The Places We Didn't Know We'd Miss

A few days ago, I was talking with my eighteen-year-old son about something his generation is missing.

“A third place.”

That was the term he used for somewhere other than home and work/school. A place where people simply go to hang out with friends or to meet others.

His point was that his generation doesn’t have many of those places. A lot of them don’t drink, so bars aren’t necessarily filling that role.

That got me thinking about the places we had growing up.

Video stores, video arcades, and shopping malls. I miss all three. Not enough that I want to give up streaming or online shopping. Let’s not get crazy.

Still, something was lost when those places disappeared.

Going to the video store used to be part of the evening. You went with friends, wandered the aisles, argued about what to watch, and sometimes discovered the movie you wanted was already rented.

Arcades were the same way. You went with a pocketful of quarters, challenged your friends, watched strangers play, and maybe ran into somebody from school.

And the mall? You didn’t even need a reason to go. You wandered around, hit the record store, grabbed something to eat, ran into friends, and maybe met somebody new.

That’s the part I hadn’t thought about until talking with my son.

We have more ways to communicate than ever, but fewer places where we accidentally run into one another.

Sometimes the trip to the video store mattered as much as the movie. Sometimes the arcade mattered more than the games. And sometimes there was absolutely no reason to go to the mall except to hang out.

Which was exactly the reason we went.