The mind is a battle ground. Recreating playtime we lost to adulthood.

Noma Gcabashe

Picture this, you’ve just left work on a random Thursday afternoon, you’ve been hella

productive this week, so you feel good about yourself. As you head to your car you get a text

from a friend asking you to join them for Padel at 6pm. What do you do? You remember that

one of your new year's resolutions was to get a hobby, your search history is filled with “age-

appropriate hobbies to do after work,” and even your plants have a better work-life balance.

So, you journey to your new Thursday Afternoon activity. Refreshing right? But what about

this new space makes you feel like life is worth living again? Why are we all so desperate for

a third space - something between work and home that makes us feel like people again?

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg called it the “third place”: somewhere that isn’t home (first place)

or work (second place). For our parents, it might’ve been the pub, the church, the hair salon.

For us, it’s... a café with free Wi-Fi and a matcha latte. The kind of space that screams rest

but in an office cafeteria kinda way.

The essence of adulthood is finding a third space to supplement the space we had as children.

The problem is everything about modern living makes it practically impossible.

Capitalism (SHOCKER) ruined pastimes the way it ruined sleep. By turning everything into a

performance. You can't knit a sweater without selling it on Etsy, you can’t do your makeup

without filming a tutorial. Even our hobbies have deliverables, the “5–9 after your 9–5” isn’t

rest - it’s just labour with cuter lighting. Thirds spaces used to be places people went to forget

about work, now they're just extensions of it. Cafes are coworking spaces, gyms are

networking events, even skin care has an audience. How has this affected our capacity to rest.

Why does rest feel like something we should be good at? Honestly rest doesn’t feel like rest

anymore, burnout is a default setting and that's not because we are lazy or unmotivated it

because all areas of our lives have been flattened by a version of productivity. We watch

shows, while answering emails, go for a drive while listening to podcasts, SLEEP to perform

to perform wellness the next morning! (Sorry I feel personally victimised by sleep tracking

ha-ha.) Maybe that's why we're all trying to sign up to Pilates and padel classes.

Maybe we aren't signing up for these classes because we want more hobbies, maybe were just craving a single space in our lives that does not demand output.

And the funny thing is when you’re this tired, it shows up everywhere. It’s in the fact that no

one wants to go out anymore, that drinking feels like a chore, that even dating feels like

clocking into another shift. Burnout doesn’t just drain us; it reorganises our desires and

squashes them!

Generational Escapism.

The decline of drinking, sex and community.

I remember reading an article on Her Campus that I resonated with so deeply. Tess Martinelli

wrote:

“After all, just like the rest of Gen Z, I’m in the ‘prime of my life’ when I should be

basking in my ability to miraculously fend off hangovers and engage in sexual

escapades. But, Gen Zers like me are increasingly choosing mocktails and self-care days

over tequila shots and one-night stands. In fact, the number of folks under the age of 35

who drink has dropped from 72% to 62% in the past two decades, according to a 2023

study by Gallup. And for sex? A 2021 study from The Youth Risk Behavior

Surveillance System (YRBSS) showed that 30% of teens reported being sexually active

as opposed to 50% in the previous generation. I can already hear Gen X screaming at us

to get off our damn phones and just live our lives.”

It is these damn phones. Martinelli put into words something I felt but couldn’t quite

articulate. Maybe it isn’t pure causation, but her point cracked open something bigger for me,

this shift toward abstaining, withdrawing, choosing “self-care” over socialising, it’s sitting

right next to the ever-growing male loneliness epidemic that’s been building since COVID.

People aren’t just opting out; they’re trading in community for self-optimization.

And men are feeling it most, girl. Places where men used to exist without performance;

barber shops, sports bars, pickup games, the gym as an actual gym and not a personality, have

been replaced with looksmaxxing tutorials and Andrew Tate monologues. We’re watching

community leave the physical world and migrate into the “metaverse,” creating a generation

of men bonding over despair, funnelled into black-pill ideology and algorithmic echo

chambers that tell them connection is impossible.

Because that’s the trick of capitalism (shocker): the lonelier you are, the more you consume.

The obsession with optimizing yourself; looksmaxxing, grinding, self-improvement as a

personality; is less about growth and more about trying to fill the silence where community

used to be, it's the same impulse, just different packaging. Whether it’s “looksmaxxing” or hustle culture, both are just loneliness with a filter.

So where do we go from here? In the hunt for third spaces, maybe we need to stop looking

for places that validate us and start looking for places that simply let us be. Maybe adulthood

isn’t this mythic state of perfect balance we’ve been sold. Maybe it’s just about reclaiming

time. carving out moments that exist for no purpose other than the fact that they make us feel

alive.The real act of rebellion now isn’t quitting your job or throwing your phone into the sea. It’s doing something with no outcome attached. It’s choosing pleasure without turning it into

content. It’s letting yourself be still without justifying it. Not everything needs to earn its

keep.

Because the third spaces we’ve been searching for might just be the space we give back to

ourselves.