The Disappearing "Third Place": Why It’s So Hard to Make Friends as an Adult

How cities make it harder to find your people

Why is it so hard to make friends once you leave school? In this episode of The Missing Middle, Cara Stern and Mike Moffatt dive into the “Loneliness Epidemic” and the disappearing concept of the Third Place, those vital social hubs that aren’t home (the first place) or work (the second place).

From the 1980s, when mall culture and bowling alleys dominated, to the modern era of “convenience-first” coffee shops and endless doom scrolling, we explore why 60% of Canadians feel disconnected from their communities. We also break down the surprising 2025 StatCan data showing that young people (15–24) are significantly lonelier than seniors.

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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, which has been lightly edited.

Cara Stern: It can be really hard to make friends when you’re out of school, which contributes to alarmingly high rates of loneliness. But before we get into the numbers, something I notice when I spend too much time on Reddit, which is often, is I see a lot of people post asking, how do you make friends in the city once you’re done with school and you’re out in the real world?

What it always comes down to is that you need repeated interactions with people to build friendships. When you’re in school, it’s really easy to get that because you’re seeing people on a daily basis. It’s much harder when you’re working, especially if you want to make friends that aren’t just the people you work with.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. I found those brief times where I was out of school a challenge. But, Gen X, we had those big coffee shops like in friends and we had the mall, like in one of my favorite movies, Mall Rats. So we did have those options back then.

Cara Stern: And we don’t really have that culture anymore. And that makes it difficult to make friends and build your network. And that’s also led to a lot of loneliness.

Mike Moffatt: So let’s start there. Talking about loneliness, because we have that 2025 Canadian Social Survey from StatCan that you were showing me the other day that tells a very worrying story about the trends with loneliness.

Cara Stern: When I think about who’s at risk of loneliness, my first thought is seniors. You hear about them a lot. There’s a lot of risk there, for sure. The National Institute on Ageing found that a massive 43% of Canadians over 50 are at risk of isolation. But much of what we talk about here on the Missing Middle, it’s actually young people who are facing the worst version of the problem.

StatsCan looked into it, and young people are the most likely to feel lonely. Almost a quarter of youth, which they define as 15 to 24, report feeling lonely always or often. That’s compared to only 9 to 11% of seniors, which they defined as 65 to 74 who reported feeling it that often.

Even when you include those who feel lonely sometimes, the percentages for youth are consistently 10 to 15 percentage points higher than for seniors.

Mike Moffatt: That’s so counterintuitive to me. Again, somebody who grew up Gen-X in a different world, if you had told me as a kid that you’d have this great technology where you could connect with everyone in the world. I know as a teenager I would have thought that’s going to make us all a lot less lonely.

It seems to be the opposite. And those that are the most tech savvy, younger people, seem to be more lonely than folks like my parents, where I have to go over sometimes and show them how to program the remote control.

Cara Stern: The YMCA survey did find that social media increases feelings of isolation, especially if you’re just endlessly scrolling. That doom scrolling thing that a lot of people do hurts their ability to feel connected to the community. And they feel a lot lonelier when they’re doing that. And I can say I agree with that for sure.

And in 2024, YMCA found that 60% of Canadians feel disconnected from their communities.

Mike Moffatt: I mean, that’s a lot larger than I would have guessed — maybe a quarter or a third. So to hear that more than half of the people are saying, “I don’t have a community here.” That is a really worrying stat.

Cara Stern: And of course, it’s worse for the younger group. It goes up to 68% for 18 to 34 year olds, which I guess is that age we were talking about. When you’re out of school, maybe you’re working. Maybe you’re looking for a job and trying to find your way in the world. It can be a very lonely time, especially since that’s the age where you’re going out trying to meet people because you’re looking for a life partner and you’re trying to find your friends outside of school. The survey found a direct link between having a third place and feeling connected.

Mike Moffatt: I think we need to define this concept a third place. So it’s basically somewhere that you hang out that’s not home, which is the first place, and not work, which is the second place. And this comes from an American sociologist named Ray Oldenburg. He came up with this in the 1980s. So let’s think back to the ’80s when we had our malls, our bowling alleys and all those great things you may have seen in Stranger Things or other throwbacks to the 1980s.

They don’t really exist anymore, or at least not at the same scale. And Oldenburg argued that third places, somewhere where you hang out like a pub, a library, a coffee shop, has benefits for the individual people, but it also creates these spillover benefits, for the community or wider society.

So one of the key parts of a third place is that your status in the outside world doesn’t matter. It doesn’t really matter what your occupation or your background is, because you’re interacting with people from completely different industries, types of families, classes. None of that should stop you from getting in the door.

So you could go somewhere to a coffee shop and you can have a millionaire playing chess against a plumber. And we’re all on the same level.

Cara Stern: It’s what people call weak social ties, which are things like acquaintances or people you see on a regular basis, but maybe you don’t actually know them that well. And it’s a really good way to meet people because you find people who are outside of your circle who are from completely different walks of life, and it’s better for the community.

The sociologist who came up with the term “third places” talked about how it’s good for democracy because people organize in these places. His ideas have held up really well over the years, and the YMCA survey found that people who have a third place were nearly twice as likely to say they feel a strong sense of belonging.

And there are many studies out there that link third places to lower levels of loneliness.

Mike Moffatt: So that totally makes sense. And I think there’s another spillover benefit as well, because these are places where you can connect with people outside of your normal circles, where you can exchange ideas with people who have wildly different opinions than you. So I look at my background where I’m an academic, I interact with a lot of people on the centre left and I deal with my family who’s on the centre left.

But if I’m going and playing on a ball hockey team or I’m going to a pub or something like that, I’m going to find people who have very different worldviews than I do — very different political views and so on. And that creates social ties.

When we’re online, it’s easy to “other people”, people who believe x, y, z, they’re monsters.

But when you interact with people regularly who have different views and you go well, they’re worried about the same things I am, they’re worried about how their kids are doing in school. They’re worried about overworking, tensions in the home, all of these different things. So it creates these social ties.

But, you mentioned these weak social ties. It’s like acquaintances and there are people who you can interact with. Maybe it eventually leads to a job, leads to actually finding a romantic partner because it gives you that access to a circle of people you would normally never encounter.

Now, for some people, that lack of third places has made them seek that out in second places in work. But that’s starting to get eroded as well with work from home. So not only are we losing third places, in many cases, we’re starting to lose second places as well.

Cara Stern: So let’s talk about why these places don’t exist anymore. And as always on the Missing Middle, part of this is a zoning problem. So much of our neighbourhoods have been zoned for residential homes only, and you can’t have a local pub walking distance from your home. If it’s illegal to build and run one in your neighbourhood, there are some in neighbourhoods that come from before these guidelines were put in place, and they’re awesome, but they’re not generally found in the suburbs and even in residential areas of cities like Toronto, they’re pretty rare.

The City Council here just approved some retail in neighbourhoods, but these aren’t the third place kind.

Mike Moffatt: They’re really not. And even back when we were growing up, that was always one of the issues with third places. They weren’t always easy to get to. Growing up in the suburbs, it was a bit of a trek. You either had to get mom and dad to drive you, or if you were lucky, you lived close to a bus route.

Friend of the pod, Jason Slaughter from Not Just Bikes, has a great story about that. When he turned 16 and finally got a car and got his driver’s licence, we drove to the Burger King in our neighbourhood, because of that lack of third spaces. And there are reforms trying to move that, to try and create small-scale retail in existing neighbourhoods.

But even there, they were putting all these restrictions on it. It’s got to be 50% or less of the floor space. The City of Toronto is asking the province to make reforms, but other times are blocking reforms themselves. So there are pushes to create these third places in existing neighbourhoods, but it’s coated with a lot of red tape and frankly, a lot of NIMBYism.

Cara Stern: That’s actually a really big problem, because the guy who coined the term third places, he made a point to specify that it’s generally somewhere you drink. And I like the way he put it. So I’m just going to read what he said.

“The third place, typically, is a watering hole of one sort or another, and conversation is the main activity. The general rule is that beverages are of such importance as to become veritable social sacraments. Indeed, the majority of the world’s third places have drawn their identity from the beverages they have served. There are or have been ale houses, tea houses, soda fountains, wine bars and milk bars, Biergärten in Germany, gin palaces in England… the German kaffeeklatsch, the French café – all derive from the respective words for coffee.”

So why are there fewer third places now than when you were growing up? Because you talked about how you could go to the mall. Or I keep hearing about the bowling alley. I’ve seen that on television. I remember in The Simpsons that being a thing, I did not know that was a real life thing that people did.

Mike Moffatt: It absolutely was a thing people did. And these third places have changed over time. A lot of times in the past they were in the existing neighborhoods. But for those of us who grew up in the suburbs, we did have to commute a little bit to get there.

But we did have those options. We spent a lot of time at the bowling alley. I was a bit of a championship bowler growing up, it was a thing we did. We went out and shot pool, all of these things. Those have died out.

They take up a lot of space. Sometimes they developed a bit of a reputation. I remember some of the arcades that we went to in the late '80s, early '90s, developed a bit of a seedy reputation. So I think part of the movement towards helicopter parenting probably hasn’t helped. Many of these certain places, again your bowling alleys, they take up a lot of space and they’re harder to build these days, just because of that lack of space. So I think it is this combination of helicopter parenting and high land costs that have really driven these things out of existence.

And we also can’t forget about online shopping. For a lot of us, ironically enough, the third place that we’d go to when we were broke was actually the mall, because you could actually do stuff there for very cheap or not much cost. But, first with the advent of big box stores and then your online shopping, Amazon, people don’t really go to the mall anymore. So that has dried up as well. So, it’s all these societal factors around changes in technology, changes in land cost and changes in parenting styles have made it really difficult for teens these days.

Cara Stern: I thought of malls as being the fallback option of third places. We didn’t have third places in the suburbs, so they’re like, let’s create this third place. And now even those are gone.

I wonder how much of this is also a casualty of social media, because people can connect and gather online in a similar sort of way to which you find the local community did. People used to get together and you had people going to churches and synagogues before to part of those communities in a way that people just don’t at the same rate anymore these days.

If I want to catch up with people, social media is obviously where I go. It’s the default. You might message each other, “Let’s get together sometime.” A conversation that often goes nowhere.

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I think that is an issue as well. I do think people have changed those kinds of social places and gatherings. It used to be, again, go back to the '90s where, if you were somebody who liked to talk about books or you’ve read philosophy, there were certain coffee shops that you could go to for that thing, and you had to find that audience. You had to find those people because they might not exist around you.

But now, you just go to Twitter or wherever else and go, I want to find somebody who will chat with me about the Austro-Hungarian Empire. You can find those people, and oftentimes they’re not proximate to you, so you’re chatting with somebody in Texas or Germany or wherever else.

So that has benefits as well, and I don’t simply don’t want to denigrate that. But I do think there is value — I think the sociologists are right that there is value — to having these third places. So since there’s all of these competing factors that have taken away third places, how do we go about fixing that?

Cara Stern: I think it is a mix of policy and the way we are in society. There’s a personal aspect too. So for policies, you can do things like legalize third spaces in places where people live, not just places they have to drive to, because especially if you’re going to drink alcohol, you don’t want to have to drive there. And yes, there’s Uber, but it adds a big expense as well.

Cities can provide spaces and some have done quite well. Montreal’s got a lot of public spaces that are meant for people to gather where they can just sit and hang out. They’re trying to build it, but they also have to have things like public bathrooms, a place to sit, good lighting, because people have to feel safe and comfortable for that to work.

I know that when you go to a park sometimes in Toronto, the bathrooms close quite early and so you’re not going to spend hours there in the evening if you can’t go to the bathroom when you need to.

The first time I heard of third spaces was when I was a teenager and I worked at Starbucks, and it actually came up in their training session when they described what they were going for, what they wanted, the shop to be. There were people who would show up daily. They would sit, they would do work and meet their friends. And I still remember some of the regular spaces and some of their drinks. It did actually used to be that community hub for some people.

It was pretty cool, actually. It had comfy seats, curated playlists, and it was really neat seeing people gather all the time in the same spots, and just hang out. And then the company made an effort to prioritize convenience over the experience. So they replaced a lot of those comfy chairs with less comfortable ones.

They’re like, “Come in, get your drink, get out.” You can order ahead. You can go to a drive-thru now. That wasn’t a thing then because it was an experience. We’re not going to just have a drive-thru, where you just take your drink and go. It seems to me that being a third space for people, contradicts maximizing revenue that a lot of businesses are really focused on for a good reason.

And I just wonder, is the downfall of third space inevitable in a world that just needs to keep growing profits no matter what?

Mike Moffatt: I would say no. And I always push back on this argument. Because it always seems to presuppose that, back in the '90s and 2000, that the corporations were these benevolent entities and then they got greedy about 17 seconds ago and started changing them.

And that’s not the case. We’ve always been surrounded by greedy capitalists. We’ve always been around profit-maximizing corporations. They weren’t building those coffee shops with coffee chairs out of benevolence. They were doing it to profit-maximize. So I think that’s what’s changed here. It’s not the need to get profit or anything like that, it’s the business model. And the business models change because of the economic conditions. I do think if you go back to the 1990s, where land costs were cheap, buildings were cheap, you could open larger spaces to make it a little bit more comfortable.

People could sit around a little bit longer, order that second coffee, or that piece of pie or whatever we were having in the '90s, whereas now that the business model doesn’t work with land costs being where they are.

There’s always been this vibe in the restaurant industry that you never want your restaurant to look empty. You always want people there because it just sends the wrong message. But if you’ve got people going through the drive-thru and your shop is tiny, nobody really cares that it looks empty and it doesn’t take too much time.

Cara Stern: In fact, they might think “I can get it quickly”.

Mike Moffatt: Well, exactly. It sends the other message. So I don’t think corporations have gotten greedier because they’ve always been profit-maximizing, but rather I think the business models have changed in response to economic conditions like land costs. And there’s actually a recent piece on this that we’ll link to in the show notes, but that’s my answer.

A lot of this, like housing, does come back to land costs.

Cara Stern: Always comes back to housing somehow or another. But apart from policy solutions, I did want to give some advice for people who are looking to find that community, because I am someone who has a very strong community and I didn’t always have one. I’ll start off by acknowledging that I am an extrovert, but I’ve always been very shy, so it took a lot of practice to get here. But I want to share what I’ve done.

I think it actually makes a big difference if you put in the effort, because you do still have the ability to find your community. Maybe you have to be a bit more intentional about it and get out of your comfort zone a bit.

So whenever I move into a new home, I try to get to know as many of my neighbours as I can, because I find it really weird to think of the idea of people living their whole lives super close to me, and I know nothing about them. That seems weird to me, and I actually hate it, so I always try to say hello.

I try to find out a few facts about each person so that they become these fuller human beings instead of just familiar face strangers. And that goes a long way. Whenever someone moves in near me, I always go over and say hello, and I write down the names of the people, so I remember them.

I did this when I lived in apartments, too. This isn’t just a, “Oh, you live in a house, therefore you can do this.” I always knew as many neighbours on my floor and other floors as much as I could, and I think that you can have a strong community, even in what some people consider anonymous high rises. If you want to know them, you can know them.

Mike Moffatt: So I admire that you do that. That sounds terrifying to me to be honest, going around and meeting my neighbours and finding out things about them. And go “You just made the list.”

Cara Stern: They don’t know about the list. No one knows about the list.

Mike Moffatt: They don’t know about the list. So you’re not walking around with a clipboard? I think for extroverts that could certainly work. You got anything else for us? For us introverts who don’t really necessarily want to go around and be talking to the new neighbours?

Cara Stern: I think even if you’re introverted, it’s important to push yourself to do that. It’s scary, but it’s worth it for the community you build.

But I have a less scary one for you, which is you can just join an activity. For me, that’s sports, which is something I didn’t even try until I was 30. It took some getting used to being the worst on every team I’m on, but it meant I got to meet people I wouldn’t otherwise interact with.

You see them on a regular basis. It’s how I met my husband, a lot of my closest friends, and I have a lot of acquaintances from there. You never know where those friendships or acquaintanceships are going to lead. But you can do it with art, fitness workshops, running groups, cooking classes — anything where you see people regularly and you get that repeated interaction.

And what I always think of it as is, you are doing something you enjoy, so even if you don’t make friends, even if you don’t meet people that are your long-term people, at least you ended up doing something you enjoyed. It feels like a low-cost to do this sort of thing, other than obviously the cost of doing this sort of thing, which ranges depending on, where you are and what age you are, which I’m going to get to in a second.

Mike Moffatt: That one, I’m totally on board with, and I did that accidentally when I was in my late 20s and early 30s. I was going to the gym. I was playing a lot of rec sports, softball, hockey, and dodgeball, as everyone knows. And I have to admit, I think pretty much every friend I made from about the age of 28 to 40 came from playing sports.

So, I can say, as someone who doesn’t walk around and meet the neighbors and so on, that totally works. And I wasn’t even trying to. It was just a happy accident. From somebody who’s just trying to get some physical activity and unleash my competitive nature.

Cara Stern: Until you joined Canada’s dodgeball team, when it stopped being a little bit less rec and became a little more serious.

I really wish that cities understood how challenging it is for young people to find community, because you do have things like meetup.com, you could do these sorts of things. But the easiest way, like I said, is go to activities. And lots of cities make it more affordable for seniors to access these programs, and I get annoyed every time I register for one of them.

Toronto gives seniors who are 60 plus half off the registration fee, which makes no sense to me when we know younger people are struggling financially more than seniors on average. And I understand it probably comes back to the days where they’re thinking of that lonely, isolated senior and how important it is to continue building those social connections and doing physical activity.

But it’s just as important for young people. And in some ways it’s more important in that age, in your 20s when you’re trying to build your life. You have to build those connections at that time. It’s so important. So I keep wishing they could just make it means-tested, or they could just rethink who needs the program the most.

Maybe they could average out the discount across everyone, make it more affordable for everyone to go into it. It’s going to be those people who are loneliest and at an age when they’re just starting to work on building communities who really need it the most. So I really would like to see that change.

Mike Moffatt: That sounds absolutely fantastic. And I do think there’s a meta narrative in a lot of these episodes that we do need all levels of government to be thinking more about people in their 20s and 30s, not just helping seniors. Seniors absolutely need help. There are areas where that should be expanded, but there is this loneliness epidemic, for teens, 20s, people going into their 30s.

And I think governments can and should be doing more.

Cara Stern: One thing to remember is if you do go to something, if you sign up for a cooking class and you show up, you have to push yourself to talk to people around you. I’ve been to a lot of these things where no one’s talking to each other, which is fine if they just want to learn the activity, that’s okay too.

But if you’re trying to build a community, it does involve talking to people. It’s scary, but you have to push yourself to do it. And you can ask them to go for a drink outside of it, like say, “After this class, do you want to go get a drink?”

Not everyone is in the market for new friends. That’s something I have to remind myself of all the time.

So if I ask someone, “Hey do you want to get together sometime?” And they’re like, “Yeah, sure.” They never say no. They always say sure. And then you try to make plans with them and they’re like, “I’m busy.” I usually give people two times and if they’re busy, I try again. If they’re busy again, I take the message.

If you can get past that feeling of rejection, you’ll find your people. You’ll find them. Eventually, you’ll be able to start building your community. It’s so important to take those steps and just push yourself, as scary as it is.

Thank you so much for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin and our editor is Sean Foreman.

Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about making a 7-10 split in bowling or how to deal with rejection, please send us an email to [email protected].

Cara Stern: And we’ll see you next time.

Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:

Six in Ten Canadians Surveyed Have Little or No Sense of Community, New YMCA Research Reveals

Church Closures and the Loss of Community Social Capital

Where Have All the Great, Good Places Gone?: The Decline of the “Third Place”

Third places, true citizen spaces

Brands should provide “third places” to help Canadians feel connected: report

The Hidden Health Crisis: Understanding Loneliness in Canada

Why your ‘weak-tie’ friendships may mean more than you think