Think back to your last weekend. If you weren’t at home or school, where were you? Chances are you were probably stuck in a car or wandering around the local Target.

As teens in 2026, we are currently living in an era where all ‘third places” are disappearing. Think of places that aren’t home (the first place) or school/work (the second place). There is an increasing decline in places people can just hang out in without spending money.

It is not that there are no places to go,  but instead, the problem is that all places have a paywall. 

Coffee shops are great until you’ve sat there for an hour and feel that internal pressure to buy another $7 drink. Even local parks which seem like a good idea have “No Loitering” signs up or limit their hours so that they can deter groups of teens from going there.

Teens have no public places to go to that allow them to properly socialize with their friends.

This problem isn’t just about being bored. This is also a big contributing factor to why teens in this generation spend so much time online and on social media. With no physical space to gather in, we instead are forced to resort to digital ones.

It’s not that teens nowadays don’t want to see their friends in person, it is simply the fact that due to a lack of accessible places for teens, we are left with no other options to socialize.

If society wants a generation of people who know how to connect beyond a screen, they need to give us a place to put our phones down. It’s so easy to blame screen time for all the issues with teenagers today,  but it is much harder to realize that teens have been priced out of the real world.