So, I recently saw a quote about college that completely pulled me up short, because it is such an accurate observation:

Granted, there are many other things that the quote doesn't take into account (the proximity of close friends, the bracing new freedom of young adulthood, parties, fewer responsibilities, I could go on), but at its core, it feels incredibly true. There are certainly also many post-college adults who do actually live a life described in the quote, but I'd wager they are not in the majority.

So, college. Before James Madison University (Go Dukes!) emerged into the national spotlight as a brief stop for successful head coaches en route to larger Power 4 programs (no, of course I'm not bitter about the "success tax"), it was, and still is, a serene campus nestled in the Shenandoah Valley, and the school I attended for four excellent years.

I loved college. I met my then-and-now closest friends there (shoutout to "The Fellas"), I wrote my first newspaper article (a full-page review of "Derivations of Venus" by Lisa Titus, in the Arts section of the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record), and I grew and learned and expanded my understanding of what was possible in the world. And I hung out.

If I was done with classes and wanted to see what folks were up to, I would head up to the Highland Room to see who was there, relaxing or shooting pool. Or if it was Thursday night, I would crowd into the community room of McGraw-Long Hall with everyone else and watch "A Different World," or maybe "Martin" or "In Living Color," depending on the night. On some days, I would shoot the breeze in the Warren Campus Center, or run headlong into hijinks in the trademark pandemonium of Eagle Hall. In short, as the internet and mobile phones really weren't a thing in the late 80s/very early 90s (I know, I'm totally dating myself, but seriously, we didn't know how good we had it at the time), I didn't really plan to meet up with groups of people. If I wanted to socialize with no agenda, it just required a little serendipity, and more importantly, a place to hang out. A "third place."

The concept of the Third Place was theorized by sociologist Ray Oldenburg, and is defined as follows:

Of course, there's a second, more important aspect to this theory worth mentioning:

Think about diners where the coffee was just okay, but the conversation was good. Or the barbershop where you arrived early and waited longer than you needed to because you enjoyed the never-ending "LeBron vs. Jordan" arguments. Or how I used to work in a record store, and I would see the same people come in day after day to hang out, flip through the rows of vinyl, and talk endlessly about music. It's the feeling of being somewhere that had no agenda for you; somewhere you belonged without having to perform belonging.

Fast-forward to today: those places are disappearing, and most of us felt it before we had language for it. So, what happened?

Three forces converged, and as always, it starts with money.

Real estate pressure and rising operational costs made the economics of low-friction, low-consumption gathering spaces nearly impossible to sustain. A coffee shop where people sit for three hours on one drink is, on paper, a terrible business. A diner that doesn't turn tables fast enough gets replaced by something that does.

Then the efficiency gospel took hold: somewhere in the past two decades, the cultural pressure to be productive colonized every available hour (my least favorite aspect of all of this). Unstructured time stopped feeling like rest and started feeling like waste. When every moment is potentially optimizable, sitting somewhere with no clear purpose starts to feel irresponsible.

And then social media brought us connection without geography, and community without commute. It was fun for a while, but it just didn't deliver what it promised. What it delivered instead was audience, performance, and the specific loneliness of being surrounded by people while feeling completely unseen. The feed replaced the gathering space without replacing the thing the gathering space actually provided.

Instead, what we’ve wound up with are things that look like third places, but operate on completely different logic. Boutique gyms and branded coffee shops that feel like community, but require ongoing consumption to access. Online groups can generate real connection, but those are fragile, and mediated by platforms whose incentives have nothing to do with your wellbeing. It’s worth noting that none of these are truly third places. They're responses to the same hunger, and they feed it imperfectly.

For anyone designing spaces, products, or organizations, the question is whether we're willing to build things optimized for human presence rather than human consumption. That's a different design brief than most of us are used to working from, but the need it responds to is as old as Thursday night “must-see TV,” and it isn't going anywhere.

Considering the current state of things, reading I Cheerfully Refuse (2024) by Leif Enger seems like a strange choice. The description follows:

So, I’m sure how you can see that the plot is just a little too on the nose considering, well, everything at the moment.

But I loved it. That’s the short version. The longer version is that I found myself fully invested in Rainy’s story, as he sets out on a deteriorating Lake Superior aboard a salvaged boat (stay with me), and what unfolds is part elegy, part fable, and a story that’s deeply hopeful. A road story without roads, that speaks to the idea of hope is something you carry with you, rather than something you find. And the warmth and humanity of the story against the backdrop of a future America that’s coming apart at the seams resonates with the incredible absurdity of real life in 2026: going to work and posting on LinkedIn and watching prestige television on HBO (on a related note, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is perfectly delightful) while things go off the rails. In the novel, Engar seems to be insisting that kindness is a form of resistance, and that beauty still matters even when the systems around it are failing.

The real losses in this world are communal ones: the places where people used to gather, the stories that used to travel between strangers, the informal networks of care that held neighborhoods together before everything optimized itself into isolation. Sound familiar?

If you've been thinking about third places, about what we've traded away for convenience and efficiency, or what it means to keep showing up when things are falling apart, this novel will feel like it's in conversation with those thoughts. Read it slowly. It rewards the patience.

And as always, thanks for being a local, and be sure to visit Rural & Co. to continue the conversation. You'll be glad you did.