The Vanishing Art of Gathering

Image Courtesy: Foundation for Intentional Community

Last week, I spent three hours at a café and spoke to no one. I wasn’t trying to be antisocial. I just…didn’t know how to start. Everyone was plugged in—laptops open, headphones in, eyes flicking between tabs. So was I, but I kept glancing up, half-hoping someone else would meet my gaze. Yet nothing happened. Eventually, I packed up and left—not upset, just struck by how normal the silence felt. I don’t remember it always feeling this way. But lately, it’s hard not to notice how places that once felt open now feel closed off. How easy it is to spend hours surrounded by people and still feel like you’re on your own.

That’s what the “third place” was supposed to prevent. Not home, not work—just somewhere else. A space that held you without asking for anything—where conversations started for no reason, and time slowed enough to notice the people around you. Somewhere along the way, we stopped showing up. Maybe the spaces stopped showing up for us. Either way, those in-between places are disappearing. Ore worse—they’re still here but hollowed out. A paper-thin version of what they were supposed to be. Cafés became co-working hubs. Bookstores closed. Parks fenced off or overpoliced. Front porches are mostly decorative, if they exist at all. Even when we do visit public spaces, we carry our little worlds with us—phones, earbuds, curated playlists—shields from spontaneous connection. It’s like we’re all ghosts haunting the same space. Together, but not.

Image Courtesy: TIME

Part of it, maybe, is that we were never taught to value stillness. Or presence. Or people who weren’t immediately helpful to us. Sitting in a park with no purpose feels almost illicit in a world bent on productivity and performance. Time becomes something you “spend” rather than something you inhabit. And if you’re not producing something—content, labor, improvement—what are you even doing? In all its mundanity, the third place offered something radical: unstructured connection. A place where you didn’t have to buy anything, where small talk could stretch into a real conversation. Where the stakes were low, and the possibility for serendipity was high. These places didn’t ask anything of you but your presence. But presence is expensive now. Not in dollars, necessarily, but in attention, in intention. You have to fight through the literal and digital noise to find it. And even then, you’re often alone in it. We’ve traded community for convenience—intimacy for efficiency. 

Sometimes, I think about front porches and how people used to just sit on them. Watch the world go by. Say hi to neighbors. It sounds simple, even nostalgic. But it was infrastructure for belonging. It was a rhythm of visibility—you saw people, and they saw you—and that does something to a person. Now, we have “content” instead of conversation. We post instead of participating. We say we’re too tired to meet up, and maybe we are, but the kind of tiredness we feel is different. It’s not the tired of being surrounded by people—it’s the tired of always being alone while being surrounded by people.

Image Courtesy: Project for Public Spaces

I don’t think “third places” will save us. But I think they were doing more than we realized. They made loneliness less sharp. It gave us a way to be around people without needing to perform. Offered up the chance for something accidental to happen: a chat, a laugh, a friend. Now, those moments feel rare—maybe that’s why they feel sacred. I’m not saying we need to go off-grid and build a commune (although someday…), but maybe we can bring them back in small ways. Say hi to the person next to you. Sit outside without your phone. Linger somewhere that doesn’t ask you to be anything but human. It won’t fix everything. But maybe it gives us a place to start and find our way back toward one another.

Strike Out,

Kayla Perez-Fontaine

Editor: Dani Hernandez

Tallahassee 

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