@TideisTurning wrote:
That's a really cool definition @chibam. I'm super curious- thinking of home as a group of people, how would you define homelessness?
Well, I'm always reluctant to try to repurpose words that already have established common meanings - I think we lose our ability to communicate when everybody independantly rewrites the english language like that.
But whatever you call it; my "homelessness" is the absence of meaningful relationships that you engage with on a day-to-day basis, in real life. (i.e. I struggle to believe you can build a home over the phone or via zoom).
I think those relationships need to significantly play out in "free time", when the participants are truly free to be themselves in the presence of their companions. This allows the relationship to be between our real selves, and not the more cultivated images we may be obliged to project in the workplace. I suspect that even if you get to spend all your weekdays working alongside a team of coworkers who you adore, you still may not have achieved a "home" there, while your interactions are still ultimately under the thumb of what the company demands of you. But that's not to say you can't build a home together if you go back to a shared apartment together when you clock off for the day.
I've heard a lot of testimony from military servicepeople, who all live in the little base "villages" with their families, alongside all their coworkers, and for the most part, I'm lead to believe that they have a tremendous sense of "home" sharing their "off-the-clock" lives with their coworkers, who are also their close friends and neighbors.
I think having a home does demand living in the same address; that there's that level of intimacy between you that you share a dwelling, a bathroom, a fridge together. That you sit down together often and lazily half-watch television together. That it's that sort of connection/relationship that I don't think I can describe very well, you know?
And I guess that there's something about sleeping under the same roof (or similar), too, you know? Like you know that if you woke up in the middle of the night with some sort of crisis, you can just go down the hall and knock on a roommate's door, and you'll have someone there who's got your back, you know?
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