I bet you heard about “The Third Place”.
The concept was more in the popular media once Starbucks started to talk about it. If you have never heard about it, your first place is your home, your second place is work, and then we all have this need to escape somewhere else, that’s the third place.
I’ve been riding this pony since the 2000’s, when our flagship product was the VPN (the virtual private network) and as good corporate citizens, we would “walk the talk” and work from home with a then-blazing fast 2 MB connection. Now that WFH is common for many more, how does it change this dynamic? Is it just the numbers? One and two become one, and three becomes two? That’s it?
The last time I visited a Starbucks, it was bustling. Same thing with any bar or other place that may qualify in this numbering scheme. I think that now -more than ever- third places are necessary and we’ll only see them grow. The reason is really simple. In the old Home/Work/3rd Place model, we could always stay at work if we got into a fight with our significant other and needed a break. We could also go home and forget about any BS going on at work. This is no longer possible in a WFH situation. For this reason, we may end up going to 3rd places twice as much.