Finding Your Third Place featured on Wisconsin Public Radio

Rick Kyte, author of Finding Your Third Place, was featured on Wisconsin Public Radio's Morning Edition with Ezra Wall. Read a sample and listen to the full interview below.

Ezra Wall: What is a third place?

Richard Kyte: It’s the place where we go to socialize, where we go to make friends. It’s not home. It’s not work. It’s someplace that’s easy to access, that’s comfortable and that’s conducive to conversation.

EW: This isn’t a brand-new idea. Where did you first hear about this concept of third places?

RK: I heard about this idea about 20 years ago from a sociologist that I that I knew. We were sitting in a coffee shop and he dropped the term “third place,” thinking I knew what it was and I had never heard of it. It comes from another sociologist named Ray Oldenburg, who wrote a couple of books in the late 1980s and early 1990s explaining it.

EW: You point out that people often feel as though the world is becoming generally worse, but that statistically, many things are continuously getting better. What’s causing that disconnect in people’s perceptions?

RK: It’s really a remarkable thing that the world is getting much better in just about every measurable way in categories like health and longevity, equality, childhood mortality, the ability to cure diseases, and even air and water pollution.

We’ve done so much to clean things up from the time when I was a kid. And yet people aren’t feeling well. We know that there are much higher rates of anxiety, depression and loneliness. What seems to be happening is that we’ve developed a form of society in which technology fixes a lot of problems and we can use it to make our communities and our bodies better and our workplaces cleaner and better and more effective.

But we’re becoming less interdependent and that means we spend less time together. We are fundamentally social animals. We have to spend time with other people in community in order to feel good about our lives. We’re especially seeing this absence of connection in young people. That is where we’re seeing really high increases in anxiety, depression and loneliness.

Listen to the full interview here

Finding Your Third Place: Building Happier Communities (and Making Great...

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