Recently I have seen more and more media coverage and social media posts on loneliness. Studies indicate that the feeling of loneliness has increased throughout all age groups in almost all countries of the world (see here, here)
As far as I understand there are many reasons for this, and a common culprit seems to be the importance of the internet in most peoples’ lives. I think this importance will not decrease, but rather keep increasing in the next years. Also for all the other factors, there probably won’t be any developments that magically make the problem disappear in the next years, rather the opposite.
As a person who has relocated multiple times over large distances in their life, and lost a considerable amount of friends due to political differences and being confronted with bigotry of former friends, I had to find a systematic way to make new friends, and I feel like I have indeed found something that works for me.
I frequently see social media posts where people describe that they feel overwhelmingly lonely. That they tried out numerous ways to make friends and feel like they exhausted all of their options. The typical go-to examples for what people try out to make friends include going to the gym, library, dog park, generally speaking public places with people in them.
Many people tried to formulate a way to talk about this problem, including on social media. What I’d like to highlight is the idea of a so-called “third place”. While social media hasn’t created this concept, it has certainly given it more wide-reaching popularity.
Still, I think a very important point of distinction often goes unnoticed here. Most people who talk about the concept of a “third place”, and most people who hear about it, think it means places in public where you go regularly, and that’s it.
Instead, I think it makes sense to narrow the definition a little bit to a place where you go regularly, AND have to interact with other people. Wikipedia cites the work of a certain Ray Oldenburg who said one of the key characteristics of third places is “Conversation is the main activity”. This often falls under the table in (social) media representation of third places as a solution to loneliness.
That being said, in almost all places it’s of course tolerated to go there without interacting with someone on a specific day. But there are places where not interacting at all with anyone, each time you go there, would be increasingly perceived as weird and unfitting. Those are the real third places.
Examples include a DIY club, a book club, a local non-profit organisation, a hackerspace, even a sports club. Sports clubs are a funny exception here because they count as a third place in contrast to just going to a gym and doing exercise and leaving, because you have to interact with others in sports clubs.
Another interesting exception is a barber shop. In some communities barber shops are an important place to meet and talk to people from the neighbourhood. Contrary to that, in many European cultures going to the barber shop is a simple service between you and the barber and not a place to meaningfully create new connections.
Other examples would be a bar or a nightclub, but those tend to promote or reinforce drug use or even abuse. Having those as a third place could easily lead to friendships based on drug use.
A last interesting example I want to talk about is an online community. Online game guilds or discord servers can be valuable third places, even though they aren’t per sé places outside of the internet. Many people have found long-lasting friendships and other meaningful connections in online communities, especially people who are regularly excluded from public places on grounds of lacking accessibility. This is in contrast to the typical argument of the internet being the common culprit for increasing feelings of loneliness. Quite the opposite, the internet has made additional third places possible that were unthought of before.
Now that we have a good definition for the places where you can make friends, the only thing that is missing is the When and How. I can only speak from personal experience here on the example of going to hackerspaces.
I feel that going to the third place once weekly is already not quite often enough to create good friendships. If it’s all you can muster and the third place only offers this frequency, then it’s the best you can do. But if it’s possible to go there twice per week (with exceptions of course), that would certainly help.
In the past years I have often tried to get into hackerspaces simply by being there, or by trying to participate in the project of someone else. But that never really worked out, even though everyone was nice and welcoming. It turned out what I really needed to feel like I’ve earned my rightful place there was to bring a project of my own. I brought my laptop, sat down and worked on stuff I wanted to work on on my own anyway. Often, people would come over and be interested in what I’m doing. Other times while working on my project I overheard interesting conversations in the room and sometimes I even felt like I was able to participate in these conversations.
So, ideally you should have one or two third places where you go once or twice per week, and bring your own good reason to be there. That’s it folks. That should be enough to make you some friends.
tl;dr Most people talking about the concept of third places are missing the important requirement that “Conversation is the main activity”. This leads to many people trying to find third places in places that don’t really fit the criteria. This ultimately leads to a sense of defeat and, societally speaking, to a reduction of meaningful connections between all of us.
Feel free to write me a mail on what your experience with third places and making friends were, I’m looking forward to hearing from you :)