We Broke Something, and Now We’re Trying to Buy It Back
I’ve been thinking about my grandmother’s kitchen. Not because it was particularly special, but because everyone showed up there. The mailman would stop by on Fridays. My cousin’s friend learned to make pasta there one Sunday afternoon and never left. My grandfather’s poker buddies treated it like their second office. It wasn’t designed to be a gathering place. It just was one. And somewhere in the last thirty-five years, we collectively decided those spaces weren’t necessary anymore.
Then the data came back, and it was bleak. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that 21 percent of American adults now report having no close friends at all. Sit with that number for a second. In 1990, that figure was 8 percent. That’s a 162 percent increase in complete friendship isolation in just over three decades. People aren’t just lonely in the abstract sense anymore. They’re reporting a void that sociologists have stopped calling a social problem and started calling what it is: a crisis. The Pew Research Center Social Connections Report should be required reading for anyone wondering why every conversation at dinner parties now feels like people are searching for permission to talk about something real.
What’s wild is that we all saw this coming. We just thought it was the price of progress. We moved away from downtown centers to suburbs. We stopped going to bars because we could have drinks at home. We quit the bowling league. We stopped asking the neighbor over for dinner. We chose our isolation in a thousand small, reasonable ways. And then, when the loneliness started showing up in our bodies and our bank accounts, we realized we’d made a catastrophic miscalculation about what we actually need.
The Third Place Becomes a Startup, and That’s Actually Complicated
Sociologist Ray Oldenburg wrote about “third places” back in 1989. These were the somewhere-between-home-and-work spaces where real community happened. The coffee shop. The pub. The park bench. The community center. The barbershop. Anyplace that wasn’t your home or your job but was somehow essential to being human. Oldenburg was trying to explain why American civic life felt like it was collapsing even then. He didn’t have an answer, just an observation.
Fast forward to 2025, and venture capital has discovered the third place, which is both wonderful and deeply unsettling. We’re talking about at least $400 million invested in community-space startups over the last year and a half. Investors have realized that people will pay for connection, and that realization has created an entire new industry. There’s money in loneliness, it turns out. Big money. The irony is thick enough to spread on toast, but the phenomenon is real enough that I’d be lying if I said some of these ventures aren’t genuinely filling a gap that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
The most visible example is probably Erewhon’s social membership model, which launched in Los Angeles in 2024. It’s a high-end juice bar that sells access to community as much as it sells actual juice. Within three months, they had a waitlist of over 6,000 people. Six thousand. People were willing to wait months for the chance to pay for the right to sit around strangers and feel less alone. That should tell us something about how desperate we’ve become for spaces that matter. It should also terrify us that we’re monetizing what used to be free.
What the Science Says About Why We’re Actually Willing to Pay
The Harvard Study of Adult Development is one of the longest-running longitudinal studies in human history. Researchers have been tracking the same people for decades, watching how their lives unfold. In early 2025, they released an updated report that basically confirmed what we already knew but haven’t been acting on: social connection is the single strongest predictor of long-term happiness. Not money. Not fame. Not health, though that matters too. Connection. The Harvard Study of Adult Development doesn’t say this casually. The data is overwhelming. Loneliness literally kills. It’s as harmful to your health as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. And we’re doing it to ourselves.
So when Erewhon charges money for membership, they’re not really selling juice. They’re selling access to something the research says we need to survive. They’re selling permission. They’re selling the guarantee that other people will be there, that you won’t be sitting alone in a room full of strangers. The market exists precisely because we destroyed the free version of it.
This is where it gets uncomfortable, though. The fact that connection science is solid doesn’t make it okay that we’re charging entry fees for belonging. It makes it more dystopian, actually. It means we’ve identified the problem correctly and decided the solution is to let wealth determine who gets to solve it. The people with money can join the expensive juice bar. Everyone else can scroll through their phones and wonder why they feel so empty.
Sober Curious Spaces Are Filling the Void Differently
Here’s something that did surprise me: the sober curious movement is actually driving genuine change in how we’re building community spaces. Between 2023 and 2025, non-alcohol-serving social venues increased by 22 percent in U.S. cities with populations over 500,000. That’s significant. It means people are rethinking what a gathering place needs to be. A bar used to be the default third place, but bars require alcohol to justify their economics. Sober spaces require something else: genuine hospitality.
I’ve spent time in some of these new spaces, and there’s something different about them. There’s less posturing. There’s more actual conversation. When you remove the lubricant of alcohol, people either connect or they don’t. There’s no middle ground. The stakes feel higher somehow, which makes the successes feel more real. These venues prove that people will show up for connection if the space is actually designed for it, not just for profit extraction.
The irony is that these sober spaces are often cheaper than traditional bars, which means they’re more accessible, which means they’re accidentally solving the wealth-inequality problem that the luxury community-space startups are deliberately ignoring. But they’re still fragile. They still need to make money. They still exist in a culture that doesn’t particularly value gathering unless someone’s making a killing off it.
The Question That Actually Matters
We can see the damage clearly right now. The data is undeniable. We know what we need. The question is whether we’re going to treat community as a fundamental human right and rebuild it as a public good, or whether we’re going to keep paying startups to let us feel connected in curated, profitable ways.
I think the answer lies somewhere uncomfortable in the middle, but I’m genuinely curious what you think. Are these new third-place ventures filling an important gap while we figure out how to rebuild genuine community? Or are they just another way for us to commodify human need? Does it matter that the venues exist if the motivation behind them is fundamentally extractive? I don’t have clean answers to these questions. I just know that my grandmother’s kitchen worked because nobody was trying to monetize it, and that matters somehow.