Why You Lose Your Place After Seeking a Third Place — the Entrance Where Dependence Begins

Introduction

I want a third place, neither home nor work. Thinking so, you join a place where people gather.

At first there is, indeed, a sense of having gained a place of belonging. There are people to talk with. There are people who understand. But after a while, you come to spend your care on keeping that place instead. The sense “what if I fall out of here?” grows.

Many are surely searching for how to find a good place of belonging. What this article verifies is the premise beneath it: why the very feeling of seeking a place of belonging tends to become the entrance to dependence — its structure.

Let me give the conclusion first. The desire for a place of belonging is legitimate. The problem occurs when the place that answers that desire is designed in the shape of “the side that gives a solution” and “the side that seeks one.”

The Desire Is Legitimate; There Is a Problem in the Way of Answering It

Let me make one thing clear at the outset. The desire to seek a place of belonging is, in itself, legitimate.

Many who work independently are inside a deep isolation. They keep making decisions with no one to consult, and no one can confirm for them whether their judgement is right. That there is a limit to this state is a fact. The value of learning from another’s viewpoint, and the value of an environment where you can stimulate each other, are real.

The problem is that when you try to answer this legitimate desire, the design “there is one who stands at the centre and others gather to it” gets chosen.

The desire “I want a place of belonging” is satisfied in the form of “dependence.” The desire “I want to think together” is quietly swapped for the desire “please teach me the answer.”

Precisely because the desire is satisfied on the surface, it looks as though it is working. But that method of fulfilment chips, in the long run, at the person’s autonomy.

The Stance You Enter With Decides What Follows

Here there is a decisive dividing point. With what stance you enter the place.

Watching people of various backgrounds enter a place, there is a clear pattern.

Those who already hold some base tend to “enter in order to give.” They treat the information there as “material for updating their own thinking,” and welcome rebuttals and differing viewpoints as ingredients for tempering their own ideas.

Those who enter without holding a base tend to “enter seeking a solution.” They come holding the concrete question “how do I change my situation?”

This stance itself cannot be criticised. Seeking a place of belonging or a solution is a natural motive. But when, keeping this stance, they form a relationship with “someone who looks as if they hold the answer,” a hard-to-reverse asymmetry is born between the two.

And the motive of entering to seek a place of belonging tends to overlap with this “stance of seeking a solution.” When you enter as a place that fills your unease, that place is positioned as “a place that gives what I lack.” This positioning makes the asymmetry from the start.

Position Is Updated Later Than Ability

After the asymmetry is born, what happens?

One who entered as “a seeker of solutions” is first given, in that place, the role of “the receiving side.” This role, once settled, is hard to change.

Not only the perception from those around. The person too comes to hold the self-recognition “here, I am the receiving side.”

A self-image within the place is updated later than the real change in ability. Even if ability has been gained, one may keep staying on the receiving side, unable to hold the conviction “I have something to give.”

Thus, though you were supposed to have gained a place of belonging, the situation arises of being bound by your position within that place.

The Fear of Losing Your Place Overwrites Judgement

What is graver still is that attachment to a place of belonging changes judgement itself.

When belonging to that place begins to take priority over your judgement as a self-reliant individual, the fear of “falling out of here” is born.

What the psychologist Erich Fromm drew out in Escape from Freedom was this structure [Fromm, 1941]. The freedom modern society gave the individual is accompanied by the burdens of loneliness and responsibility. To flee these burdens, the human being seeks belonging to a strong authority or group.

Beneath the feeling of seeking a place of belonging, this wish “I want to step down from the burden of freedom” is often mixed in. The relief “if I am here, it is all right” is continuous with the relief “I don’t have to decide for myself.”

And when this fear grows, voicing a discomfort becomes hard. You can no longer say something different at the risk of losing your place. Thus, to protect your place of belonging, the inversion occurs of offering up your own judgement.

▸ This mechanism of “no longer being able to voice a discomfort” is treated in detail in peer pressure is not made by anyone.

Self-Reliance and Solitude Are Wholly Different

Here let me untie a common confusion.

The word “self-reliance” is often confused with “living in solitude.” This very confusion becomes the ground for justifying dependence — the logic “I cannot manage alone, so I must connect with someone.”

But “being able to live without borrowing anyone’s power” and “living alone in solitude” are wholly different.

When self-reliant human beings gather, each becomes for the others not “a dependency without which I cannot live” but “an ally whose presence widens my thinking.”

That is, presupposing self-reliance enriches a place of belonging.

And self-reliance here is neither a large income nor a stable belonging. If, the moment the place you relied on is closed, you fall into a state of “not knowing what to do,” that cannot be called self-reliance — such is the definition.

Conclusion: Do Not Make a Place of Belonging a Dependency

That you lose your place after seeking a third place was neither because the place was bad nor because you chose wrongly. It is because the desire for a place of belonging tends to overlap with the “stance of seeking a solution,” and that stance becomes the entrance to an asymmetric relationship.

Let me confirm, to be safe. I am not denying holding a place of belonging itself. That a place to engage with others is necessary is a premise.

The problem occurs when that place is positioned as “a place that gives what I lack.” Keep this positioning, and the place of belonging turns into a dependency, and before long becomes “a place you are afraid to lose.”

So the order needs to be swapped. Not “aim at self-reliance by gaining a place of belonging,” but “first hold what you can offer, and on top of it join the place.”

And the first half of this order can begin today. Record your observations and hold one base for delivering them continuously. No large capital is needed.

Before searching for a place of belonging, make what you can offer. This reversal of priority changes a place of belonging from a dependency into a place where thinking widens. The whole of this structure is gathered in why the more you connect, the lonelier you grow.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Fromm, E. Escape from Freedom (1941)
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press
• Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (2013) Times Books