A regular of ours (I won’t name him, but he knows who he is 🙂 ) would come in to the cafe at least twice a week, order the same flat white, sit at the same table near the window, say maybe forty words total, and leave visibly lighter than he arrived. For a long time I assumed he came for the coffee. I’ve since decided he comes for something the coffee is just an excuse for. And yes, this post is somewhat related to what I wrote about in my last post (I guess you can see what’s been on my mind a lot this month… call it my “mental health awareness” month).
Anyway, there’s a name for what he’s after, and I only learned it fairly recently. The sociologist Ray Oldenburg called it the third place. It’s the somewhere-else in your life that isn’t home (your “first place”) and isn’t work (your “second”). The pub, the barbershop, the library, the corner café. The spot where you’re neither performing for your boss nor doing the dishes, and where, crucially, you might bump into someone you didn’t plan to see (or, for my fellow introvert peeps out there: unlikely to run into someone you know).
About once a month I try do a “solo date” somewhere at one of my “third places”. It could be a lunch spot (I can highly recommend Evert Opstal in Durbanville for a hearty winter lunch) or a cafe, but it has to tick my boxes. Personally, I really like a spot that is warm, cozy, has excellent service and is fairly quiet, rather than cold and industrial looking (think “Central Perk” from Friends… I’ll rabbit hole into this specific topic in a future post though as I have a lot to say on the matter). Obviously, if I’m going there to work instead then there is an extra set of criteria too (e.g. the correct ratio of table to chair distance, plug points, a decent backdrop for professional looking video calls, etc). Regardless of the reason for heading to my third place, I always come back feeling a bit more refreshed and myself. The rest of this post helps to explain why, and to perhaps serve as a little voice in your head to remind you to visit your third place too with no other agenda.
What a “third place” does for you
Oldenburg’s argument, laid out in a book with the excellent title The Great Good Place, is that these spaces do essential work for a community. Full disclosure: I haven’t read the book in its entirety, I just skimmed it a bit when I first came across this concept. These third places are where you rehearse being a person among other people, without pretense. Where a lonely week gets interrupted. Where the old regular and the new arrival end up in the same conversation because they happened to order at the same time. If you want the tidy version, the Wikipedia entry on the third place is a good starting point, and it’s scary how many of these examples are vanishing in modern times.
Because they are vanishing, and we tend not to clock it until it’s gone. High streets thin out. The café becomes a place you tap a card and leave, or you stay but you’re “plugged in” to the matrix the whole time because really you’re effectively still just at work. Even the ones that survive often turn into offices — everyone hunched over a laptop, headphones in, a “do not disturb” sign made of body language. I say this with love and full hypocrisy, because I have absolutely been that laptop person.
The point here is that the “third place” is somewhere that you can go to detach from modern pulls and distractions. And by doing that, you are more easily able to focus both inwardly on yourself as well as the community. You have more creative space to think and problem solve, and to consider others and feel empathy for other people, whose problems you probably had little time to really consider at work or at home. On the creative side: I literally haven’t felt like writing in so many years until recently. I feel like having the mental space (in part, due to spending time intentionally at my favourite spots, away from work) has really allowed me to feel my creative side wanting to be expressed again – hence this series of inter-related blog posts. So you can probably see how the third place is important for both your own mental health as well as that of the community, and why we need to lean into it.
Cape Town has always understood this
This city is unusually good at third places, even if nobody calls them that. The stoep. The parkrun that turns into a coffee huddle. The stretch of Sea Point promenade where half the suburb seems to end up on a Sunday, walking nowhere in particular. I also saw something pop up in my feed a few times for a place in the city where people meet up purely for connection sake, play games, and exercise together, although I can’t remember the name. We’re outdoors people with a strong instinct for gathering, and I think it’s one of the most under-rated and awesome things about living here.
What we’re less good at is protecting it. Third places don’t survive on nostalgia; they survive on being used. A café that everyone loves in theory and nobody visits in practice closes just as fast as one nobody loved at all. The bench, the corner, the counter — they only stay alive if people keep turning up and, occasionally, talking to a stranger. So remember to support your local “spot” where possible. And spread the concept of the third place – let’s normalise being intentional about spending time at these places.
A small, unsolicited piece of advice
So this is less a marketing pitch than a random ask, and it applies whether the third place you choose is ours or someone else’s entirely. Pick one. Go often enough that they start recognising you. Leave the headphones out once in a while. Learn the name of whoever’s making your coffee (this is probably the best starting point, if you don’t feel like doing the others). It’s a really low-effort way to feel less alone in a city, and it does more for a neighbourhood than any amount of good intentions. You can do this as a “solo date” once a month for example, or even with a friend. But either way try to keep the concept of the third place front and center in your mind and recognise its importance and notice how you feel when you get back home.
And what of the man at the end of the counter that I mentioned earlier? Well, I think he figured this out long before I did. He’ll probably be in tomorrow, same flat white, same forty words. I’ll be glad to see him, which is, when you get down to it, the whole point of the place. Thank you for coming.
If you’ve got a third place you love — ours or anywhere — I’d love to hear about it. Tag us on Instagram @apothecary_coffee_co, leave a comment on one of our posts listing a great little spot you go to, or just come sit at the counter or outside the trailer or in the cafe. And if you’d like a bag of something to make the mornings at home a little more ceremonial, our beans are roasted to order right here.