‘Friends’ and ‘Seinfeld’ knew the cure for loneliness | Hacker News Reader

‘Friends’ and ‘Seinfeld’ knew the cure for loneliness

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57 pointsgmays101 comments

> We can see this shift everywhere. The characters of the biggest shows of the '90s — "Friends," "Seinfeld," "Cheers" — spent the overwhelming majority of their time hanging out at the café, diner, and bar, and work was either an afterthought or a running joke.

These were television shows, not reality. Even in the 80s and 90s you couldn't spend all of your time in a Manhattan coffee shop or a bar (unless you were a drunk). I think our concept of what a "friend" is was heavily shaped by 20th century sitcoms and not realistic, setting up a couple of generations to be very lonely and very disappointed that life doesn't turn out like TV.

You don't need to spend all your time somewhere for it to become a decent third space. You just need to go regularly, at a similar enough time that you start building rapport with the people who also go at the same time. If you go to the gym or bar for an hour or two after work every weekday, for example, you'll quickly notice that the same people are there with you. Interact with them enough, and these people form the outer ring of your social life.

Then you need to have explicitly social gatherings. For example, I've got a biweekly game night that an old friend and I alternate hosting. We invite our friends and the occasional acquaintance from our outer rings, and some start coming regularly. Typically somewhere between 4 and 10 people show up, BYOB, and we play some board games into the odd hours. Often random subsets of the group will grab dinner together before hand.

Then you have your close friend maintenance regimen. People you're not seeing regularly anymore in the context you used to (whether it was school, and old workplace, etc), but that you want to maintain a relationship with. If you spend at least 1 weekend night a week grabbing dinner and some drinks with one of these people, you'll be able to maintain your relationships with up to a half dozen or so people (in addition to the ones that are in your more active group).

Mix in some larger gatherings/parties a couple times a year, and you've set yourself up a healthy social life.

Nailed it.

In threads like this, people often bring up gyms as social spaces.

Hell. No.

I've been using a gym for most of my adult life. Gyms are anti-social spaces. Big box gyms, sports clubs, the gym at the Y, campus gyms, the gyms that most people go to.

Maybe boutique gyms and gyms where you always work with a personal trainer are different. Every gym I've been to: hell, no.

I don't mean while working out. I mean before, in locker rooms, and after in the sauna or lounge. Those are both spaces where there's an expectation of some level of small talk.

Not in any gym I've ever worked out in. Who strikes up a conversation with strangers in a gym locker room? That's not a place where I go for smalltalk; it would be like talking to the other men at the urinals while we're pissing.

The best way to meet new people and make new friends, in my experience, isn't to simply be somewhere at a regular time - it's to do something which naturally involves interacting with the other participants. In other words, get a hobby.

To give an example: in the last few years I've met and befriended a lot of new people in my area through training in BJJ.

"it would be like talking to the other men at the urinals while we're pissing"

Doesn't everyone do that?

Hold your peace while you hold your piece.

I have the same opinion. As I said in a comment I made in this thread before, gyms are non-places today. Maybe a CrossFit gym can be a social space because there are workouts that require a partner. It's not enough to go somewhere regularly, you need to be forced to interact with people.

There's a pretty wide range of gyms. My old gym seems to be more like what you two are talking about, with just a weight room, an aerobics room with treadmills and stairmasters and such, and a locker room with a couple showers.

I'm talking about a full-on gym, with all that, various sport courts (racquetball, squash, etc), a locker room with a sauna, steam room, hot tub, etc., and social spaces with a cafe and seating.

The former expects you to show up, work out, and get out. The latter is a lot more conducive to loitering.

Exactly - everyone has their headphones on, no one wants to talk!

The only way I made friends at gyms was playing a sport - racquetball in my case, took years.

But again - I barely hung out with anyone outside the gym.

wow... for me gyms (or sports in general) was the #1 place to meet new people, here where I live and in my bubble (germany) it's quite common to spend a few hours in the local boulder gym, or climbing gym, drinking coffee, grep a pizza boulder/climb a bit and small talk, meet friends and new people, same on the local skate park or pump track, hang around, skate, talk, and meet new people, also the sauna/pool areas of some larger gyms are quite social, same goes for the local park, watch the kids at the playground, a coffee is always nearby and plenty of people to talk... and everything in walking or biking distance (I live in a small town)

A climbing or sports gym is different than a typical weightlifting gym. I mostly see people doing their sets alone, or running on treadmills and such

I don't know about Manhattan, but I can tell you in my small hometown, you can walk down to the pub any night and you'll meet up with some friends randomly, no planning required. It's actually amazing.

Of course this is much more difficult in large cities, but it's something to work towards, and is clearly possible.

imo, options to spend one's time being limited (in a good way) leads to these coincidences more often than in towns/cities with unlimited (sort of) options.

But speaking from experience, if you have a falling out you can’t really go back there anymore and choices are generally limited in small towns.

I agree that fiction — especially sitcoms — should not be taken as a model of reality. I studied film and media science, but one doesn't need academic rigour to come to that conclusion.

However I would still say the best way to avoid making friends is to avoid being in places where strangers hang out. Places where you come into low pressure contact with strangers are places where you get to know people — and where you get to know people, is where you find friends. Going to those places is just a way to increase your chances of talking to someone you like by increasing the number of people tou are talking to.

And the place for you might not be a cafe or a pub, it might be a library, a golf court, a ski hut, an art gallery, a vacation resort, a park, a camping place, .. you get the idea places where people hang out and don't do everyday stress stuff. So no train station platforms or grocery stores.

But places that are especially unsuited are places without strangers, so: your home (unless you invite strangers), deserts or other remote places.

Add in regularity. Friendship doesn't happen overnight.

I've just started taking up sword fencing again at a local club. It takes time for people to build up a rapport of yourself.

If I look decent, and turn up each week that's the image I paint. They have no other image of knowing me outside the club so that's the image they'll judge you on.

Also, subconsciously shoes are always the first thing a person will home-in on when they encounter you for the first time.

sorry, I got totally distracted and remembered a strange scene/gag from The IT Crowd ... "The Shoes!" but also this whole comment is probably way more telling of the fact that folks are expecting friendship to just <poof> happen when it really does require conscious, specific effort a lot of the time. We just didn't realize it was so direct when we were all in elementary/highschool/college/firstjob because it was second nature

I don't look at people's shoes. Why should I care what they wear on their feet? I wear shoes to the point where they're falling apart. If people judge me on that, then I want nothing to do with them.

People will judge you on no matter what. That is normal. They don't know you after all.

You likely do that too — when someone approaches you on the street you very quickly and intuitively judge their whole being to know whether you need to be on the guard or whether you decide you can have a chat with them.

Now unless the rest of the persons appearance gives you other clues totally broken shoes are in my experience a bad sign, most of the time.

Of course that is shallow knowledge of a person, and you can't truly judge someone as a person by the clothes they are wearing — but unless you want to get to know everybody you meet deeply before deciding they are not worth your time, clothes can be a fast (but low quality) proxy.

That also means your appearance is a fast and low quality proxy based on which others decide whether to talk to you and how they should go into a conversation with you.

Thst isn't normative btw., so it doesn't mean you need to wear boring suits all day. You could line two punks up next to each other and have one looking interesting and worth talking to, and the other shady in a bad way.

Good addition to my post. People forget that when they originally made friends (involuntary) regularity was a big part of it. Your parents might have expectwd you to go to $SPORT, so you went and got to know people there, some of which might have become your friends. Same but even greater in magnitude for school.

Now some might have terrible memories of school ans maybe never found a decent friend there, but as someone with multiple silblings I can assure you that luck (or the lack thereof) plays a big role when it comes to theae things.

not just regularity of going there yourself, but you also need to pick places or activities where most of the participants are regulars too.

and that is more likely the case for small active groups or clubs, not bars or museums. but it could be boardgame nights at a bar, anything that draws only a small group.

on events that draw a larger crowd, you have to pay attention to who the regulars are and focus on associating with those if you want to develop any kind of friendship.

There were way more places to hangout in the 1990s. Gentrification wasn't full tilt so rents were subdued. Record stores, book stores, video stores, arcades, coffeeshops where socializing not work was the norm. Movie theater going was different -- no phones. Teenagers weren't chased out of the malls.

These were television shows, not reality.

This article is wild. It's conflating television with real life.

How did we get to this point?

> How did we get to this point?

Don't reflect on society based on what some article leads you to believe.

We haven't conflated a damn thing. This article is an ad meant to influence on several topics ranging from politics (civil engineering, gentrification, etc.) to the literal brands mentioned. So much content on the internet is like this these days: a mess of paid junk trying to emulate real opinions hoping something catches.

I think Friends showed us what we most deeply desire - a life without concern for work where we spend most of our time with our loved ones at a Third Place away from home and work. I agree it is not literally realistic, but it could be viewed as aspirational.

Youtuber Andrewism made an excellent video about the Third Place last week that explains what various thinkers have written about these places, and considers how we might bring them back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD_CMrCpBMc

I much prefer having people over at home or going to their home over a Third Place. I think the only Third Place I really like is a park with a view.

Suburbia poor - rich in materials, poor in people and experiences aka life

In a world where our third places have degraded this is not surprising. I am walking distance to an Oakland hacker space and I love their social nights. Of course I love having friends over to my place too, but a good third place is lovely.

They actually seem pretty accurate depictions of friend groups to me.

Friends: the friend group was defined by college room-mate, family and room-mates i.e. people thrust together as a unit and then socialising together. They went to Central Perk as this unit, and did not become friends through it.

Seinfeld: the friend group was defined by college room-mate, a neighbour and an ex-girlfriend. They didn't meet in third-places, they went to the diner as that unit. That Kramer was an outgoing weirdo using his proximity to basically force himself into a pre-existing relationship is familiar. The presence of Elaine is unusual but she was basically grafted-on to fix a sitcom rather than drawn from real life.

Cheers: this is more of the "people you know at a third place" but the running joke was that despite drinking every day with each other, they weren't really friends and didn't even like each other. This type of "regular acquaintance" is perhaps a familiar experience for a lonely adult struggling to find new friends. You can shoot the breeze with someone you see regularly but it's a constrained relationship.

It's unfortunate that the strangers who want to talk at third-places are only the Kramers and Cliffs of the world. A combination of bores and nutters that you have to actively avoid. Anyone vaguely normal has ear-buds in and head down. It would be nice to try and reverse that. At a minimum, normalise saying "hello" to strangers as a polite necessity instead of a red flag. For some reason it's common when hiking but not in a city. I'm more likely to chat to a stranger in the wilderness than a dense neighbourhood.

I go to the gym every day and what I can say is that if it used to be a third place, now it has become more of a non-place[0]. Nobody talks to anyone anymore. People don't look at what's around them and are glued to their smartphones all the time while they rest. If you approach someone to ask something, and if they are also wearing headphones, make sure you repeat what you want to say, because inexplicably these cheap knockoff headphones have perfect sound isolation.

When we talk about the increase in loneliness, I can't help but associate it with the launch of the iPhone and the social apps. I wonder if the benefits brought by this device really outweigh its cons.

Furthermore, every month I organize a meetup with people who want to practice English (I live in Brazil) and usually 10 to 15 people attend. I think people want to connect with other people, but technology isn't helping them find those opportunities. I use meetup.com, but the person has to download the app or go to the website. I think most of my potential audience don't even know it exists because it's a very US thing.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-place

The gym has never been a social place. Everyone is there for a reason, normally to get fit.

We however do live in a very fearing world. With the stories that are spewed out daily, there is always a worry of "Is this person I'm going to meet going to X".

So it's safer to judge based on online social imagery, where the true creep holds.

Meetup / group sites while have an advantage point in meeting the tech they introduce are flawed. They are difficult to navigate, and again it falls symptom to the likes where AirBnB where anything worthwhile is normally berried at the bottom and you need to sieve through to reach the others.

The repeal of the fairness doctrine was the final nuke. Boy has that come home to roost.

The fairness doctrine only ever applied to broadcast media. It was never a thing for online services, cable TV, or print media.

As a life long gym rat, CrossFit is definitely the exception to this. And not even every class, you'll really want to ask the instructors which class is the "social" class. I've seen boxes where 4/5 classes are people woodenly exercising and leaving, and then one class everyone is friends and always are throwing parties and having a good time.

This is one of the reasons that, despite the immense cost, we're trying to stay in NYC as long as we can.

Two small children in an apartment definitely has its tough moments. But we live by a giant park packed with playgrounds, when we go we frequently bump into friends from school, meet friends of friends, etc. Everyone can go get an ice cream, head home happy. We have dozens of museums an easy subway ride away. etc etc etc

It's not like it's a perfect life but for this moment in life I really wouldn't trade it.

Why is this a New York specific phenomenon? Living in a large town/small city in Europe, I find the same effect plays out here. A very few number of times my social activities have been actively planned. Most occur after bumping into someone at a local venue, concert, or other event.

I guess it's quite rare within US.

It's actually not, every city in the US has packed parks and stuff to do.

I am talking from a US perspective. There are few cities in the US that offer this, though NYC is by no means the only one.

You should really get out of NYC sometime. Pretty much every city and even mid-sized town in the US has what you're describing. A lot of it is far easier to navigate than Brooklyn as well.

I get out of NYC plenty!

I’m not saying mid-sized towns have no amenities. I’m saying the sheer density of NYC provides many more opportunities. If you’re claiming that even mid sized towns have dozens of museums accessible by public transit… they do not.

But to provide more context to my original comment about serendipitous connections: the default path for many people living in NYC is not to move to a mid-sized town (fewer job opportunities, for one), it’s to move to the suburbs. Out in the burbs (where I’ve spent more time than I ever care to) you’re driving absolutely everywhere and people are scattered all over the place. That is what I don’t want.

Well you talked about having ice cream and going to parks, so I'd say yes pretty much everywhere in the US has that. Other places are also much more walkable than Brooklyn, tons of smaller cities have started focusing on revitalizing their downtowns and providing walkable communities.

> Well you talked about having ice cream and going to parks

That's two of the things I mentioned, yes. I also mentioned museums and other amenities which are also "third places", as discussed in the article.

It still sounds like the things you claim are unique to NYC aren't. Maybe your strong preference rests on something else you aren't identifying.

In my experience NYC has nothing in it that you can't find in dozens of other US cities for far cheaper.

Edited to remove worthless snark.

> In my experience NYC has nothing in it that you can't find in dozens of other US cities for far cheaper.

Then you haven’t truly experienced NYC, I’m sorry. It’s simply not a true statement.

I’m not saying NYC is for everyone or that you even have to like it, but it having nothing you can’t find in dozens of other cities? To paraphrase Principal Skinner: “can it be that I simply don’t know NYC as well as I should? No, it is all of the seven million inhabitants who are wrong”

Name something.

Also, it's pretty dubious to think 7 million people agree with you just because they live in the city in question.

I 100% concur with afavour that regularly running into acquaintances around town is magical, and wonderful, and pro-social, and a rare privilege.

I've had that experience only once in my life, when I lived literally in the center of town in Palo Alto, and ran into coworkers very regularly on the street, because our company gave us a subsidy of hundreds of dollars every month to live within a 10-block radius of the office. And these were misanthropic pale boys who mostly had no hobbies and avoided going outside and meeting other people if they could help it.

I've lived in 200k-sized cities and I've lived in college towns and I've lived in quaint, "walkable" suburbs. And nowhere have I had the experience of serendipity as a result of density, because in all those other places I would get in a car and drive to a specific destination point and meet no one either there or en route. And even if there were some amenities I could "easily" walk to within "only" a mile or so, no one else I knew walked there with any regularity, so I'd never see any friends around town.

Objections that go "but I'm happy with my life in XYZ location, how can you say that" are missing the point. If you haven't experienced the difference, it is as stark as night and day.

The experience of serendipity of urban life is available in almost every mid-tier city. No one in this thread has offered any explanation or example of some unique thing that NYC has that other places don't that leaves their their poor, clueless denizens deprived of cultural benefits they just can't understand.

The hard part is not finding an ice cream shop, it’s bumping into people you know, or being able to walk over to their home easily

Bumping into people you know is more likely in a small city than a large one.

> being able to walk over to their home easily

Unless your friend (or you) lives on the G or some other impossible to get to place in NY.

People do this all the time across America. I did this in Michigan, California (not the coastal cities), small town New England, Colorado, Texas, etc.

No, no they don’t. That commenter explicitly called out museums etc. You are not going to find that level of museum in a mid sized town.

I think they're mixing two different things. Yes, you can go to a lot of museums in NY. No, living in NY doesn't provide an easier and more serendipitous social environment for families than the average US city.

That's so misleading. The number of mid-tier cities in the US with worthwhile museums and varied cultural access is in the many dozens.

Totally skewed to think that NYC/L.A./Chicago are the only places you can raise kids in a bustling urban community.

Anything Cincinnati-sized or bigger will do.

The Cincinnati MSA has over 2 million people in it. It's not a mid-sized city.

The comparison is to NYC and we are talking tshirt sizes. Not sure a more granular classification does any work here.

I agree, it's not exclusive to NY. I live in a college town of around 65k (100k with the student population) and it's amazing. We have a very modest home, but it's super walkable: 1/2 mile to a small grocery store, 3/4 mile to downtown, 1 mile to the river, 1 1/2 mile to the library.

We moved during COVID from one of those cities where "a park is a giant empty field of grass". Major life changer.

This seems nuts to me. I grew up in Colorado and have also lived in several other states where people are more comfortable and likely to bump into each other in public spaces than NYC. In NYC, people are nearly all strangers and in a big hurry. Even living in Mountain View was better.

In terms of serendipity, I'd put a college town far ahead of a large city.

> In NYC, people are nearly all strangers and in a big hurry

Maybe you've only been in midtown Manhattan? I live in a Brooklyn neighborhood where we bump into people we know constantly and no-one is rushing around madly.

You got it exactly!

Every time in NYC, I've spent nearly my entire time in Manhattan, excluding one trip to my friend's folks' place on Staten Island. That seemed much better in terms of the odds serendipitous bumping into friends, but still less so than mountain state.

Anecdata: currently living in NYC in a very similar situation to GP (possibly the same neighborhood based on their description?), and I have easily 10x more such serendipitous encounters than in any of the 4 other places I've lived (from suburbia to another major US urban center).

It's a pretty well known phenomenon here that you see people you know (or, say, notice the same person twice in the same day in totally different parts of the city) way more often than you'd expect. Sure, 10x as many people live here, but you see 100x as many people each day.

The "people who don't live here assume that residents are rushing around places that look like Midtown 24/7" is another pretty well known phenomenon, fwiw

We constantly joke that Brooklyn is a village. I know like 20 people in the city, but somehow run into 1 of them every time I go out for a walk.

People do live in neighborhoods, even in major cities. Their kids tend to go to schools in the area, so the families will be near by. It's not surprising at all to run into people even way outside your neighborhood in NYC>

> In terms of serendipity, I'd put a college town far ahead of a large city

My family moved from a suburb to downtown Boston just before our child entered kindergarten. We ran into people we knew literally every day. It became a running joke because we made it almost 80 straight days in the summer of randomly running into someone. The best moment came while attending a work event with a visiting coworker. I mentioned this phenomenon and we actualky ran into two people I knew on the trip between office and restaurant.

We've since moved back to the suburbs. I see my actual neighbors less frequently than I ran into someone I knew in the city.

It seems like a paradox, but major factors that (IMHO) contributed to this were:

a) Everyone lived in a small physical area b) Most travel in the area is on foot c) The high concentration of "staple" stores like hardware and grocery, combined with the relatively small size made it easier to run into people

It sounds weird, but running into friends and acquaintances is one of the things I miss the most about living in the city.

> It sounds weird, but running into friends and acquaintances is one of the things I miss the most about living in the city.

you do not sound weird. what you are suggesting is the best part of being part of a "community"

> It sounds weird, but running into friends and acquaintances is one of the things I miss the most about living in the city

Hah, I guess I worded that awkwardly. The weird part isn't the joy of running into people, it's that it was a very common occurrence in the city, which (I think) is unexpected for many people.

Agree!

I’ve run into friends during car commute (which is more complicated due to car sizes, separate lanes, slow relative speeds, etc. greatly reducing the number of cars you are near enough to, on a given day).

What do you do then? Honk and wave? Call their phone? Quite a different thing than running into someone on the bus, subway or walking, where you can talk for 10 minutes easily.

Happy to see I'm not alone and someone else is complaining about our sad parks,

"What we call parks look like parking lots with some grass on them, perhaps a baseball diamond. That's not the kind of park that draws people in," Tayana Panova, a researcher who studies the built environment's effects on mental health, told me. "We need parks that have amenities and assets that make it desirable for people to go there." A third space of dreams isn't a barren field. It also includes pools, benches, art, fountains, playgrounds, and food stands — things people gather at.

>It also includes pools, benches, art, fountains, playgrounds, and food stands — things people gather at.

Can't have those, the homeless might use them to avoid suffering for a few minutes and be visible, and that makes people angry.

Around these parts it's more like a few hours to a few days but it is still a fair point. One answer would be to build and support more places, enough for everyone to enjoy.

Nah, better for it to be a crime to be homeless in public

>avoid suffering for a few minutes

Not sure where you live, but where I've lived, they form camps, do drugs in the open, scream at people, and vandalize their surroundings. They make a good environment hostile to everyone. That's what most people are angry about.

In Ohio we have professional hobos. People that hang out with signs, know all the laws, dress a certain way, make themselves up all dirty, and beg for money. They do quite well with the fools here. You can see them change out for shifts. Whole families cycle through the shifts or work in a group with their children on display.

I guess they are entertainer then ?

I’ve seen that described several time here on this forum.

I’m skeptical that those people really do “well for themselves”.

But I’m open to it?

I doubt they have sick day or that they’re saving for retirement. But who know?

Who you say they make more than a service industry worker for instance ( per hour )

That's only half of the story. A lot of those people are mentally ill. There are also a lot of "hidden" homeless people who live diverse lives. I knew some travelling kids that rode freight around the country, they were typically sheltered by friends. They did odd jobs and could busk, and yes they did drugs, but they weren't shitting in the street and boofing heroin in plain sight. There's people that are down on their luck, and there's people who just gave up the rat race - and there's a good chance they aren't slamming meth, but they can turn into drunks fast.

Nah, the "camps" around here are a bunch of tents where people just want to be left alone. The only violence happens to other homeless people, so it's "contained" in a way. The best part is that the city keeps throwing away everything these people physically own, so they have no hope of improving their situation and ever escaping homelessness, and all the social workers struggle to keep in touch with the homeless community because they keep being jerked around and screwed with for no benefit.

Tell me, if you are homeless, where are you supposed to go when the sun goes down? As far as I can tell, it is a crime to not be in a bed you have paid for. Why have we made it a crime to be alive?

Ideally, you'd have a bit of both. A large open space is needed for a lot of sports and hobbies. In cities I see a lot more parks that are nothing more than a bit of run down looking playground equipment and a couple benches than large open fields.

The parks with more amenities tend to have things like fenced off areas, nets and marked courts for ball sports, bright overhead lights, buildings, and actual parking lots. Busy outdoor entertainment centers are nice, but open green space is important too.

Sounds like regular parks in my city.

Wouldn't it be ironic if the current worry in the US about public spaces (i.e. homeless and/or drug addicts) were two sides of the same coin: the goal is to isolate yourself in a massive home in the suburbs to protect yourself from the homeless and drug addicts. And, if you fail at that goal, you then have no choice but to become what everyone fears.

The more people succeed at isolating themselves the bigger the problems of social isolation including homelessness and drug addiction.

Last year I moved to the downtown of a small progressive college town (definitely not a party school). I joined the volunteer fire department, and then 2-3 times a week I walk across the street to local coffeeshop for breakfast. I do all my grocery shopping for two days at a time at the small bodega across the street and just carry my groceries back. I go to a bunch of local theater shows. There's a community center, so I go to events at that. There's a train station if I need to go into the big city, but I rarely even use it now. I hardly use the car at all anymore.

A year later, I know dozens of people. I know the mayor and half the city counsel. I cannot walk anywhere without getting waved at by 2-3 people. For the first time in my life since college, I feel like I have a community.

There's very real cons: it's more expensive, I've got no private yard, and my apartment is hot and tiny.

But I really enjoy the sense of community. It definitely helps me feel connected.

I don't know if you need a third place. Home will do fine, just invite people to hang out to watch sports games, movies, BBQ, whatever. I lived separately, but I had a few friends living together and it was an open door policy like Seinfeld and Friends... just walk in.

Another point is a lot of my friends, who have trouble meeting other friends, don't have hobbies. During the summer, I say "I'm going hiking every weekend this summer, whoever wants to come can join". If no one else goes, that's fine my dog still has an awesome time. Sure enough, friends show up, sometimes with their coworkers or their hair barber. These friends are closer than the beer, coffee crowd because we already have the hobby in common.

EDIT: the main commonality between the open door policy and hiking example is consistency. Any time not busy, people will just default gravitate to the house or hiking meetup.

I think it's good if you have a home where people can meet and gather, but many times, that is not ideal, especially for anyone who is in a lower socio-economic class, or has significant family members or roommates there. Having people come over is a whole thing of "playing host" or "entertaining guests" which means that you might need to clean up some, you're going to offer food and beverages, you may need to determine a program of entertainment, whether it's movies or cards or conversation. That's a burden, and it can drain the host's resources.

Someone's home is also non-neutral territory. It's guests coming into someone's owned living space. That creates a unique dynamic.

The reason third spaces are popular is because none of those burdens apply. The restaurant, or coffeehouse plays host to us, so the cleanup is on them, the menu is theirs, and we know the bounds of activities that can be done. Third spaces are neutral spaces; none of us live there, and we are all essentially "guests" on the same footing, so it's comfortable, especially if a man and woman are alone together, the third space is a public meeting place where things are much less likely to get weird.

For decades, especially while I was homeless and living on the streets, I enjoyed third spaces with my friends. We were safe and climate-controlled in the coffeehouse, and we had hours of diversion while we played card games. Street urchins and our church friends would come and go as they pleased. We could tank up on beverages or a little pastry. There was a convenient bathroom, and oh, the people-watching potential! We were downtown in a college town, and the nightlife never stopped!

My circle of friends was down to a tight-knit three people, and I was the youngest among them, and we played card and board games right up until the pandemic hit. At that point, our third spaces were all decimated. Our favorite teahouse closed forever. We scattered to the four winds. One of us is just too old to keep going out, and the other lady seems rather paranoid of COVID-19 that she won't do social outings. We really don't have a third space to go, either. Well, there's a little place across the street, with an extraordinarily surly owner and two weird dogs.

Recurring, reliable activities are great. You would always know when to meet us downtown for cards. We would go to evening Mass and then proceed to the coffeehouse, like clockwork. That's important. We could count on getting mostly the same baristas on shift and seeing the same people each time. I thought about advertising on meetup.com or something, you know, just to get some visibility beyond our local circle. But COVID-19 has changed the landscape.

Eh I don’t like to have people over because then it becomes a regular thing, people pop in unexpectedly and I don’t really want to host and cleanup that often. Much simpler to go down to the bar and come back to a mostly private experience at home with the family.

Cities in Europe, Japan, and Korea still have vibrant and central "third place" cultures, perhaps because the apartments tend to be smaller. Loneliness in Europe IMHO seems more to occur outside cities where density is lower, though even there people our "out and about" more than I see in the US suburbs.

France is recently obsessed with “tier lieux” in rural place.

Coffee place, book exchange, brewery, shop-postoffice-coffee, second hand shop and the mix of all the above.

I go there every year or so, this year the “tier lieu” is what striked me as strong trend.

It’s not new, but it’s on everyone lips.

> In Germany, they have a term for the beer you drink as you walk to the next bar, a "wegbier."

The US has that too, but in New Orleans mostly. It’s called a too go cup and it’s mighty convenient.

Also, New Orleans is full of third places and so tiny that a bike is plenty to move around

>In Germany, they have a term for the beer you drink as you walk to the next bar, a "wegbier."

There is a humorous pun on “Wegbier”. It is sometimes called “Fusspils” (foot beer) which is a homophone of “Fusspilz” (athlete’s foot).

New Orleans is such a treasure. One of the few "European" cities in the U.S..

It's a real shame it's going to be taken by the sea.

Yeah, there is still some good time to be had in the meantime.

I can picture the last days of the city already. It will be a drunk brass band on a Cajun navy boat, parading into oblivion.

https://archive.is/RAOw9

I... does anyone else have issues with the captchas used on this site? I never previously questioned my humanity but I can't seem to satisfy its definition of bridges and motorcycles.

It’s because you use cloudflare dns. Switch to another dns provider. Seems to be a spat between the author of archive and cloudflare about what the proper dns protocol requires. Can read more about it if you search through hacker news

Community is showing up. Go somewhere every week and see what happens.

It's depressing when all the third spaces are bars full of miserable people

My third place is disc golf leagues/tournaments. The great thing about the sport is that it's easy to pick up and tournaments are usually set up in such a way that you can choose a group that suits your ability. The social aspect is great and you get to spend time outdoors surrounded by trees.

My third place is the local hackerspace. This has been the case since 2010, except, perhaps surprisingly, for the few years when I lived/worked in silicon valley. Weirdly, hackerspaces don't seem to work the same in silicon valley. Everybody is too busy at their tech job to have any energy left to spend free time building stuff purely for fun, and real estate is too expensive to allow for affordable memberships. When I went to the local hackerspace, the few people there were busy working on their own startup and nobody was talking to anybody, they weren't there for fun, they were there to work. Noisebridge and Ace Monster Toys were better, but too far away (SF and Oakland, respectively) to be convenient. In other places I've been (Texas, Virginia) hackerspaces seem to work a lot better as third places and be more fun oriented. I chalk this up to less intense work environments and cheaper real estate.

Ample pay to hang out with your friends, and skilled editors?

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