There's a scene in Joker that gets me every time. Arthur Fleck sitting alone in a tiny apartment, watching TV, laughing at jokes no one else hears. His loneliness isn't just a screenplay device. It's a diagnosis.
Now tell me: what happens when an entire generation of Arthur Flecks — urban, connected 24/7, with 2,000 followers and zero real friends — decides it needs actual human company?
Someone turns it into a business. And charges a premium.
The new gold rush: selling socialization to people who forgot how it works
CNBC ran a story about the boom in so-called "third spaces" — social venues focused on wellness. Social saunas, cold plunge clubs, community spas. Places where you pay a membership fee to... be around people.
The most striking case is Bathhouse, which opened in 2019 in Brooklyn. The company exclusively revealed it expects to hit $120 million in annualized revenue by the end of this year. One hundred and twenty million dollars. Selling baths.
Another player in the game is Othership, which combines saunas, ice plunges, and nighttime events — all wrapped in a "wellness" aesthetic that makes Instagram drool.
And it doesn't stop at the private players. Life Time, a publicly traded gym chain, doubled down on premium wellness a few years ago. Investors turned up their noses at first. Now? The stock has more than doubled since October 2023. The doubters got their asses handed to them.
The pandemic broke something we still haven't fixed
The term "third place" isn't new. It was coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in 1989, in his book The Great Good Place. The idea was simple: beyond home (first place) and work (second place), every human being needs an informal social space. The corner bar. The bakery. The town square. The church.
Know what happened? The pandemic blew those spaces to pieces. Lockdowns, fear, isolation. And when the world "reopened," a lot of people realized they'd forgotten how to socialize. Or worse: that the places that existed before had simply shut down for good.
Richard Kyte, a professor at Viterbo University and author of Finding Your Third Place, notes that the term only went mainstream in recent years — precisely when loneliness started being treated as an epidemic. That's not hyperbole. The U.S. Surgeon General himself declared loneliness a public health crisis.
And that's where capitalism walks in doing what it does best: identify pain and monetize the cure.
The paradox nobody wants to face
I'll be blunt: there's something deeply disturbing about paying $100 a month for access to a place where you can have a conversation with people.
I'm not criticizing the people who go. Grace Guo, the 31-year-old from the story, quit drinking, wanted alternatives to the bar scene, sought community. Totally legit. Totally human. Totally understandable.
What bothers me is the system that created the need in the first place.
The same generation that got shoved behind screens, that swapped public squares for feeds, that traded coffee with a neighbor for doom scrolling at 2 a.m. — that generation now pays a premium to have what their grandparents had for free. A space. A conversation. A sense of belonging.
It's as if we demolished every bridge in a city and now we're selling tickets for the ferry across the river.
And the money? It's flowing
From a business standpoint, the sector is legit. This isn't a fad.
The convergence is powerful: mental health crisis + anti-alcohol movement among young people + wellness culture + post-pandemic craving for in-person experiences. Put it all together and you've got structural demand.
Life Time proving it on the stock market. Bathhouse marching toward nine figures in revenue. Venture capital investors eyeing brands like Glo30 and Othership.
If I were an entrepreneur looking for an opportunity, I'd take a hard look at this space — especially in markets where social culture is already strong but the business models are still stuck in the stone age.
But as an investor and a human being, I'm left with a question that won't shut up in my head:
If we need to pay a monthly subscription to have community, what exactly went wrong with civilization?
Maybe the answer is in your screen time report today. Go ahead, check it. Then come back and tell me.
