The Anatomy of your Triangle of Sadness

Urban planners have tracked a certain phenomenon for quite some time and came up with a term for the state most of us currently live in. The shape of modern life is not a circle, nor a grand adventure across the map, but a simple triangle.

© Jonny Briggs "Shoes to form a triangle" | 2025

The points are from home to work and a third place, wherever we go to remember that work is not home, such as the gym, the café, a supermarket, a yoga studio, or a bar. Researchers studying human mobility call these “significant locations”, and recent work has already proposed the “activity triangle” as a way of describing the real geography of everyday life. The data points come from GPS tracking, which shows that the overwhelming majority of us spend our time moving between a remarkably small number of places, narrowed to three dominant anchors that define the activity space. If your brain is already yelling “That’s not true! That’s not me!”, maybe you still are, because many leisure activities are squeezed into the corridors connecting exactly these three stable points of destination. Your city may contain millions of possibilities, yet our lives often resemble a child’s drawing: three dots connected by wobbly lines.

The fascinating part is that the triangle becomes self-reinforcing as new activities tend to appear along its edges. The new dentist, the bakery, a friend residing conveniently between the dots, etc. Our lives wrap themselves around existing routes, which make the triangle grow denser, not larger. Peculiarly, the city seems to disappear.

Not physically, of course, as museums, hidden courtyards, little bookstores, secret paths remain. Yet, they vanish from our lived experience and perception while we become experts in some streets and strangers to everything beyond them.

Most peculiar, this pattern extends far beyond geography. Most people inhabit social triangles with the same few friends, colleagues, and family members. Curiously, we construct intellectual triangles as well, such as our favorite topics, trusted sources, or recurring opinions. We move through conversations exactly as we move through cities, taking the shortest route between familiar destinations. The result is efficiency and results in a quiet form of sadness.

We are not talking about the dramatic sadness or heartbreak. Just the gentler sadness of unexplored possibilities. So, how to escape? The good news: Nobody needs to move to a new city or seek an extraordinary new hobby. No grand reinvention at all. Instead, by small acts of rebellion. Think about following any blue sign in your hometown, regardless of what it points to, as guidance and rediscover your own city. Accept an invitation from someone outside your usual orbit or simply read a magazine you normally dismiss (at a doctor’s or café). Get adventurous by ordering the dish you cannot even pronounce.

Cities reward curiosity with compound interest. Follow that one unfamiliar street that leads to a new café where you are about to have a conversation with a stranger who maybe will become a friend, inviting you to a new neighborhood. Before long, the triangle becomes a constellation. And just to be clear, the goal is not to abandon your triangle because we are aware of the fact that we all need anchors and routines. The aim is to puncture it.

Enjoy experimenting, exploring, and seeing where curiosity can take you. If your explorations spark a thought, a question, or even a friendly disagreement, we’d love to hear from you. Who knows? It might lead to an animated conversation in a tiny neighborhood restaurant or over a really good cup of coffee. Some of our best ideas have started exactly that way.   

Your truly,

Margot

MDA sidenote: Jonny Briggs (b. 1985, London) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores memory, family, queerness, and identity through the constructed realities of photography. Using his body to intervene in family archives, he reimagines childhood narratives, challenging patriarchal structures and the boundaries between past and present, truth and fiction. More recently, Briggs has expanded his practice by investigating how contemporary artworks can infiltrate heritage properties, reinterpreting historic collections, and creating new ways for audiences to engage with them.