a rest without a security guard chasing you away. Except for the Company Gardens.

I miss third places not so much for the community aspect, although that's part of it, it's more just being able to feel at home and at ease anywhere that's not your literal home without having to pay.
posted by Zumbador at 6:01 AM on December 20, 2024 [4 favorites]

Gen Xer chiming in to say I also miss The Third Places. Waffle House did most of this heavy lifting when I was a teen because the coffee was cheap and you could sit there for hours with your friends, smoking cigarettes you should not, drinking your bodyweight in bitter black coffee.

Then in my late teens, the coffee shop/house trend began. Even my shitkicker small city got in on it and then hanging out like the Friends gang in a comfy coffee house with couches, board games, and still pretty cheap lattes became what we did. Heck, I even remember that place had one lone desktop computer terminal if you wanted to check your email and didn't have dial-up at home.

I think younger folks can have these places back but being in these places means not being on your laptop for work or school. It means just being with friends as you are, not on a phone instead. (This criticism is also levied at everyone. I am not without sin.)
posted by Kitteh at 6:28 AM on December 20, 2024 [8 favorites]

One of the weird side effects of not having third spaces is that when one pops up, sometimes they get way too big way too fast.

This is absolutely the case where I live (Atlanta). There are all kinds of little festivals that used to be neighborhood things, but because 90% of the metro population lives outside the actual city of Atlanta (and this has all kinds of other profoundly negative consequences) where there is next to no public third space, all these little festivals started being mobbed by suburbanites 10 or so years ago, and now none of them is worth going to because the crowds are just way too much. [edit: and they all drive, so that even if you're on bikes like we are, it's chaotic and dangerous as people get real aggro about parking spaces]

There's a neighborhood around the corner from where we used to live that has a Hallowe'en parade, and it used to be this quirky DIY thing, and now there's 70k people there and the floats are all sponsored and I'm like thanks but no thanks, I'm staying home.

I'm not knocking the suburbanites doing this: they're seeking community. There's just way too many of them. At least now you're starting to see some of the inner-ring suburbs restructuring themselves so there's art walks and that sort of thing.

Daughter 1 has for the last few months got into hanging out at the mall with friends: we drive them out to the burbs where the malls are. One girl's mom and I, both grizzled Gen Xers, sat in the parking lot and had a good laugh about it, like okay, if that's what you want to do, have fun. Trouble is, the friend who organized it turned out to be super toxic, and then started trying to get the girls to shoplift makeup and so forth. D1 is Very Sensible, both in the Jane Austen and the modern sense, so she backed away from it real quick, but it kind of ruined the fun.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:43 AM on December 20, 2024 [2 favorites]

Ah, I remember when the Cabbagetown Chomp & Stomp was mostly me and my neighbours, maybe some folks moseying over from Inman Park or Candler Park. Or when the L5P Halloween Parade was just a bunch of local weirdos.
posted by Kitteh at 6:56 AM on December 20, 2024 [2 favorites]

I’ve recently started attending a Universalist Unitarian congregation as an atheist, for the community and ritual of it. The UU is pretty diverse but the one I’ve found has been lovely and accepting, and it’s hitting that longing for a third space now.
It’s nice to find some queer community without drinking being a focus.
posted by astrospective at 6:57 AM on December 20, 2024 [11 favorites]

There was a very cool book store cum coffee shop cum event space in Denver called Mutiny. Every time I came to town I’d try to drop in because the vibe was really chill and you’d see loads of younger people clowning around in the evenings. It was comforting.

The same week I finally moved to Denver from a sleepy suburb, Mutiny closed their doors because of increasing rent prices.

Thankfully there’s a maker space (ironically in a sleepy suburb) that I’m joining for that third space vibe.
posted by ifatfirstyoudontsucceed at 7:34 AM on December 20, 2024

The same week I finally moved to Denver from a sleepy suburb, Mutiny closed their doors because of increasing rent prices.

I read the article and this doesn't seem to be mentioned. A huge part of the death of Third Places is the rent. Retail rent is super high these days.
posted by Kitteh at 7:54 AM on December 20, 2024 [4 favorites]

A lot of the third spaces I hung around in when I was a youth were cafes and diners that stayed open all night, ones where you could just nurse a single $1 coffee until 2am. Those don't really exist like they used to.

For a (very Canadian) example: there were a few Tims Horton around downtown Edmonton that used to be open past midnight. The Tim Horton's in Commerce Place I think was 24 hours, it was definitely open past midnight when I lived in that part of downtown, now it closes at I think 6pm. Starbucks largely left downtown, and we have very nice independent coffee shops that replaced them, but they don't keep the same late hours. I don't think that is rent, presumably it is the same whether you are open all night or close at 6, I think it is probably the cost of labour (a single $1 drip coffee just isn't enough to keep the staff around).

Aside from the cavernous sports bars around the ice district, which are largely empty when there isn't a game on, there are large parts of downtown where there kind of is nowhere to go after business hours.
posted by selenized at 8:22 AM on December 20, 2024 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I feel like 2020 shutdown put a lot of 24 hours places to death. No coffee shops, no diners, not even pharmacies or grocery stores that used to be 24 hours re-assumed those hours.

There are a lot of night owls and shift workers out there who would love to have them back!
posted by Kitteh at 8:27 AM on December 20, 2024 [2 favorites]

If you're in a built-up urban area then there's no shortage of third spaces for you within easy walking distance

Less and less true every day! A lot of city cores in the US right now are in a bad way, and I don't mean that like some suburban asshole on Facebook means it. I mean half of Chicago's Michigan Avenue (the Magnificent Mile) is just closed, papered-over storefronts now. I mean yes, you can still go to the giant Starbucks, or the smaller Starbucks, or the even smaller Starbucks. And you can still browse around a few big stores. You can wander Water Tower Place and go to the 6 stores remaining. And yes, you can still just hang out in one of the two plazas (the one outside the water tower is actually legitimately pleasant. The one on the river is cold enough to freeze your Winnebago). But I very clearly remember from not that long ago! Like, less than a decade ago! that one could kill a whole day on Mag Mile for the price of a nice coffee in the morning, and a glass of wine at sunset. And that is just not true anymore.

And that's setting aside the question of whether stores, restaurants, bars are truly the best Third Places, due to the cost barrier, even those somewhat inferior versions...just aren't around.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:43 AM on December 20, 2024 [6 favorites]

Ah, I remember when the Cabbagetown Chomp & Stomp was mostly me and my neighbours, maybe some folks moseying over from Inman Park or Candler Park. Or when the L5P Halloween Parade was just a bunch of local weirdos.

The Chomp & Stomp was the actual example I was thinking of. Daughter 2 is a bit freaked out by crowds, and we got under the Krog St Tunnel and it was a total madhouse and she's like we're not doing this, so we went home and made chili.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 9:46 AM on December 20, 2024 [1 favorite]

Reading through this I wonder how different and weirdly isolated high school would have been without a chance to spend hours absolutely bullshitting over crap coffee and pie at my town's Village Inn where one of our friend's waitressed some nights. Drank enough coffee to stop an elephant's heart those nights while my friends smoked and we all talked about not much at all.
posted by drewbage1847 at 12:53 PM on December 20, 2024

the question of whether stores, restaurants, bars are truly the best Third Places, due to the cost barrier,

I agree that the cost barrier is an issue. But I would say a small cost barrier can be a good thing, like the $5 MeFi hurdle to keep out spammers. An overpoliced Third Space sucks, but a curated space can help community grow. For my own example, we always try to impress on our stitch groups that we never require any purchases to participate. It requires goodwill from the store/restaurant/etc., but any good space requires goodwill from whoever provides oversight.

In our current setup we are kind of stuck with rent/property ownership costs. Even a lot of publicly owned community centers charge for use. If you can find a good free space, grab it! But in the absence of many of those, look for business owners who really want to create space for people the want to be around. Try to create partnerships and mutually beneficial situations.
posted by rikschell at 1:20 PM on December 20, 2024

But I would say a small cost barrier can be a good thing, like the $5 MeFi hurdle to keep out spammers.
I don't know: I think the $5 hurdle is most effective when people who want to behave in ways that are not aligned with the goals of the space find it otherwise extremely easy to hit up all manner of sites to try to exploit them for cash. The hurdle means a unique identity, which means that spammers can't just create another free email address and try again. But that's not a problem that in-person putative third spaces have: you can't write a script to spam coffee shops, you have to physically enter the spaces to put up ads and that takes time and effort that make the exercise unrewarding for spam. That's.... why spammers are a creature of the Internet, which first lowered the barriers to accessing commuication with large amounts of humans that presumably have money to spend.

The cost barriers and rent-seeking have just gotten worse and worse and worse with time. I have no earthly idea what to do about any of it, and I am very sad.

For about nine years I ran a free asexuality meetup in Austin. We'd buy a couple of drinks at a local coffee shop and just hang out and talk about whatever, and I just ate the ~$75/year fee to keep the Meetup.com account because it meant that people who needed to find us could. Money has been tight for most of my adult life, so we almost never ate out or even bought drinks out and about in favor of trying to save money by making food at home, but $7 for a stupid hot chocolate milkshake or whatever once a week and a yearly fee was worth having access to the physical space to create an offline community.

I haven't really had the energy to make my own offline community since I moved up here a few years back, but I hear that the price of an organizer account (one that can host a meetup) is now $300 per year and possibly no longer free to join as an attendant now, judging from a friend of mine. As I was running mine, I noticed increased monetization on the site: methods to charge people to attend your event, for example, and this idea that running meetup groups was a way to make money instead of just to meet and talk to people.
posted by sciatrix at 2:04 PM on December 20, 2024 [12 favorites]

We don't have a shared historic understanding of how to be urban in America. It's one of the starkest differences between us and most of the world. Every year well-meaning people move to one of the few actual cities in America and either fetishize all the "third space" and kill it, or are inconvenienced by the same and kill it.

I'm curious about how people outside America view this, particularly non-Western aligned old countries with a couple more centuries of experience.
posted by mathjus at 6:30 PM on December 21, 2024 [1 favorite]

I think there's a type of person who doesn't have much time on their hands because of childcare, commuting, and work, and who only leaves their home if it's an "event." Getting coffee at a run down diner or a cheap taco from a truck doesn't meet the bar; it has to be Instagram-worthy to go through the effort, so they all end up at the same place. It doesn't help if you might get heckled on Reddit for bringing your kid to the diner or that it takes an act of congress just to get your kid to climb up into the SUV and buckle in and make sure they have their favorite snack and entertainment. We have constructed a world where leaving the house to grab a coffee is not a quick thing for some people. Plus they already have the Wirecutter recommended coffee machine at home so why would it be worth leaving in the first place? The benefits of human interaction and engaging with your community are intangible, so we don't notice the deficit until later.
posted by tofu_crouton at 12:57 PM on December 22, 2024 [2 favorites]

Hard to beat a richer person's BATNA
posted by clew at 1:07 PM on December 22, 2024