Hostel culture

The hostel common room is one of the best third places ever designed for meeting strangers.

Hostels have, somewhat accidentally, solved several of the hardest problems in adult socialising. They are worth studying — even if you have not been in one for years.

Proximity, shared purpose, and no expectation of prior relationship.

The sociologist Ray Oldenburg described the "third place" — the informal gathering space outside home and work where community forms — as essential to human wellbeing. The hostel common room is almost a designed third place. Everyone is already there. Everyone is, by definition, in a new place and therefore slightly in need of orientation and company. The shared context of travel eliminates the awkwardness of introduction. Conversation is expected. Not talking feels odder than talking.

Hostels also eliminate status signals. Nobody knows what you do or who you know or what your apartment looks like. You are just the person in bed four. The levelling is uncomfortable for some people and liberating for others. For the people to whom it is liberating, hostel experiences are often described as among the most socially alive periods of their lives.

The irony is that the conditions hostels create — easy proximity, low stakes, shared transience, no prior history — are exactly the conditions that most adult home lives lack entirely.

You cannot recreate a hostel. But you can recreate the willingness.

The specific architecture of hostel sociability cannot be transplanted to a suburban flat. But the underlying disposition — availability, openness, willingness to start a conversation with someone who shares a space — can be taken anywhere. It is a skill. People who travel widely often develop it and carry it home.

Mindfuse is the digital equivalent of the hostel common room: a space where people who want to talk show up and talk. Anonymous, immediate, real. The conversation you have in the common room at eleven at night, except the other person could be anywhere in the world.

One free conversation per month, then €4/month. iOS and Android.

The common room, in your pocket.

Mindfuse: anonymous voice calls with real people, anywhere, any time.