on finding my third place.
also known as, why substack feels like home.
You know that feeling when you walk into your favourite coffee shop and the barista doesn’t ask for your order? They just know. Or when you arrive at a friend’s house and immediately grab the good blanket because you live there too. That’s what Substack feels like for me.
It’s where i get to live my best unfiltered, semi-chaotic, this might be a terrible idea but we’re going with it life.
It’s my third place.
What the heck is a third place?
In 1989, urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg introduced the concept of the “third place”. These days sociologists (and your one friend who can’t stop referencing their psychology textbook) love to talk about “third places”.
Your first place is home, where the laundry piles up and you remember to water your plants only half the time. Your second place is work, where you pretend to have it all together while trying hard not to quit.
Then there’s your third place. The place where you show up exactly as you are, where nobody is demanding dinner or a deliverable. It’s the group chat that lets you rant out your week, the place that lets you breathe.
“third places are nothing more than informal public gathering places.”
For me, it’s this weird little corner of the internet where i get to write whatever i want and somehow, somehow, people choose to read it.
The search for a digital third place.
The internet has always promised connection but it often delivers something else: the constant performativity of social media, the chaos of algorithm-driven feeds, and the anonymous hostility of the comment section. It rarely provides the refuge we need to truly exhale: a place to think, to create, and to connect.
Substack, however, feels different.
It’s a space where i get to write without worrying about likes, saves, or whether the algorithm has buried me. A space where i get to explore the dichotomy of ideas that matter to me, no matter how twisty they seem. Because of that, there’s an intimacy that’s hard to find anywhere else online.
Why we all need a third place.
Life is loud. Work blends into home. Home feels like work. And in that blur, it’s easy to lose the part of ourselves that just wants to exist. Finding our third place has never felt more urgent.
If you’re still searching for yours, let me offer this unsolicited advice: find the space that lets you exhale. The one that doesn’t ask you to be more polished or more productive or more anything. The one where you can show up as a whole mess of a person and feel like that’s more than enough.
For me, as an OG blogger (hello 2014), that’s Substack. It’s this strange, wonderful place where i can be obsessed with whatever i want, and you can be obsessed with me being obsessed, and we all get to feel a little more human together.
Let’s savour this peach of a place.
Lyss. x
Gonna have to get cosy with referring to you as Lyss :) Cheers to the importance of finding our third places. Yes, the first two do merge uncomfortable and YES to that space to be fully who we are and what we are currently obsessed with! My current obsession is catching up on everything I missed during Novbemuary.
Catching up on being off line a bit more over Christmas, hence the comments on old posts. Blogtactular is a blast from the past… I read some of my first blog the other day — from 2006! — and I kind of liked the mundanity of the general musings. Might have to try it again round these parts!