Comment by jleyank
5 days ago
This is more complex than you might thing. First, there's far more places to meet people - rather than having them over for coffee, we meet in a coffeeshop. Networks have provided a "together in time" alternative to "together in place", so people can game, talk, ... via voice and video rather than traveling to a common location. There's far more 2-working-member families than previously, so the ability to organize household events is reduced. Finally, there's far more organized sports activities that consume both child and parent time. These pull everybody out of the house.
I’ll never forget a conversation I overheard on a plane years back: a caricature of a man in his 20s failing repeatedly to explain to an older lady what a “gastropub” was. Each time, he rephrased his description, and each time she responded, “that sounds like a pub.”
“No, not exactly...,” he replied in an increasingly exasperated tone. I could hear the struggle in his voice as he recognized the cracks forming in the thin veneer of his identity. “It’s like a pub, but it serves food. Like, real food, thoughtfully considered by a gastrochef.” She returned the serve, now teetering on boredom at minute four of the flight. “At our pub we call him Kevin. He makes the best pot pie.”
He regrouped and they found truce in talking about the weather in Toronto. I resisted the urge to twist around to ask if they knew any good restaurants downtown.
A pub must serve drink. It doesn't need to serve food.
In Ireland that distinction matters. It generally will affect other things, like what time and how loud music will be played, how the tables and chairs will be organised and what type. It will often affect opening hours and the price of a pint. Gastro pubs also tend to be much larger.
In North America it seems the vast majority of "pubs" are gastro pubs, possibly why that lady couldn't see the difference. I personally love micropubs and they never serve food other than crisps and maybe a toastie.
I feel like a pedant but I get that dude in his 20s and had to speak up.
> In North America it seems the vast majority of "pubs" are gastro pubs
To be fair, at least in the US, anything calling itself a "pub" is already going down a marketing/branding road and it almost certainly means they're going to try to evoke an Irish or British sensibility.
In my state you can't get a license to serve alcohol without also serving food.
Decline in religion + third spaces combined with socioeconomic system expectations of a 40 hour work week + two incomes needed to live comfortably. Places and time for community and social activities has declined, and so social activity has as well.
If more social time is desired at the macro system level, people need to have more leisure time (shorter work week, higher wages, good quality of life with more free time broadly speaking) and more third spaces to meet and socialize.
Citations:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49644302
Is there a citation for the decline in third spaces? I read such a claim often. But in my part of the US (Brooklyn NY) the number of third spaces like coffee shops and pottery studios is booming.
When I was a kid kids used to just hang out. We'd take a bus, ride bikes, or walk to the mall, the park, the woods, fast food restaurant, record store, dollar store, etc and just loiter. Nobody had any money to buy anything, but boy we'd browse and loiter. Sometimes we'd just walk for hours. We'd walk miles and miles and miles just to sit at a table at Burger King with a single small fry between our group and hang out there.
Children don't do that anymore; they basically don't leave the house because they have the Internet. They communicate through texting and Discord so they don't even have to "hang out." Beyond the social change, when I was a young adult most malls went 18+ (unless accompanied by parents/guardians) and most other businesses nowadays allow teens to loiter the way we use to. Businesses want people in and out once they are done.
Even if business allowed it, most parents don't allow their kids to leave the house unattended anymore.
Does it count as a third space if you have to pay for it?
Coffee shops and such don't feel like good third spaces to me, because I don't always want to spend money just to exist
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Brooklyn isn't very representative of the majority of middle America
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legister's comment https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/business/third-place-mean...
NYC is a thriving city of 8.5 million people and one of the most economically active cities in the world, so your experience may be different than say, Gary, Indiana.
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Part of it may be high rents. I read that rents increased a lot because of fashion stores. They make so much revenue per hour that more traditional stores (like the laundry, the washing machine store, the sewing store, the tabletop games store, and maybe cheaper cafes and restaurants just can't compete.
An enormous portion of my social life is through my church. Bible studies, committee, small groups, Sunday schools are the main structures things, and then you make friends through it and start having other people over and hanging out with them. I don't know what my social life would look like without it.
At least in the US, people are leaving the church (at least the more conservative ones) in droves. I saw recent numbers that over 40% of people who were raised LDS are no longer in adulthood, for example.
Tying religion to politics was probably a bad idea for both religion and politics.
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The 40 hour work week is most assuredly not new in the past 30 years.
The households where both parents work full time probably have increased in that time, but I'd say you have to go back closer to 50 years to really get to a time where it was still somewhat common for a housewife to be home all day with the kids.
Dual income earners hasn't even increased that much, 44% in 1967 to 53% in 2011 - https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20140602.htm
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This 40 hr/week need to be combined with
1) Increasing job/economic insecurity.
2) Prices rising faster then income for majority of population.
3) increasing commute time around employment, activity hubs
4) kids activities/sports are now taken as seriously as work project deliverables. Previously it could be just gifted kids in school teams now with pay-to-play a lot more kids are involved in "serious sports".
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regarding the 40 hour work week, I wonder what "always on" is doing to impact social activities. Meaning, you work 40 hours in the office, then you go home and get online and work a few more hours each night.
The constant aggregate dopamine demand and chasing activities is certainly not helping, imho. "Work, home, doomscroll, repeat."
I can assure you we had "coffeeshop"s in the ancient times.
Yeah, but they weren't as common as they are today. There were pubs and eateries before also, but again, not so common. My point was that much of what was done "then" in one's house are now done elsewhere. Some, of course, aren't done and I'm not sure they're quite so popular.
And I assume the pertinent discussion is what happened/changed in the western world post WW II.
> they weren't as common as they are today
We have a lot more people these days and we're a lot more urbanized.
> My point was that much of what was done "then" in one's house are now done elsewhere
Yeah, and I don't think I believe that.
Wait until they find out "coffee shops" preceded "coffee at home"
For the last century (and still today) we called them cafés (in Germany). Coffee shop was the term we used for joints in Amsterdam where you could buy ... well, joints.
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Wait until they find out that commodities markets started off as coffee shops.
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