Don Martin

We are seeing that a lot of people don't have to enter marriage for security.

They can enter marriage because they want to.

And that's meaning that people can get married later in life, they can have kids later in life, and they can do that whenever they feel safe and secure, which for a lot of people and a lot of intersections of society is a lot later in life, because there's a lot less security, just generally speaking.

Well, I actually am really fascinated at how much time we've spent blaming malls for the erosion of community bonds.

So the idea of the place of the American mall inside of the loneliness discussion is that it's basically an accessible, what's called third place for a lot of people.

In a lot of communities, if you didn't have anything else, you had the mall.

And the mall is where you could go and you could hang out and you could gather and you could meet up with your friends and you could go yada, yada.

And sociologists, researchers in the area have always had a contentious feeling about the American mall as a third place because they really exploded in popularity in the 1980s.

Mall culture really exploded in the 1980s and 1990s.

But we saw a shift in the early 2000s, somewhere around like 2006, I want to say, which actually, funny enough, we also saw a decline in church attendance at the same time.

church attendance, mall attendance, pretty much all kinds of attendance at existing American institutions, we just stopped going to them after a while for lots of reasons, somewhat different reasons, but we just stopped going to established institutional places, but to take it back to the American mall.

There is a question as to whether or not the American mall has ever actually been a third place.

If you look at the original

eight qualifiers for a third place, which comes to us from the book, The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg.

If you look at the original eight qualifiers for a third place by Ray Oldenburg, the American Mall isn't and never was a third place.

It's not a casual place for people in the community to go to.

People say that there's no financial barrier for entry, but it is a place of commerce.

You can't just...

You can technically go and not spend money, but it's literally just a whole bunch of stores and restaurants inside of a building.

You aren't necessarily going there to meet new strangers.