Re:Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?
by znpy on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @09:03AM
(#41787494)
> Making friends with the wrong people can really mess up your life.
> And yet, I keep reading about this epidemic of loneliness...
Both things can be true at the same time, this is not a dichotomy.
At the same time, there's a old saying in my company that goes like "better alone than in bad company". Timeless wisdom, I guess.
On this matter, I was recently brought to pondering about the extinction of the so called "third place". The reasoning goes like this: people often used to have three places they attend the most: they home, their workplace, and the "third place".
The "third place" can be pretty much everything, and it's the place where socialising happen: for example, in many sitcoms it used to be some kind of bar/pub/restaurant: the McLaren's in HIMYM, "Arnold's" in Happy Days and another similar one whose name i can't remember in Friends. When I was a kid, it was a public park where we played soccer, and most kids just spent time there.
It seems this is going out of style or something?
Two things I noticed are:
- nowadays spending time in bars/pubs etc can get costly. Might be the general economic downturn, but it seems to be that going at the bar and having a beer or two used to be more accessible in the past (older folks are welcome to chime in and offer their perspective).
- pubs with larger university people tend to be more affordable, but the age band is quite restricted... Not formally, but somewhat implicitly.
> And yet, I keep reading about this epidemic of loneliness...
Both things can be true at the same time, this is not a dichotomy.
At the same time, there's a old saying in my company that goes like "better alone than in bad company". Timeless wisdom, I guess.
On this matter, I was recently brought to pondering about the extinction of the so called "third place". The reasoning goes like this: people often used to have three places they attend the most: they home, their workplace, and the "third place".
The "third place" can be pretty much everything, and it's the place where socialising happen: for example, in many sitcoms it used to be some kind of bar/pub/restaurant: the McLaren's in HIMYM, "Arnold's" in Happy Days and another similar one whose name i can't remember in Friends. When I was a kid, it was a public park where we played soccer, and most kids just spent time there.
It seems this is going out of style or something?
Two things I noticed are:
- nowadays spending time in bars/pubs etc can get costly. Might be the general economic downturn, but it seems to be that going at the bar and having a beer or two used to be more accessible in the past (older folks are welcome to chime in and offer their perspective).
- pubs with larger university people tend to be more affordable, but the age band is quite restricted... Not formally, but somewhat implicitly.