There's no place like third place.

I'm not talking about winning and losing here, or races or sports or politics, but something far more important: the simple art of living your life in the real world. In that world, as someone has pointed out, all communities — and therefore all members of communities — need a "third place." It's not your home. It's not where you work. Those are the first two places. No, it's the place where you go to, um, be.
—Stephen Hunter, "Shear Gladness," The Washington Post, September 13, 2002

"All great societies provide informal meeting places, like the Forum in ancient Rome or a contemporary English pub," explained Oldenburg, a faculty member at West Florida State University. "But since World War II, America has ceased doing so. The neighborhood tavern hasn't followed the middle class out to the suburbs...Accordingly, for eight years, Oldenburg devoted himself to gathering the legend and lore of America's last remaining neighborhood taverns, ma-and-pa grocery stores and other examples of what he calls "third places." The term derives from Oldenburg's gloss on a Freudian concept.

Sigmund Freud held that emotional well-being depends upon having someone to love and work to do. Oldenburg argues that the great psychoanalyst made his mental-health list one item too short. Besides a mate and a job, Oldenburg said, we need a dependable place of refuge where, for a few minutes a day, we can escape the demands of family and bosses.

In that kind of psychological Eden, an easy-going conviviality allows us to be temporarily amnesic to our woes and shortcomings.

Oldenburg is convinced that many problems of contemporary society — alienation in the workplace, soaring divorce rates, etc. — trace to America's declining supply of such third places.
—Ron Grossman, "Hangouts," Chicago Tribune, February 4, 1990