The one who stays

There's a person you start noticing once you know to look.

They buy one coffee and stay for three hours. Not for the caffeine. They've got a laptop open but they're not really working. They just don't have anywhere else to be, and going home to a quiet apartment felt worse than sitting near strangers.

I used to walk past that person. Now I can't stop seeing them, because building Third Chapter has made me pay attention to something most of us feel and almost nobody has words for.

So this week, instead of an update, I want to give you the words.

Back in 1989 a sociologist named Ray Oldenburg wrote a book called "The Great Good Place." His idea was simple. Every healthy life runs on three settings.

Your first place is home. Your second place is work. And your third place is everywhere else that actually holds a community together; the diner, the barbershop, the corner pub, the library, the church basement, the bookstore where the owner knows your name.

Third places are where you go to be around people without needing a reason. No agenda, no reservation, no purchase required to stay. You just belong there. Oldenburg argued that a society without strong third places slowly forgets how to be a society at all.

We have been losing our third places for fifty years.

Malls closed. Local diners got replaced by drive-throughs. The places we used to linger got redesigned so you couldn't. We swapped the front porch for the backyard, then the backyard for a screen. Robert Putnam wrote a whole book about it called "Bowling Alone," and the title says it: we still bowl, we just do it by ourselves now.

You already know this in your body. It's why you can be surrounded by people all day and still drive home feeling like you talked to no one. We didn't lose connection because people got colder. We lost the buildings where connection used to happen.

I'm not building a bookstore, a café, and a coworking space because I think Boise needs three more businesses.

I'm building a third place. The bookstore, the coffee, the tables you can work from all day; those are just the excuses to walk in. What I actually want to make is the room. The one you come to on a Tuesday with no plan and leave having run into someone you're glad you ran into.

That's the whole thing. That's the why behind every decision I make on this.

So here's my question for you, and I read every reply: what was your third place? The one that closed, or the one you always wished you had. Hit reply and tell me. I'm collecting these, and they're shaping what we build.

Thank you,
Jonathan