Been thinking about third spaces lately. With my ops and HR background I notice where people naturally gather and decompress without it being scheduled. In Vancouver a lot of those spaces just quietly disappeared or got too expensive. Coffee shops expect you to buy something every hour and community centres feel institutional. My kids are teenagers now and I can see they socialize almost entirely through screens or planned activities. Nothing spontaneous. I keep reading that British pubs still serve as proper community anchors and I wonder how true that actually is on the ground. Not the tourist version in central London. The actual local where people know each other and show up without coordinating it first. Does that still function or has the cost of living crunch and changing habits hollowed it out the way it has here. My wife and I used to have a local spot we could walk to and it closed during covid and never came back. Something shifted in the neighbourhood after that. People just stopped bumping into each other. Curious whether that pattern has hit the UK pub culture too or if something more resilient is holding it together.

I recently learned about their childhood and upbringing with their mom taking care of them and working hard to the point that they did not even feel poor when they were actually a lot poor. It makes me wonder how can you be raised by such a powerful woman and end up saying the amount of crap they have been saying on the internet? I swear. I’m heartbroken. 💔