No, The Lack Of 3rd Spaces Isn’t Why We’re Lonely
Almost every town has a park or a library. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
Viktor Cvetkovic | Canva I used to have a friend named Jerry. Jerry would do things that would hurt his career, only to come back and whine that he was fired from the latest venue he’d get into. Jerry was a person who was the reason for his problems. Lately, I’ve been thinking about Jerry as I pondered the Loneliness Epidemic.
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, around half of all Americans reported feeling significant levels of loneliness in 2023. It’s an upward trend that became noticeable during the Pandemic Lockdown of 2020. Every year since 2016, loneliness started to come further and further to the forefront until it was no longer able to be ignored.
Loneliness has been linked to health problems, mental health decline, as well as cognitive decline. Most people have mentioned feeling lonely and socially anxious.
A common belief is that a lack of third spaces is the main reason for loneliness.
Full disclosure: I believed this for a while, too. I fully admit that there is something to be said about free spaces where congregating with others is a thing. However, I started to realize there were issues with this argument:
- Almost every town has a park, a library, or a church to go to. It used to be that walking through town would make it possible for you to meet new people. These venues still act as third spaces. Most have events, but attendance has been steadily dropping at most events. I ought to know. I’ve attended events just to see people not show up.
- Approaching people at events and third spaces no longer gets a good reaction. It used to be that people would smile and chat you up. Today, being too friendly gets you eyed with suspicion. If you are not in a person’s friend group, a lot of people will just exchange glances and keep talking amongst themselves.
- If you try to offer a drink or smoke to someone, it’s no longer a gateway to conversation. They assume you’re trying to do something nefarious or that you’re buying their friendship. The art of hospitality or even being generous seems lost on people.
In other words, I don’t believe it’s the third spaces. Third spaces are shrinking because people aren’t using them. It’s people's behavior that is causing loneliness.
What gives? Society has forgotten how to make friends — and part of that deals with internet culture.
We’ve dealt with a good three to four decades of “stranger danger” talk, where anyone we don’t know is a potential threat. When the internet started to kick up, we got more suspicious.
To make matters worse, we are often bombarded with horror stories of bad relationships, meetups gone wrong, and celebrities offering antisocial advice. When you pair this with the advice people get to maximize their social returns while minimizing effort, you get a society that wants companionship but refuses to do the work for it.
I knew something was going down when I was a Pickup Artist assistant in my 20s.
Yes, it’s true. When I was in my early 20s, I worked on a website for ethical pickup artistry with my homeboy, Michael Chief. Our goal, back in 2010 or so, was to create courses that helped lonely but good men get great women and become decent partners. Mike and I worked on techniques that engaged people — and I actually would go out and experiment with them.
I enjoyed those experiments because they helped me out a lot. The idea was simple: if they could work with my autistic behavior issues, they could work well with most other people. Our hopes were dashed by celebrity Pickup Artists like Mystery and books like The Game. The Game was the book that I believe tanked men’s mental health, or at the very least, started the beginning of the end.
This was the book that started the whole “negging” trend. It also came up with terms like sarging and gave men a guideline on how to get women with less ethical means. It’s such a shame that men didn’t read the book entirely. Mystery even admitted that most of those tricks are only good for a hookup — and that inner confidence and self-reflection were keys to a happy relationship.
So many men who worked with us dropped our courses and became Red Pill users. The results never worked long-term, leading them to become more bitter and aggressive than they ever were. Eventually, they couldn’t bottle their rage and women began to avoid them. Having seen the downward trajectory of mental health and social skills in such a large group of people made me realize how much we were losing touch with one another.
I believe the Pickup Artist and Red Pill had another backlash that most people don’t acknowledge.
Before the blossoming of the unethical Pickup industry, women were generally much more amenable to men. There was an overall belief that men were trustworthy, loving, and looking for a genuine partner. I assure you, that particular dose of faith no longer exists for many, if not most, women. What’s interesting is that the Pickup industry also negatively affected men, too.
I can’t name how many men I’ve seen treat women badly because they assumed “she’s probably going to cheat and leave anyway” or because they assumed women hate them. Eventually, I started to see this happen with friendships too. People assume the worst, cut people off at the drop of a hat, and are constantly trying to figure out the best possible way to have friends without putting in the time to be friends.
We went from a culture of socializing to a culture of fear.
The internet and mass media made it so easy to fall victim to fear and isolation. We’ve spread “stranger danger” so much, that we can no longer believe it when people who have good intentions do something “just cause.” Moreover, many of us turn up our noses at new opportunities to connect to people — out of either suspicion, fear of rejection, or the feeling that they can “do better” because the person in question isn’t shiny or sparkly enough.
We all talk about how important it is to vet people and how to meet new people. Then we all collectively sigh, look at our phones, hope to meet up with new friends at the next online meetup group, rethink it, and wonder why nothing changes. Of course, nothing changes. We refuse to change.
Ossiana Tepfenhart is a writer on Medium, Substack, and more. She is also the founder of RaggedRiches, a personal finance site for people who don't fit the typical wealth mold.