Only the Lonely

One of my dad’s graduates students, an Irishman, noticed immediately upon arriving in the United States that Americans don’t have a third place. Everybody back in Dublin had a preferred pub (their “local,”) or a football/cricket/rugby/shinny/bowls club, that wasn’t home and wasn’t work. It was a purely social space, often offering food and drink or some activity, where the other regulars knew by looking at you whether you’d had a bad day or had nailed that big presentation. “You Americans don’t have that, which is why you’re so lonely.” Michael reached that conclusion in the 1970s, but maybe he was prophetic because the data seems to be, we are, indeed, lonely. Adolescents are especially lonely, and for them it’s bad and getting worse. Of course, in Ireland, if you move from your home town on the east coast over to the west coast for a better job, you are still less than 200 miles from the fam. Americans move an average of 11 times, and my situation is probably not unique. I live in…