Episode 659: Where Is Your Third Place?

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg spent his career studying something most of us have never thought to name.

He called it the third place.

Not home. Not work. The other place. The one where you belong without obligation, where you show up because you want to, where something in you exhales.

In this episode I explore Oldenburg's concept and what gets lost when the third place erodes from modern life: not just convenience, but a specific kind of belonging that home and work simply cannot provide. I share my own third places, dance and solo travel, and what makes them function so differently from the rest of my life. And I offer what I think is the most revealing version of the question: not where is your third place now, but what used to be your third place before life got so full?

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