Searching community in an individualistic society
Notes on third place, commons and bars
What if our youth were often described as ‘the best years’ because we get to see our friends every day? We are all in the same space (school, after-school clubs, university), it is easy, you don’t have to pay to access, you get free time to discuss ideas unsupervised… It is a time to experiment, to learn about others and social issues. It is a period where the consequences of our actions are not as measured or important. A time when we can rebel.
As adulthood hits we suddenly find ourselves restrained by demanding jobs, distance, cost, busyness, etc. and we start to see our friends less and less. We may favour our time on our own, the need to wind down, the easy access to the mirrored world on our phones, faking togetherness on social media. We may have moved away and the social scene is not what it used to be. At bars, clubs, cafés we prefer to stay within our group. It already costs so much to go anywhere, is it worth meeting strangers? Is it worth risking a bad time?
So how do we find a community in an individualistic society?
As some of you may already know, I move a lot and I live in the middle of the nowhere. These two elements make it incredibly hard to find a community, but it wasn’t always like that. When I was studying in Brussels, there wasn’t a week without a “bar in 10?” text coming or going between our phones, now we just wish we could.1 When I think of third place, a bar is the one place that comes to mind.
The third place is a concept developed by urban sociologist, Ray Oldenburg. In his 1991 book “The Great Good Place”, he makes the case on the elemental role played by those places, the places that are neither the home (the first place) nor the workplace (the second place), but places essential to community, civic engagement and ultimately, democracy. A third place, like coffee shops, libraries, churches, or gyms, anchors community life, it is a place to gather and “encounter familiar faces”. I recommend reading this article by
, a co-author of the new edition of “The Great Good Place", on what a third place is and how to make one.Although bars are now harder to access due to cost or even distance2, they still constitute, to me, a meeting place, an agora of sorts, or a place one can go alone with a book and simply be. The thing is, not every bar or pub is a third place.
I have found it harder to connect in bars, pubs or other places in England, I find everywhere is low-key the same, part of that is because of all the chains. Chains, be it pubs, supermarkets, clothes, etc, don't contribute to community building, they don't help knit the social fabric, they are places to consume - not socialise. Our local pubs (two pubs a 40-minute walk apart) are part of pubcos, or pub companies. According to a 2022 CAMRA article, over half of all pubs are controlled by just 9 pubcos. We don’t enjoy going to our locals, the vibe is off, no one mingles, the service and drinks are average - I’m sure it may be perfectly fine for others but I would never go on my own.
So while anything and anywhere can be a meeting place, having easy access to various dedicated meeting places is essential in order to create new communities and sustain existing ones. However, whether it is malls, bowling alleys, cinemas, café, libraries or dead high streets, the cost of doing anything is an obstacle, not only that but most of those places are not particularly welcoming or nice places to hang out. When the simple fact of leaving the relative comfort of your house is prohibitive and you have access to your friends at the tip of your fingers for ‘free’, why bother?
Critics may point to the change in work culture as an element of the isolation and loneliness we are experiencing, without work friends and the structure work offers we are less likely to socialise after work. But what does it mean about our social life? Adult life is built around work instead of the opposite, work should bring in something (arguably enough money to live well and time to socialise) and not be the canvas on which we paint our lives. I believe we failed as a society by relying on the workplace to build community. Saying that as a full-time working from home person may be a bit big, but the few weeks I did spend in the office were enough to conclude I would not be friends or go to after-work with my colleagues. We had very different lifestyles, I was a little 24 years old fresh out of uni and new to the country, and the 4 (yes, tiny office) colleagues, including my boss, were interested in very different things, not once there was talk of socialising. So… you know.
I think we have this romantic idea of the workplace that was served to us on a screen-like plate with workplace TV shows and movies. Just like we were served third place. I think about my favourite shows and they are either workplace-focused: the workplace is at the centre of life, where love and friends, as well as a profound sense of accomplishment, are found; or they are third-place focused, think about the booth of a bar where the protagonist spent their evenings. I mean, a corporate part of me still dreams of an office overlooking the city and drinking martinis with my work bestie.
Before the transition into capitalism at the end of the Middle Ages, people enjoyed the commons: spaces accessible to everyone, to labour, to prepare food or care for children, for example. Commons were spaces to inhabit, to share stories and to keep traditions alive. Then came the politics of enclosure, as I wrote in ‘the medieval revival’, “The politic of enclosure added a nail to the community coffin and further imprisoned women at home. The commons were privatised, restricting workers to their (landlords) properties, and domestic chores that were done in groups were now done alone.”. In ‘Re-enchanting the world’, Silvia Federici argues that capitalist development requires the destruction of communal and collective properties and relations, thus we slowly evolved into an individualistic society.
J.P. Hill explains perfectly how similar trends are affecting us in the present:
The isolation you and I might suffer from isn’t, in truth, the result of our individual decisions. We’ve been afflicted by systems that target all of us on a mass scale. Gentrification, the influx of capital that raises rents and makes buying a home more and more expensive, pushes people out of the neighborhoods they grew up in. Local institutions like community centers and cheap diners and dive bars and after-school centers also tend to suffer or go extinct in the process. At the same time neoliberalism has attacked, all too successfully, organizations like unions and community groups and other centers of people power. These massive, international systems have alienated us to further the profits of corporations and the 1%.
Without third place, without meeting in the flesh it is harder to know what we all go through, it is harder to empathise but it is easier to be manipulated if we believe we are all on our own. We are all sick of being alone with our troubles when so many of us are going through similar things, but slowly we are identifying the structures causing it rather than blaming ourselves.
We want more and we know we may need to take things into our own hands rather than waiting for the next magical app. Book and running clubs are spreading everywhere, so are trendy arts and crafts nights or dinner parties, yet it does not quite satisfy. Neoliberalism has made our lives worse. We have nothing to work for, there are no places to go, no affordable house to buy, there is not even a guarantee of a liveable planet. No wonder generation Z wants change no matter the cost.
Let’s not forget that generations are not a monolithic bloc behaving as a simple organism when it is in fact deeply complex and subject to multiple forces, pulsing in various directions. And one of those directions was protesting. Younger people, in particular students, have been at the heart of social change for a long time, often using protest to make their voice heard. So at the heart of the movement against the war in Palestine were the campus protest in autumn 2023, in interview with Anne Helen Petersen on Culture Study, the writer Soraya Chemaly said:
“These campus protests, especially the encampments, illustrate a real cultural shift from individualistic orientations to collective ones. (…)
Their way of adapting, the way they have to be resilient, is through mutual care, listening to others, accepting difference and pluralism, and being, in core ways, other-focused. The acceleration and accumulation of overlapping crises made our interdependencies — otherwise masked in slow violence and harm — more obvious. Technology and social media also altered their experiences by exposing them to more people, different ideas, and new relationships.”
Activism and community feed into each other, and we need both more than ever. Considering how the protests at Columbia University were handled by the university administration and the intense backlash the students faced by the authorities, it is clear they are scared of our power to assembly. To unite and stand for what matters to us.
I spent so much time searching for a picture to illustrate the article, trying to capture a feeling I couldn’t find in other people’s pictures but found instantaneously in the memories I captured. I probably will never live under 10 minutes away from our bar again, from the community I spent years building only to abandon it savagely. Communities exist in all shapes and forms, mine was a square kilometre in central Brussels.
Our lifestyle is threatened not only by the rise of fascism but also by an increased polarisation, and as hatred is being normalised (you know, through the elites discourse) it will be even harder to get out of our home. Without third place, it is harder to organise. So we improvise, get creative and find new ways to get together. I think activism will play a role in reshaping community and how we make friends in an increasingly fragmented society.
Needless to say I have a lot more to say on the topic and hope to do so in the future. To not miss any of it, don’t forget to subscribe! Thank you so much for reading a bit chaotic <3
/ in parallel /
Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, Silvia Federici
Fancy a stroll? Across Europe, young people like me are finding friends by walking our cities
Welcome to the club: why are private members’ clubs booming?
This amazing article on comfort video game by Reuters reads like a game. Even if you’re not going to read it, just click on the link and scroll down (sound on for the full effect).
Writing this was actually so sad it took me by surprise.
This one is for the people not living in a city, they know.