The Third Place

Notes from the sauna, the cold plunge, and the place every man needs but most don't have.

I had my eyes closed in the cold plunge.

And then something touched my hand.

I want to say I reacted like a calm man with full command of his nervous system. What actually happened was, in the half-second before I opened my eyes, my brain ran through a tiny lineup of suspects. Maybe a woman? I don’t know why my brain went there. It was the first guess my mind handed me anyway. So I sat with the slightly thrilling, slightly horrifying possibility of what is happening right now for about three-quarters of a second.

Then I opened my eyes.

It was Brody. Holding my hand.

This is the kind of move Brody only does as a joke. He saw my eyes were closed and decided this was going to be funnier than just tapping my shoulder. He was right. The hand-hold transitioned into a fist bump somewhere in the middle of me catching up to what was happening, and we both cracked up right there in the cold plunge, which is not what most people are doing in the cold plunge, but here we are.

That was the start.

We ended up in the sauna a few minutes later. Handful of guys, loose conversation, the kind that happens when nobody is in a rush. There are a couple of regulars in there in their 20s who periodically complain about being “old.” That’s usually where I chime in.

Anyway. I don’t even remember exactly how my age came up. Somebody was talking about somebody else, he’s about your age, and I said, yeah, he’s about my age. I’m 47.

The sauna went quiet.

Brody looked at me.

His mouth fell open. He just stared. It went on for what had to be thirty seconds. Nobody else said anything because they were waiting to see where he was going with this.

Eventually he said, “You said you’re 47?”

I said, yeah.

He kept staring. The steam was doing most of the work of obscuring eye contact, which is the only reason that part was bearable. Then he said something I’m going to be taking with me for a while.

“Man, I hope I’m as put together as you when I’m your age.”

I took it as a compliment. I’m taking it as a compliment. There’s a slightly more honest version of taking that compliment, which is that I had to sit with it for a second to figure out how to receive it without doing something annoying like deflecting or one-upping. I just said, thanks, man. That was the right call.

A little context on Brody. He’s been through the wars in the way young men sometimes have. He’s in his 30s. Motorcycle accident a while back. There’s a bar in his leg. He told us a story I’m still kind of laughing at about how for a long time he thought he didn’t have a spleen. Turns out he does. It just doesn’t really work. Apparently the doctors had told him one thing, then later told him another, and somewhere in there the spleen had been quietly demoted from “missing” to “present but unemployed.” None of us knew what to do with that information.

So that’s the guy who held my hand in the cold plunge. That’s the guy whose mouth fell open at 47. That’s the guy I’m now thinking of as one of the regulars in my third place.

We did the usual thing. Out of the sauna, back to the cold plunge, back to the sauna. Cycled through it for a while.

Here’s the part I want to talk about.

If you’d asked me three years ago who I’d be hanging out with at the gym, I would have given you a list of guys roughly my age. I am 47. So, mid-40s. Maybe a 50-year-old or two. I would not have said Brody and his maybe-spleen and the regulars in their 20s who think they’re old already. That would not have been my guess.

But that’s where I am.

It’s not that there aren’t guys my age in the sauna. There are. A lot of them are great. But the ones I actually click with, day in and day out, are mostly younger. Some of that is randomness. Some of it is chemistry. Most of it, though, is something I’ve been slow to name out loud.

A lot of the guys my age don’t really have a third place anymore.

They have their house. They have their job. They love both of those things, or they’re trying to love both of those things, and most of their bandwidth goes there. By the time they get a free hour, they’re tired. So the free hour goes to a screen, or it goes back to family, or it goes to something they’re already obligated to. The third place got squeezed out somewhere around 35.

The younger guys still have one. They make time. They show up. They stay long enough that the conversation goes places conversations don’t usually go, like into the working state of someone’s spleen. They’ve still got the muscle for unstructured presence with other men.

I’m 47 and I still have one. That’s why Brody held my hand in the cold plunge. That’s why the sauna went quiet. That’s the actual reason a guy in his 30s said he hoped he was as put together as me at my age.

The third place is not a thing you graduate from. It’s a thing you protect.

I write about this a lot, but I want to say it again here, for the men reading on a Saturday morning who are wondering why everything feels a little flat even though the work is good and the family is loved.

Every man needs a third place.

You have your home. That’s the place you’re loved. That’s the place you lead. That’s the place you’re known in the deepest, most pajama-clad sense. Not negotiable.

You have your work. That’s the place you produce. That’s the place you become someone in the world. Also not negotiable.

You need a third place.

Somewhere that is not your house and not your office and not your garage. Somewhere your wife isn’t and your kids aren’t and your boss isn’t. Somewhere where you are not, technically, anyone in particular. You’re just a guy. A guy who shows up. A guy who knows the regulars. A guy who can be 47 in a room of 20-somethings and 30-somethings and have nobody act weird about it, mouth-falls-open moments aside, because the third place doesn’t really care how old you are. It cares whether you’re there.

For me it’s the gym. Sauna, cold plunge, the workout itself, the parking lot conversation that goes longer than it should because nobody actually wants to leave. It started as a place to stay strong and turned into something more. I don’t know exactly when. It happened the way most important things in my life have happened. Slowly, then all at once.

For other guys it’s church. A men’s group. A pickup basketball night. A Tuesday morning poker game that has been running for nine years. A surf spot. A trail. A diner where the same five guys eat eggs every Sunday and complain about the same five things. The form doesn’t matter. The function matters.

The function: somewhere real, where phones are not the priority. People are.

Read that line again.

That’s the test.

If you walk into a place and the first thing everyone does is sit down and look at their phone, that’s not a third place. That’s a waiting room. A third place is when you walk in and the phones go face-down on the table and stay there until you leave because something better is happening in the room.

We’re going to need more of these.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of our connection is being absorbed by screens that are designed by extremely intelligent people to keep us looking at them. AI is going to make this worse before it makes it better. The signal-to-noise on a phone right now is bad. The signal-to-noise in a sauna with a guy in his 30s telling you the saga of his maybe-spleen is incredible. Different texture. Different effect on the soul.

I’m not anti-phone. I have one. I use it. It runs my calendar and my notes and most of my work. The phone is not the enemy. The phone replacing the third place is the enemy.

If you’re 47 and feel like everyone you used to be friends with disappeared into their own house, you’re not wrong. They did. Most of them won’t come back without a reason. You can be the reason. Pick a Tuesday. Pick a place. Tell two guys. Do it again next Tuesday. Do it the Tuesday after that.

If you’re 28 and you have a third place and don’t realize it’s a privilege, this is your reminder. Protect it. Show up. The 47-year-olds who still have one didn’t get there by accident. They got there because they kept driving back. That’s the only secret.

If you’re somewhere in between, you already know where the door is. Your job this week is to walk through it.

Brody pulling that stunt in the cold plunge was funny. The sauna going quiet at 47 was funny too, in a slightly more philosophical way. The story about the spleen was funniest of all.

But the actual thing I’m taking out of that night is that I have a third place, and at 47, that’s not something to take for granted. Most men don’t. The ones who do tend to be the ones who said yes to being known by guys outside their house and outside their office for long enough that the relationships actually stuck.

If you don’t have one, get one.

If you do have one, go this week.

Catch you next Saturday.

Chris