Third Spaces

When I entered my senior writing capstone class, I was focused on writing about two very different topics - either religion or maximalist design. I attempted to decipher why I wanted to write about these two topics, but it mainly boiled down to self expression and having either too much or too little of it. I have always loved maximalist design, and it has allowed me to express myself and bring comfort to a space that I often had to be in, especially during the pandemic. 

During these large periods of solitude and taking college classes from my standard Michigan Rental desk, I focused on researching what some of my favorite things were and how I could express them through decorating my living spaces. Often more than not, I was surfing through Pinterest during my classes, focusing on my favorite Simpsons memes or collage walls, rather than taking in the student examples of past entrepreneurship projects. I couldn’t reuse any of those old examples anyways, right? As time went on and my walls filled up rapidly with posters and pictures, or my shelves overflowing with knickknacks of all genres and hidden pieces of joy, I soon realized I had a dwindling amount of room to decorate. With little room left to cover is new designs, I had to move onto my next area needing inspiration.

While seeking ingenuity for a new section of my house to decorate, I hurried onto my next mission after viewing a series of blank walls in the house living room. After researching and analyzing what would fit our space best, I was determined to include a floor to ceiling picture wall of all of us roommates. With a shared photo album that collected mass amounts of our best (and funniest) pictures together and a quick jaunt to CVS, I hopped upon the challenge to design my new landscape. In the end, it looked sick as hell. It filled the space beautifully, and it brought character to a shared space in which we spent the majority of our free time. Although it remained a space within our house that we sat to do homework or giggle while watching crappy reality television, it brought comfort for us and solace in the fact that we could exist in a space that celebrated our community of seven. 

After jumping from project to project of interior design, I happened to actually need to focus on my school work a little throughout my middle years of college. What a bummer, right? During these years, I began battling for free time on my mobile devices, craving any activity besides searching for jobs on Linkedin, or making slides for my professional fraternity. I sought out time in which I could relax after my copious amounts of internet use, but in my hunt for free time, I always fell back to focusing on completion of work and home activities, rather than the enjoyment of new experiences. 

In my never-ending media consumption phase of schooling, I was focused on getting a job, rather than devoting time for peace of mind. Not a suggestion I would give others, but I was determined! After a few months of what seemed like endless suffering, I had landed an internship. I would be moving to Washington DC! Well, kind of. After taking a deep breath and celebrating my success, only after deeply deteriorating my mental health with limited additional activities, I knew I could spend more time on what I really wanted to enjoy in my free time. I immediately found the time to escape into a community of people online looking for the next design trick or home improvement hack. Scrolling through TikTok and searching through Pinterest, I realized I wanted to focus on a new design attempt. 

I channeled everything into designing the layout of what would be my new apartment in Vienna, Virginia. My technical house for the summer would be roughly 20 minutes outside of DC, centered in the classic NOVA suburbia, aka spacious amounts of walls to cover and designs to be made. After a heavy dose of exhaustion, created by my own networking, cover-letter-writing, coffee chats and series of interviews, I finally had something to look forward to. 

In a plethora of months, I was fully prepared with designs for each room, devoting certain sections to fun, upbeat designs and others to a series of friends and family pictures. All in all, I was devoted to planning out my design, and when it filled me with great joy, I was less focused on the impending doom of my approaching essay deadlines, my last year of school (much sooner now than before), and nailing down an official job after school. I later determined this escape of design as my “Third Space”, as scholars within psychology call it. A Third Space is an area, beside from work and home, that someone can find comfort and community within (Forbes, 2021). Although I often was not interacting with people in person while planning my interior designs, I would interact with online communities that also focused on decorating new spaces, or I would chat with all of my roommates while making our living room look more alive. In addition, whether I was home, away, or in the stress of classes, I would escape to a place where I could devote time into an area of relaxation, away from my necessary tasks of the day. Specifically, it helped curate a better, more comforting environment in different sections of my house that quantified as outside of “work/school or home." 

Students of all ages and phases of life need this kind of Third Space. Carving time out of a busy life is necessary while keeping wellbeing in check, but taking care of oneself can be difficult with a hefty work or school schedule, let alone while searching for a job post-grad. Whether it be spaces like heading to the gym or going for a drive, cooking dinner each night or going out with friends every Thursday, it is crucial for sustained wellbeing to devote and spend time in places outside of work and home - even in a time when virtual spaces are the only option available. 

Whether finding community in a virtual or physical Third Space, it is extremely important to do so when living in a society that is deeply focused on doing the most, all the time. Consumerism is focused on having more in all areas of life, and this can bring people together or it can tear people down. When seeking a Third Space as the only option outside of both work and home areas in life, we must consider changing our habits of consumerism in our First and Second Spaces as well. By providing oneself with quality time in a Third Space, society can release from the grasp of overwhelmingly consuming information, interactions, and items constantly, but this shift can be focused on in our other areas of life as well. If this "Third Space" is an escapism tactic for real world consumerism, shouldn't we try to shift our other spaces as well? 

Specifically for students struggling in a time surrounded by constant networking, intensive classes, or consistent interactions with new people and spaces, it is extremely important to find a comfortable space or activity, whether in person or virtual, in which people can be a part of a calming community. While consuming so many things constantly, society, and myself, often have to escape to a space in which we can find solace and community, but why is this? Why are we always trying to escape from what we are always looking forward to in the future? 

In my mind, we are all pushed to our limits. While scrolling on TikTok for fun, we are hit with video after video of paid content or companies telling us to buy their products with ads. While checking sources for a new project we have to complete for class, we are hit with blinking advertisements that redirect us, collecting our cookies for the next time we enter the web. Our malls are full of the choices, from which store or snack or perfumes or toys to buy, confusing our senses and direction of necessity in finding what we really need - community and comfort. 

Whatever the topic or focus of attention is, we fight to find a space in which we can escape from the heaviness that consumerism can place on us, but can we attempt this is all spaces of our lives? Specifically when communities in person are not available, such as adverse household culture or lack of access to people during the pandemic, we are continually hit with consumption practices in our virtual or physical Third Spaces - unless we put forth focus on intentionally choosing a space and community in which we can unwind, relax, and escape from the pressures and messaging of a consumerist society. 

While I continually focus on my next big design project or crafting a new Pinterest board, I know that I can find solace in a little space created for myself during the stresses of school. In each of our own Third Spaces, communities found within them should make each of us feel better than when we left them. If this is so, we should begin working towards formatting our other spaces of life in a similar manner. While continually consuming what the next big thing is that we need, we must all try to remember that we need a little peace, quiet, and community within a space that isn’t asking us to consume anything.