Right guys… two things are happening at once and not many people are putting them next to each other.
First off: a study of nearly 65,000 young adults, published in February of this year (2026), found that 54% of American college students report being lonely. Trellis Strategies, working from Healthy Minds data, put it another way - more than 60% of students aren't thriving, which in survey language means they're short on close relationships, purpose, or optimism.
The second: everyone under thirty is joining a club.
The run club thing is not about running
Strava's 2026 community report has running clubs on the platform growing humongously year over year, a million clubs on the books, and club-organised events up by half again. Their summary of it: people slowlllyyyy moving away from doomscrolling and starting to move again!
Forbes covered the same wave in July: "That is a social trend wearing running shoes."
But then again, it isn't only running. Listening bars. Cold plunge clubs. Pilates studios operating as social networks. Forbes again in August, citing ClassPass data showing 44% of users aged 18 to 34 had made a real friend through a class. One line from that piece: "a weekly class can fill that third-place gap." Membership clubs together are projected to be a $59 billion industry by 2033.
The term for all this is the third place. Not home, not work, the other one. Ray Oldenburg's idea, later borrowed by Robert Putnam to explain what America lost when it stopped bowling in leagues. Richard Kyte described the good ones to HuffPost as "comfortable, fairly ordinary places where you can just drop in as you are."
Bars have closed, churches have emptied, malls are gone. So people are building replacements out of whatever's to hand. A Tuesday night run. A record collection. A cold tub in Brooklyn??
What makes them work is boring
The interesting thing about the third places currently succeeding is how little they have in common on the surface and how much they share underneath.
They're cheap or free. They meet on a fixed schedule, so nobody has to organise anything or send a text asking if people are around. They require no skill — you can run badly, and everyone does at the back. The activity is shared but low stakes, which means conversation happens sideways rather than head-on, and sideways is where people actually talk. And there's a name attached, which sounds trivial and isn't. A name turns a group of people who went for a run into a club that someone can be a member of.
That is basically the whole formula; anyone who has ever run a student club already knows this.
Campuses already have this
Buried in the loneliness study is a finding that didn't make any headlines: the students reporting the least loneliness were members of fraternities and sororities. The researchers put it down to the social opportunities those organisations provide, which is a polite way of saying they have a structure. A name, a house, a calendar, and a set of people who notice when you don't turn up.
That is exactly what a run club is. Same with a crew team, a debate society, an acappella group, a Sunday league club rugby side with eleven players and no coach. Campuses hold the densest concentration of third places in the country, but over half the students are lonely anyway.
We think some of this is down to scale. A university of thirty thousand people is not a village, and the assumption that proximity produces friendship is the same assumption that made social media look like a good idea. Some of it is that clubs get framed as extracurricular — a thing you do around the real business of a degree, useful mainly as a line on a CV. Which gets it exactly backwards. The Ohio State research found that involvement on campus predicts a significantly higher sense of belonging, and that loneliness in the first few weeks of a semester tends to persist through it. The club isn't the sideshow. For a lot of students it's the only bit that reliably works.
We get to see a version of this up close, because our business runs through campus groups — teams, societies, clubs — and the ones that hold together are never the ones with the most members. They're the ones that meet on the same day every week and have a name people are pleased to say out loud.
None of this is new
Putnam wrote Bowling Alone in 2000, and he was describing a decline that had already been running for thirty years. The generation now credited with inventing the third place is rebuilding something their grandparents took for granted and their parents have let go of.
The odd part is where it's being rebuilt. Not on campuses, which already have the infrastructure, the calendar, and a thousand clubs looking for members — but in cities, by graduates, from scratch, at some expense, in the form of a running group that meets on Tuesdays.
It's exactly the same thing whether it's intramural or not. Somewhere between joining college and leaving it, people forget that joining things is allowed.
Sources: Hill et al. loneliness study via The EduLedger, February 2026; Trellis Strategies, "Invisible on Campus", February 2026; Strava 2026 community report; Forbes on the third space boom, July and August 2026; HuffPost on Gen Z and third places; Center for the Study of Student Life, Ohio State, 2025.