Skip to main content

Third Space

If it took upwards of ten minutes to charge an electric car what would that mean for the culture of instant gratification we live in and who is best positioned to make a quick buck in this space are some of the questions this article in Big Money deals with. The author Mathew DeBord suggests that Wal-Mart with their commodious parking lots could be a very good fit. They could make good use of their space and entice customers to step inside the store to shop while they are waiting for their car to be recharged.

The premise is clearly that people with ten or fifteen minutes of idle time will have no idea what to do with themselves and their pocket books. They will absolutely need stuff to do (that someone can monetize) to fill that time gainfully.

But what if the slow charing cars cause a general cultural shift toward slowness and people get comfortable having nothing to do while their cars juice up. That would be a good third space to have - a place to wait and watch the grass grow, maybe chat with a stranger who like yourself is has ten minutes weighing heavily on them. It would be really nice if some big box store did not jump and kill any chance there was to slow down the pace of our lives just a little bit.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Lovely post! Dropping by...

p/s: We would like to invite all of you to join our blogging community which helps you to get more visitors to your blogs. It's totally free and you get the chance to meet other celebrity bloggers. Visit us at IMCurtain

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Reading Shantaram

I finished listening to Shantaram on audiobook after several weekends of being absorbed in the story. This book had been on my to-read list for a long time and I am glad I chose the audio version of it. It is an extraordinary story teeming with colorful characters and rich detail. As an Indian who is a stranger to Mumbai and Maharashtra in that I have never spent years of my life there. I have to rely on what I know second hand. As a fan Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, where in my mind I imagined the action taking place in Mumbai, this book was a chance for me to know the city through another author even if an Australian.  The author,  Gregory David Roberts comes across as someone who is able to see the soul of India through all that ails it. And in connecting with that soul, he finds some answers to his life's hard questions. India does not save him but it keeps his soul alive and striving. Most of his experiences would be unrelatable to the average person who lives a far m...