I’m sitting in a coffee shop trying to do some writing, but first I needed to get some words off my chest: this was fifth place I tried. It’s shortly after lunchtime on a Monday in October and the first four places I tried—including three other cafes and the local public library—were so stuffed full of people that I would have been squatting in the corner hoping for a sympathy chair had I stayed longer than walking in and right back out again.

We’ve stopped making third places.

Or, if you want to call coffee joints third places, we’ve stopped making the kind of third places where you don’t need to spend anywhere from three to eight bucks to buy a drink so you can use their wifi guilt-free for an hour… tho, even then, I had to drive in a loop of about fifteen kilometres just to find one with a spare seat.

First places are where we live.

Second places are where we learn, work and contribute.

Third places are where we go to be social and thrive and be outside of the other two places. I like to write and create and think in third places… but this usually means I do most of my writing and creating and thinking over an expensive coffee in a local Starbucks. 

Fair enough, there’s a teachers strike on right now and the library being packed with teenagers who are off school because of the labour dispute was not a surprise, but I’ve been there on any other given day and finding an empty chair is always a roll of the dice.

And true, when I go out at 8am with my writing device ready I usually have my pick of places to be a write and create and think and sit pretty much anywhere I want in the doing of those things.

But we’re not a society that creates public buildings to just hang out in. There’s a local rec centre, but I’ve checked there, too, often and found it just as hopping busy as any cafe or library, it’s thirty or forty seats filled with people who beat me to the punch with their computers or whatever.

Parks are wonderful third places, as is the bragging rights of the city having an absolutely enormous river valley trail system filled with nooks and crannies. But too, we live in a winter city, so on a cool, late-autumn day when the rain is off and on and the wind is blowing a pre-winter chill, sitting outside is not a great place with a sketchbook let alone an expensive laptop computer. 

Where are our third places?

Certainly if you have a few bucks to throw at a coffee or a beer or a hamburger you can sit in a cafe or a pub or a fast food restaurant. Is that the healthiest situation for a society? I have written elsewhere, or maybe even here, on the trouble with losing our third places, the virtualization of our seconds and the isolation of our firsts. The ones we have left are filled with social media trolls and AI ghosts in the machine or pay-to-play hot seats at a bustling corporate cafe, and it all seems a little sickly and sad. Even more so as winter creeps closer day by day and I remember that I’ll be trapped in my house for weeks on end soon, hunkering down and trying to find the motivation that is so much more clear and urgent when I’m out and about in public.

Either that, or I’ll drive around looking for a warm seat in what is left of the third places, shell out my three bucks for a mediocre coffee and try and feel like the world is not blurring into something even more isolating than in already seems.