“Excuse me, you aren’t allowed to sit here,” the security guard told us when I was hanging out with my friends at the rooftop garden of Bugis+. We wanted to take a short break from hours of walking. But there were barely any free seats in the mall unless we chose to dine in at a restaurant.
My story isn’t unique. Young people across Singapore are finding fewer places where they can just be together without opening their wallets.
The spaces where our parents built friendships? They’re quietly disappearing. And we’re losing something important.
The Vanishing Third Place
Sociologists call them “third places”. Informal public spaces between home and work. Places where community just happens.
Your neighbourhood kopitiam where uncles play chess. The void deck where kids learn to cycle. The library corner where students form study groups that become lifelong friendships.
Why do these spaces matter so much? Unlike cafes where you’re expected to order every hour, or malls designed to extract spending, third places ask nothing of us except to show up.
They’re where we learn to be kind to strangers, where random conversations turn into connections, where community gets built one interaction at a time.
But in land-scarce Singapore, where every square meter must justify its economic value, real third places are disappearing.
The Real Cost of $10 Lattes
“Maintaining friendships outside of school is so expensive,” my friends often lament.
The math is brutal: a typical cafe hangout for three hours means at least two drinks. That’s $20-30 per session. Twice a month? You’ve spent $40-60 just to exist in the same physical space as your friends. For young people with part-time jobs and student budgets, it’s not sustainable.
Yes, there has been a rise in the use of digital third places, such as VRChat or Discord. But online interactions lack the full experience of socialisation: physical touch, non-verbal body language and eye contact.
Yes, digital third places like VRChat or Discord have become more popular. But online interactions lack the full experience — physical touch, body language, eye contact.
Research shows that face-to-face interaction releases oxytocin, reducing stress and building trust in ways that digital communication simply cannot replicate. We’re social animals who need physical proximity to thrive. When we lose access to spaces that facilitate this, we don’t just lose convenience. We lose part of what makes us human.
Kindness Needs a Place to Happen
Third places are where we practice kindness.
It’s in the hawker centre where you learn to share tables with strangers struggling with trays. In the park where you help someone’s runaway dog. At the bus stop where you share your umbrella with someone caught in the rain.
These tiny moments of human decency don’t happen online. They happen when we share physical space with people outside our usual circles.
“Kindness needs practice. It needs space”
The recent pickleball saga we had in Singapore should ring a bell. Reactions online were mixed towards the issue. On one hand, pickleball is a sport appropriate for our public badminton courts. On the other hand, the noise made by the ball was unwelcomed by some residents living nearby.
The solution? Town councils had shortened court hours, unintentionally sending a message of intolerance towards such social activities.
“When places once meant for gathering, play, and everyday interaction become less accessible, opportunities for organic connection, belonging, and shared wellbeing naturally diminish,” said Azure, founder of 3 of Us, a ground-up movement that aims to build shared common spaces for meaningful conversations and activities.
The disappearance of third places doesn’t just make us bored, it makes us less kind. When we stop encountering each other casually and regularly, we stop sharing space that belongs to all of us equally. Inevitably, we lose the opportunities to practice the small, daily kindnesses that hold society together.
What We’ve Already Lost
Loneliness rates among youth have risen. The Global State of Social Connections study, conducted by Gallup and Meta, found that 1 in 4 young people globally felt lonely.
Mental health professionals report that their youngest patients often struggle with basic social skills, not because they’re antisocial, but because they’ve had fewer chances to practice.
Dr Chew Han Ei, an adjunct senior research fellow at Institute of Policy Studies (IPS), said young people became increasingly socially isolated because they “are at the life stage when they should be making transitions to the workplace, transitions to higher education, and missed out on a lot of these opportunities during the pandemic.”
What This Means for All of Us
Singapore isn’t boring. But we might become lonely, disconnected, and less kind, not because we want to be, but because we’re running out of places where the alternative is possible.
The solution isn’t just finding hidden free spaces (though that helps). It’s recognizing that third places are infrastructure as essential as roads or hospitals. They’re where social capital gets built, where kindness becomes habit, where “we” replaces “I.”
Kindness needs practice. It needs space. When we eliminate the physical places where strangers become neighbours and neighbours become friends, we’re not just creating boredom, we’re eroding the foundation of a kind society.
Shortened badminton court hours might seem like a small loss. Multiply it across every neighbourhood, every generation, every missed opportunity for a kind word or helpful gesture, and you see what we’re losing.
We can’t app our way out of loneliness or DM our way into deep community. We need to be in the same place, breathing the same air, sharing the same moment.
Singapore has always been about building the future. Maybe it’s time we built some space in that future for the simple, free, messy act of hanging out together.
Know of third places in your neighborhood? Share them. Protect them. Use them. They’re rarer than you think,
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