Ideas
In 1989, the sociologist Ray Oldenburg cemented his status as required reading for hungover college freshmen when he coined the concept of “third places” in his book The Great Good Place. Third places, which are informal spots to gather outside of home and work for socializing, have been features of societies going back to antiquity, from Greek agora and Viennese cafés to barber shops and Burger King dining rooms. But their role in making cultures vibrant and communities cohesive, Oldenburg warned, had begun to “constitute a diminishing aspect of the American social landscape.”
He was right to worry. These days, the role of coffee shops and bars, libraries and community centers, civic clubs and houses of worship, have faded as the creep of work and domestic obligation in American life have become all but inescapable. According to the 2021 Census Bureau’s Time Use Survey, Americans were already spending significantly less time with friends before the pandemic rearranged life entirely. Our collective isolation has only metastasized since then. In 2024, a staggering 17% of Americans claimed to have zero friends, up from 1% in 1990, around when Oldenburg was first urging caution.
As a journalist reporting on the culture of work in American life, I found that the unnerving consequences from this social and civic decay go well beyond what the data conveys. We already know that Americans are working longer hours than most of our peer nations with less money and less stability to show for it. For many people, the cost of living has increasingly turned free time into a luxury. And, in the place of in-person socialization, we’ve bent our necks toward our screens. And while it may feed us an endless stream of perfect Corgi videos, it also has allowed work to seep into our off hours and has facilitated an unprecedented loneliness crisis among younger Americans.
As we’ve shifted our lives online, there are now fewer third places that provide communities and individuals with opportunities to engage in low-stakes hangs and chance encounters with people of different ages, backgrounds, and life experiences. Co-working spaces, billed as community hubs, combine the trappings of a self-selecting office with the cheery imperative to network. Quick-service businesses from Starbucks to McDonald’s have morphed from being democratic places with a low-financial barrier to entry into glorified takeout counters with overworked employees and limited seating. While social media platforms and online spaces have created communities for some, technology has been linked in far-ranging ways to a loneliness epidemic that prompted a formal warning by the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Endorphins and digital high-fives aside, crushing a Peloton ride is simply no match for doing something, anything, with another person in real life.
Broadly, this growing lack of social exposure is terrible for us and terrible for democracy. Using the voter registration data of 180 million U.S. voters, Harvard researchers Jacob R. Brown and Ryan D. Enos analyzed how geographic polarization—the growth of physical partisan clusters— has evolved from regional phenomena (red counties, blue metro areas, for example) down into individual neighborhoods and blocks. “A large proportion of voters live with virtually no exposure to voters from the other party in their residential environment,” they wrote in 2021. “Such high levels of partisan isolation can be found across a range of places and densities and are distinct from racial and ethnic segregation.” In other words, at the street level, Americans are going through their days with hardly any interactions with people who are different from them, be it demographically, economically, and politically. As a result, our politics are growing more extreme and our elected representatives have become less open to compromise and exponentially more annoying.