How Third Places Bring Back the Joy of Being
Remembering to Enjoy “The Scent of Time”
Earlier last month, on a whim to break from my usual Saturday routines, I drove out west to visit a friend. We met in the small Ontario city where we both used to go to university.
The week had been sweltering. In a few days, the heat would ignite fires that would blanket Manhattan, 800 kilometers away, with ash.
On this Saturday, we caught a break. The air was refreshing and cool, while the summery sky stayed cloudless and bright, making us keen to take a long walk around town and revisit all the old sights, three years older.
Despite our familiarity, it wasn’t hard to discover novelty. Construction rose up over previously vacant spaces. Light rail, still being laid down while we studied here, now roped and zipped around the city. Bike lanes and stoplight cameras, once mundane and rendered invisible in the busy background of our routines, caught our attention for the first time. Time and distance away forced us to see the things we were accustomed to, anew.
Outside a police station, we spotted a large offbeat sculpture. Two massive concrete loops weaved together to form an abstract shape. We wondered what unexpected motive would tempt anyone to put strange art in front of a functional-looking structure. Then, we had that same conversation that everyone does about not ‘really getting’ abstract art.
In side avenues, businesses from insurance companies to trucking carriers, had set up their offices in colorful, residential houses. It was a feature quite particular to the town, owing to how strict North American cities usually are about zoning.
But what especially captured our attention that day, were three stone chess tables, underneath the silhouette of a public parking garage. This was intended to be a Third Space — somewhere the planners had hoped strangers would chance on each other, and decide to sit down for a game of chess.
It was empty. With both the unimpressive location and absence of people giving the impression that the space was rarely used for its intended purpose. We sat there, and since we were already talking about the layout of the town, we got to trying to solve the mystery of the empty chess tables underneath the parking garage.
Why would the city put the chess tables here? Was there a sort of quota? A sudden deadline slammed onto some exasperated architect’s desk? Why chess?
We agreed it wasn’t a bad idea. Just that the execution was strange. If the tables were in the center of the nearby university district, people would definitely stop by to play. If it were in a park even, the urban planners would have been far more likely to succeed in sparking up the spontaneous games between strangers they were hoping for.
Yet here we were, on a perfect Saturday afternoon with everyone out and about, and no one was mingling under a parking lot to enjoy chess.
What’s a Third Space, Anyways? How about a First Space and a Second?
Coined by Ray Oldenburg, a third space refers to places where people spend time between home (‘first’ place) and work (‘second’ place). They’re places we go to pause, interact with new people, form community, and enjoy a good time, without any firm agenda.
Time spent in third spaces feels slow and unrushed. Lack of hurry gives us the chance to experience lingering contemplation, a state where we can wind down and absorb the ‘fragrance’ of the moment around us.
Examples of third spaces include public parks, outdoor dining spaces, libraries, and museums.
A knock-on effect of the pandemic is how it’s changed our dynamic with space. Remote work routines have meant that for many, home and work life are longer separated physically. First Space and Second Space have melded into the same thing.
We’re familiar with the benefits. Less time spent commuting. More control over our schedules. More flexibility throughout the day to sprinkle in breaks for self-care, housework, and hobbies.
There are trade-offs, however. Studies have shown that the office acts as a ‘container’ for work life. Having a dedicated second space, makes it easier for us to set boundaries for when we work. Working from home can gradually corrode those boundaries. This is why many people end up working longer hours at home.
Additionally, staying in the comfort of home comes with a greater onus to foster new relationships and find fresh social interactions. Without consistent effort to spark up new social opportunities, it becomes easy to slide into cycles of monotonous routine and isolation. Regular initiative, therefore, becomes necessary to obtain social benefits that otherwise come passively by spending extended chunks of time in second and third spaces.
With the office, think of face-to-face mentorship for people starting their careers; or little breaks throughout the day to chat with peers and build comradery. With third spaces, think of opportunities to chance on new acquaintances, or build familiarity with others who frequent the same places as you.
But That Doesn’t Mean Back to the Office, or Office Third Spaces Are the Answer
None of these trade-offs mean going back to the office is some sort of panacea. After all, people weren’t spending more time in third spaces when they worked from the office. The commute and rigidity of office schedules both made that difficult.
Many companies are trying to leverage the benefit of third spaces by integrating them into the workplace. It’s more common to see offices that incorporate cafes, rec rooms, dining areas, and outdoor patios. In an effort to encourage ‘culture’ and mingling amongst co-workers.
On closer examination, it’s hard to conclude that these spaces fulfill the real function of third spaces.
Certainly, they’re helpful for facilitating conversations about work and encouraging warmer relationships within teams. But we can’t forget they reside in the backdrop of work. Meaning, people who occupy those spaces are aware that they are at a work function. They can’t cut loose and be themselves. The effect, on a personal level, is that when people are in office ‘third spaces,’ they’re unlikely to feel the genuine ease that a third space is intended to invoke.
So back to the office, and more office ‘third spaces,’ don’t seem like an all-in-one solution to get us enjoying more quality time in third spaces.
Third Spaces Might Just Not Fit into Our Day-to-Day Lives
Consider this: Is there any place, besides your home, you go to at least three times a week and spend an hour without any work, social, or self-improvement motives? Somewhere you go just to go?
If you’ve answered no, don’t worry. It’s a feature, not a bug — life isn’t structured to make it easy.
The biggest obstacle to the third space is the feeling that you’re wasting time. Directionless time, in general, is hard to justify when it comes at the expense of potential productivity, responsibilities, or squeezing in extra moments to spend with family and friends.
It’s not that time spent in a third space feels like a waste of time in the moment. Usually, it’s the opposite — third space activities tend towards those which impart in us rare experiences of timelessness, moments where we forget our awareness of time.
Rather, it’s a byproduct of busyness — an excess of obligations that demand us to always be ‘on’ — which forces us to be acutely aware of fleeting time that could service our obligations. Meaning, busyness, makes it hard for us to want to go to third spaces in the first place.
Because of our aversion to wasting time, existing third spaces are often subsumed into quasi-second space roles. Café’s for example, which historically acted as places for conversation and acceptable loitering, have largely been reinvented into productive spaces.
If we don’t get coffee and go, our time in the café is typically directed by an aim. We go to them because we need somewhere to catchup with friends, or because we want a change of scenery while working away on our laptops. Since everyone in the café is also busy and also attending to a personal aim, we share an unwritten expectation not to intrude on each other. Which means the café typically doesn’t invite the social openness necessary for unplanned interactions and community building, as a third space should.
Part of the formula of a good third space is aimlessness. People need to feel comfortable to linger and receive whatever interaction the world has in store for them that day.
The other part of the formula is integration into our routines. People need to have reason to gravitate towards the third space. Just like people gravitate towards home after work, or towards work when it’s 8 AM.
Think of the classic English pub, itself a dying institution, where regulars go after work or when a match is on. Or the practice of la comida, the midday meal taken in Spain, where people meet up at their favorite local spot with friends, co-workers, or family.
A large degree of cultural support is certainly necessary for third spaces like those to be so seamlessly incorporated into everyday life. I mean, imagine trying to tell your boss at noon that you’ll be gone until three because you’re practicing La Comida. It just doesn’t fit with how we structure our days.
We’re both busy and expected to stay busy — making it hard to stomach spending time on what at a surface-level amounts to doing nothing, out of some esoteric pursuit of aimlessness.
Why Lingering is at Odds with Modern Life
So, the whole point of a third space is to engage in a low commitment, undirected activity like eating or chess — while being open to whoever joins the space. In short, to linger. Flub about. Reflect on your day and converse.
Byung Chul Han’s book, “The Scent of Time”, is about how lingering is at odds with modern life.
The main challenge is the goal-oriented structure of our day-to-day lives. With the 9 to 5, there’s a charted course for how we should spend the bulk of our time, along with daily expectations from others who depend on us.
Additionally, ‘Living for the Weekend,’ which is a byproduct of how regimented the 9 to 5 life is, results in pressure for leftover time to be maximized with exciting experiences, that make the stresses of the week feel worthwhile.
Since the majority of our time is not under our control, we need to get the most out of the time we have control over. As a consequence, lingering feels ‘wasteful’ because its opportunity cost is either productive time, or the little time we have for more ‘exciting’ experiences.
Chul Han believes that lingering contemplation allows us to uncover the beauty of our surroundings. If we depend entirely on immediate pleasures, and move from goal to goal without it, we’ll rarely get the chance to enjoy satisfying moments of beauty. Beauty is owed to what he calls duration, a strong immersion in the present, such that the pace of time slows down and falls out of our awareness.
Byung Chul Han also speculates that modern thinking involves constant projection into the future. We start our days thinking about what we’ll get done through the day and through the rest of the week.
A step further, we chart our lives out with larger dreams and goals we hope to fulfill in the distant future. We expect ourselves to fully commit our time in the present towards progressing closer to those future dreams, and worry when we are not. We constantly direct our mental energy towards future objects.
All results, according to Chul Han, in “Haste, franticness, restlessness, nervousness, and a diffuse sense of anxiety determine today’s life. Instead of leisurely strolling around, one rushes from one event to another.”
Our orientation towards the future, and goal-oriented, project-focused day-to-days, create a fast-paced, ‘accelerated’ lifestyle. We work incessantly to reach our goals faster, because we think our lives will be better, more enjoyable, and more perfect once we reach them. Then, it’ll finally be okay to slow down and enjoy life.
The benefit is sky-high productivity. But the drawbacks are more isolated, self-centered, and clockwork rhythms of life. With fewer moments to savor what’s good about the present.
What does this entail for third spaces?
Well, when future goals are the most constant point of daily attention, transitional moments carry less weight. It’s cliché, but worrying about future takes us out of the present. Contemplation feels like an indulgence. And “purposeless” moments are no longer immersive.
Without regular time for aimlessness, the third space has no natural place to fit into our lives. And so, we don’t indulge in them.
Using Third Spaces to Take Breaks from Goal-Oriented Life
The empty chess tables we began with are an apt symbol: having third spaces isn’t enough to make us use them.
Yet, the same tables reveal a kind of innocent hope on the part of the planners.
That in a moment, it's possible for two strangers to pop out of their plans for the day and pop into a spontaneous and light-hearted interaction.
Optimism that if there is a third space, it’s possible for two people to connect, and that such connection is worth nurturing, even under a parking lot.
I’m reminded of an anecdote from a friend. Painting in parks, he observed that older people, curious, tended to approach him and ask what he was up to. There was some modest wonder on their part because it wasn’t usual to see anyone interested enough in the space to want to capture it. They would talk for a while, share stories, then leave to go about their business.
My friend went to the park with the intention to paint, but pleasant, unplanned interactions sparked up as people wandered in and out of the space, and chanced on something they took an interest in. That’s the kind of spontaneity that third spaces make possible.
It’s a reminder that sometimes, by just lingering in a space, you can unearth experiences that you otherwise couldn’t plan or imagine.
We can agree that there’s a noticeable scarcity of community and directionless time. Each offers value for well-being, yet requires deliberate effort to obtain.
The hustle and bustle are here to stay. However, we can do our best to find activities, spaces, and small pockets of time where we can connect with new people and enjoy being. To take breaks from our goals, and enjoy lingering, even if our mode of life doesn’t always push us towards it.
To borrow once more from Chul Han, the antidote to chasing the future is to create duration. This means acknowledging and savoring moments we genuinely want to stay in, instead of always focusing on when we’ll need to move to the next. Feeling at ease in moments when we’re not required to worry about what’s ahead, and to feel grace for them.
The experience of time is deepened when we stop worrying about whether it is ‘useful’. Byung Chul Han calls this Good Time, which is when the mind is emptied of future desire, thus deepening our engagement with the present.
Duration is a pleasure that’s increasing in rarity. But third spaces make it possible to experience. We can still find it in parks, in hellos to strangers, and in empty chess tables underneath parking garages.
