Your mileage may vary depending on your parents.
Anything is better than living with my parents. I’d rather sleep under a bridge.
As someone who literally slept under a bridge to escape a horrible home, I can confirm!
boy do i know how that goes.
So…. It’s a psyop at age 18, but not at 21? What about 24? When is it not a “psyop”?
Could it possibly be that it was once believed that at around the age of 18 is when people should become mature enough to be responsible for taking care of themselves? No?
Or is it just not enough that the cost of living is going up every year to have a reasonable argument to remain home with family- now it has to be a “psyop” by big banking.
Horses, people- not zebras.
You’re absolutely right.
This is just something we will tell ourselves to cope with our spiraling quality of life.
There’s enough existing housing and resources for the vast majority of people to live off a single income.
Wealth inequality keeps all that excess under the control of less than 4000 billionaires that now own most wealth that exists.
“Psyop” is the wrong term, but there is some truth to what they are saying.
During the post-WWII economic boom, the US government was rapidly expanding the highway system, making suburban land cheap and accessible. Developers like Levitt & Sons started mass producing suburban tract homes, and banks favored financing them over multi-unit buildings, due to the GI bill and FHA loans. This is when the “nuclear family” ideal was developed, which was defined as a single generation of husband and wife + minor children living in a single-family home. It was a marketing ploy to sell more houses, more appliances and furniture, more cars, etc. All of this led to more isolation, which in turn led to more consumption.
As George Carlin once put it, “you don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge.” That’s the case here. This was just Capitalism doing what Capitalism does, which is sell more shit to more people.
Also why so many areas are zoned single-family housing and don’t allow apartments or other “missing middle” types of housing. Houses require a lot more resources to maintain, including utilities and increased car dependency.
lol yes wanting freedom and to be away from your parents at 18. A psyop. Jesus Christ.
I don’t know psyop, but a cultural norm to say “when your 18 you’re out”.
From the age of 12 on, not only did my parent say this habitually, they also stopped parenting completely.
It was a common theme of rejection in my house. I could have been the perfect kid, and tried, but I’d still here “you’re gone when your 18”. Never mind I didn’t even graduate Highschool until I had been 18 for a few months- it was habitual rejection all through my teens, and to me, sounded like, I’m done parenting you and I don’t want you in my life past the years the government madates I take care of you.
Shit hurts. My husband’s parents weren’t like that, some of my friends were, some of my friends weren’t. You can tell who’s doing better now, and it’s not the kids who were told they were out at 18.
If you don’t intend to help your young adult children through their early start, especially today when it’s so hard, don’t bother having children.
To add, I got kidnapped once by a mentally ill “friend” off their meds when I was 20 years old. At 6:00 in the morning I was able to make it to my mother’s door. When I knocked, she said I needed to deal with the consequences of my actions, And she didn’t want to deal with this. So I had to get back into this person’s car. My mother rejected me and my plea for help. I had just asked to stay at her house until the first bus ran to go home because I was in trouble. She said no and slammed the door in my face. I got back in the car, and a few hours later, I had no idea where we were. The man stopped stopping at stop signs because I kept trying to jump out. He locked me in the car. Eventually I was able to escape, and the police were called, and I couldn’t call my mother for help. I will never do that to my children. Her consequences for her actions now are 15 years now of no contact.
I’m 42 and my parents recently moved in with me. Someone killed me.
Most people in most of history don’t want that. Or at least not enough to make their life immeasurably worse.
I mean the real psyop is that they’ll deteriorate your parents mental fortitude and strip them of ability to actually foster good nature in you. Instead being sold off to the cheapest daycare so that they do it because if they divide you, you cannot form that close bond.
Why do people still think it isnt intentional, they dropped crack to experiment on black people and discovered that division was extremely profitable. Insight violence and you indebt people, create false expectations so that reality feels deceptively depressing rather than just reality. Sell them the right to feel good.
Pain means profit, to try and end it would mean the world would have to accept an order. Want and pain are one in the same. Want your own rather than wanting to overcome the muddied mess that has become, rather than unravel and detangle the horrid clump of things unsaid, actions undone and regret unending. Then again, every person loves to be in their own world, rather than share it. It’s why games, ai, and social media are so popular. You get to share the perfect details only on social media, the perfect picture. You get your perfect world with nothing but your will in virtual escapism. Ai lets you have a friend without being likeable or having to extend yourself beyond your comfort zone.
Just remember, family is those you can truly love unbridled. Get through the mess, and clean up together, thats the only way to know who will stand with you as the dust settles. Blood family is a born luxury, however it is not your only family.
Family structure is supposed to create a division of labor with age. By uniting needs you take cost effective measures to guarantee content survival. However, the young are illusioned by the concept of freedom, while bound by mortal servitude. Like a beast confused by a mirror.
Capitalism is the idea of individual gain, over communitarian gain. C’mon man every cult, church, and benefit society like the freemasons structures like this for a reason. Your commune is supposed to be a structure you can fall back and rely upon. Thats why tithing exists. It’s to tide you over until you are no longer in need, however you must adhere to social expectations and responsibilities as it is collaborative effort. (Sadly corrupted by capitalism most places)
Ape together strong.
Jesus that’s a lot of words. I stopped reading when you brought the crack epidemic into it.
Godspeed.
I stopped reading when they used “insight” instead of “incite”
Yeah, sorry I had to raise a kid by age 8, and another by age 12, then a third by 14. Dropped out of school and only in recent years got my GED.
Then again getting raped does change life.
Hey man, the crack epidemic unleashed a huge dynamic shift in all cities. It was literally done to fund under the table projects that could not use legally obtained money. Most of the violent gangs in Mexico started from american intervention and military deserters. You call them cartel probably. (While just doing the same thing gangs do in all major cities)*
Anyways, it just boils down to government meddling for profit without actual care for the citizens. Nothing new.
Im just voicing what I experienced, I suffered so much and you want to find a reason it happened. A lot of people have the attention they need to get the help they deserve, but that lot is usually only white folks. I cant blame folks for their birth, but I can blame the institutions that exist to perpetuate hollow existance for the sake of your dollar. Since my birth did not give me any of these benefits.
I have to carry my burden, and hope that change will happen if I voice my reasons, and act dutifully. I would never work for a corporation without compensation, but for you I would slave about in these letters. To painstakingly grasp my mind and splatter it into the screen, because I do not want more to suffer.
*I mention this because recent attention to the US taking Canada made me feel some calm before the storm. Misdirection I feel is the intent, since America historically chastises and attacks latin america. Sending away the latin americans means none to infight, preventative measures. Combined with recent reclassification of the cartel as a terrorist organization, and friendships with israel. (Netanyahu purposely funded hamas to build up an enemy, justification.) Essentially purposely causing harm due to their shortcomings, rather than actually make costly sacrifices. Everyone feels the winds of war rising, I am just an observer. Preparing for when it is my turn to lose it all.
You’re overthinking it.
Parents just want their lives back. Plain and simple.
When your kids are 18+ they shouldn’t be impacting your life that much, assuming you spent the time doing things like chores, boundaries, etc as they were growing up. I moved out at 25. I bought groceries, did yard work, helped clean the house, did my own laundry, etc. I don’t care if my kids choose to stay with me past 18.
That’s the difference between having an “adult child” and a “responsible adult” living with their parents.
Not every parent has the latter 😂
There are horror stories of adult children abusing their parents and basically taking over to house.
But honestly, even with a responsible adult child in the home, it’s not the same as having an empty nest. And I’m sure it works both ways with the adults living at home, feeling like they want their own space and not just shared living quarters.
We want to have loud, animalistic sex on my kitchen counter at 3pm.
Great graphical description…Feel free to use your pet as the third partner and have a threesome…The true essence of animalistic sex !! 😂😂😂
The key term is delayed adolescence. Having a 19 year old that has a job, does their own laundry, pays their own bills, etc is different from someone who is still on mom and dad’s insurance and phone plans, not paying rent, and not buying groceries.
As an example, at 25 I was working full time and my boss was 10 years older than me. My car insurance went up and I was complaining about it to my boss. Overall he didn’t think it was a big deal, but the next day he came in and told me that our conversation had got him thinking. Turns out his parents were still paying for his phone bill and car insurance. A 35 year old man living on his own and his parents were still paying his fucking bills and, icing on the cake, he wasn’t aware of it.
We don’t fit in our house I don’t need all three to leave, but I need one of them to. I don’t have an office/personal space.
I also don’t have an office space and worked covid from my basement. I think modern homes are too big, but I also totally get the desire for a home office. Unfortunately, for me at least, most homes that have an office also come with things like a formal dining room which seem like a waste of square footage.
I don’t have a basement or an attic. My oldest sleeps in part of what once was a one car garage garage. It now is a laundry room and a small bedroom. There are many nights when the only place we don’t have someone sleeping is the kitchen, the laundry room and the two bathrooms. I really could use an office space tho. I’ve been working from home more in 2025 than any other year and my PC is in the living room but there are often teenagers sleeping in there and I like to start working around 5am because my wife gets up for work at 4. I’m just waiting it out at this point, one of these kids will move out someday. Right?
Right?
That does sound pretty tight. We’re very fortunate to have a basement, which is pretty common in the Midwest but not universal. Without it the covid years would have been very tough, especially since our kids were very young at the time and wouldn’t have understood “parent working”. We wound up having to put a lock on our basement door.
The way your post reads, it seems like you’re doing the best you can. I’m sure a kid will move out someday and wish you the best both before and after that occurs!
Yeah they’re 20, 17 and 15. It could still be a few more years but we’re making changes to keep the living room more free. It’s also been extra challenging because for the last six months my job has been going through big changes and I haven’t had an office at work either, which is why I’ve been working at home more. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve worked standing in my kitchen, sitting at a conference table alone at work, or working from my car or a cafe or something. It’s actually been really cool, but sometimes really challenging.
I’ve just spent six days on holiday with some of my extended family, all adults, staying in a hotel with my own room and en suite bathroom. It was great and we had a lot of fun but after less than a week I’m VERY happy to be back in my own home with the knowledge that it’ll just be me and my cat in the morning. Maybe some people would prefer to keep living with family into adulthood, maybe I would if I’d been used to it but as it stands I love my parents and siblings though the idea of living with them fills me with dread.
Remember, just because someone posts something on the Internet with confidence, doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about.
A lot of people really need to stop taking advice from Twitter/X, Facebook/Meta, Reddit/Lemmy, etc.
Spare me the predictable reply “but why should I listen to you” or any variation.
Username checks out
The real reason your parents want you out is so they can fuck everywhere in peace and bring the kink back into their life. Kids are the ultimate mood spoilers.
*meant in jest, you’re all lovely*
Other way around too. One major reason why the current cohort of 18-25 year olds aren’t getting any is because no one wants to bring someone back to their parents’ place.
When I was that age we fucked anywhere, no need to go home for that… Unless the old folks were away for the weekend of course
That’ll get you on the sex offender registry these days
I don’t live in Americanistan
USA needs love hotels like elsewhere (Asia, LatAm)
I would want the entire room sterilized before I check in.
And so would the people who use it after me.
So you just request the same service you alwaysss do the morning after at the Hilton, after having had called ahead to explain your reason for booking
I’m in the party that thinks if you have a full-time job you should be able to afford a home
Both can be true, we can put pressure on all fronts
Also homes could be way cheaper if zoning were fixed, density were legalized, and property taxes were retooled into a land tax
I dunno about America, but Australia has the problems you listed, but we also have problems with tax incentives to investing in housing rather than investing elsewhere, which also helps push up property prices by increasing demand without affecting supply.
It’s culturally dependent. It is not taboo to still live with your parents in some countries. And considering the housing market difficulties, it is actually becoming more acceptable in places where the practice has been previously taboo.
No THIS POST is a psyop to help normalise the idea of generational family living at home again so that we’ll swallow the ungodly recession and poverty that will be brought upon the entire working class; should we not agree, as a global unit, to Tax the rich and restore wealth to the Government, Middle and Working classes and out of the hands of Billionaires. Fuck this post.
Anytime anyone suggests we need to decrease consumption people complain that it’s a plot by the rich to get us used to poverty.
we should eat less meat
The elites are trying to make the poor eat bugs
we need to drive less
The rich are taking away our freedom
we need to live in denser housing
The rich are trying to force you into a shoe box
You know what the rich really want?, consumption. They want you buying as much as possible because that’s the way we get growth and it also makes it so you have less savings and are more dependent on your job, and less likely to make demands or quit.
I agree we need massive wealth redistribution and consumption by the 1% is magnitudes more harmful then the rest. But the current american lifestyle of heating and cooling an entire house for 1-2 people in a sprawled out suburb where you have to drive everywhere and have meat with every meal is not sustainable either. We need to reprioritize what we value as a society, deemphasizing individuality and private ownership and moving towards community.
You know what the rich really want?, consumption. They want you buying as much as possible because that’s the way we get growth and it also makes it so you have less savings and are more dependent on your job, and less likely to make demands or quit.
No, not anymore. We exist in a post-capitalist world. Capital used to be the output, whether that’s labour, or a trade, or a craft that’s what capital is. Now, we are the capital. Google is a search engine that made billions selling your private data to amazon, whose effect on the global economy has massively accelerated climate change. Google maps records your phone calls, they copy and scan everything from your phone. Every free online pdf converter, every image editor. Most of all computing and all of the resulting data is collected in the browser. Every app on your phone, generates data points it sells to Google, Amazon Web Services, Meta and all of big tech. The clearnet has shrunk drastically to only a handful of companies. They use this data to profile us, socially engineer us. Your thoughts and opinions are not your own, they are what you have been trained to believe. Advertisers and sellers pay rent to Google, AWS and meta to remain on their platforms so that they have access to us. The rich don’t need us to spend anymore. When you are worth more than the GDP of entire continents, when less than 3000 people have that wealth, they seize control to install themselves as our rulers. Why do you think Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg and Alphabet have said nothing despite reportedly losing “billions.” Because when money becomes meaningless, you go mad with the power to use it to control people and reshape the world into what you want. That is why being a Billionaire is a mental illness, because when you have access to literally everything and anything at anytime you want. You relate to no one, because they exist to please you and you value nothing, because you struggle for nothing. The people who want you to spend aren’t the rich, they’re the farmers that rent the land from the lords that own it. Who will never need money again.
That doesn’t track though. Consumption is just a vehicle for the accumulation of wealth, and is easily wielded as a weapon once it stops being effective. Like, if they were truly in favor of consumption, the whole avocado toast thing would have been encouraged instead.
Consumption is necessary for capitalism, the way you accumulate wealth is by selling goods and services for profit. Many recessions are caused by production overshooting consumption which leads to people being fired to lower production, which lowers consumption… Most of the evaluation of companies and thus the wealth of billionaires is based on consumption increasing. If it were to ever go down in a meaningful way then production would to, and thus the GDP and the billionaires slice of it.
There are other forms of accumulation besides the capitalist mode, eg. Fighting and conquering your neighbors in a feudal system, but I don’t think musk and bezos want to bet there fortunes on there military acumen and they probably prefer this current system.
I think the whole avocado toast thing was way overblown. It was maybe one cnbc article and a cable news segment but the memes and media against it far outnumber the articles that supported it.
I’ve seen far more media supporting consumption of avocado toast, both social media and advertising, then media telling you to stop consuming avocado toast. We have just gotten so used to “tuning” out advertising that we don’t notice it, meanwhile an article shaming you for consuming is far more likely to get a reaction and make you remember it.
If capitalists didn’t value the accumulation of wealth over consumption, they’d be in favor of wage increases. If they really did want us to consume more, they’d let us have more money to spend, knowing it’s going back into their pockets.
This is also colored by my experiences being homeless when the avocado toast thing was going around. I didn’t have regular internet access, so I don’t remember seeing the memes and media against it, but I do remember how regular society grabbed onto it and ran. I remember hearing avocado toast jokes about me from the people behind me in line when I was using food stamps, and that just strikes me as something that wouldn’t happen if the ruling class actually valued consumption.
The tension between a capitalist wanting lower wages and more consumption is a contradiction at the heart of capitalism. It’s one of the reasons Marx thought it was bound to destroy itself. One resolution to this contradiction is debt, get people buying everything on credit cards and you won’t have to raise wages to keep consumption up. This is why the economy has kept growing while wages have stagnated, credit card debt has boomed recently.
There are many contradictions in capitalism, another is that workers want higher wages, but also want cheaper products. If wages do increase then the price of products increase as well and we get inflation. These contradictions lead to the instability of capitalism and require the state to step in and mediate them otherwise the system oscillates wildly between booms, busts, inflation, deflation etc.
Sorry to hear about your situation. I understand how that sort of rhetoric can kick you while your down and stick with you a lot more. Blaming poverty on the impoverished is always disgusting.
We need to reprioritize what we value as a society, deemphasizing individuality and private ownership and moving towards community.
Except… how do you do that?
Write a book?
Post on social media?
There’s nothing actionable there. Vaguely encouraging people to consume less will literally do nothing in the face of endless advertisements and algorithms.
There is no way to change the mass behavior of human populations without doing something direct… like addressing the fact that the wealthy are hoarding all of the wealth.
Banning advertising would be a good start.
This requires a cultural change. Even if we fully redistribute the wealth, if everyone uses there new money to buy a huge pickup truck then we aren’t helping to make a sustainable system.
Changing the culture is going to require some carrots and sticks.
The carrot is showing how you can enjoy life without consumption. People in the west have been indoctrinated by advertising and other cultural forces to think the path of happiness lies through consumption. Banning advertising and having media show paths to happiness that are less consumptive can help with this. Social media can play a part in this by showing people enjoying life withiut needing to buy anything, eg. Posting a pciture of your friends hanging out in the park. Celebrating a low consumption lifestyle can direct peoples drive for happiness away from consumption towards less destructive pursuits.
The stick, which most people don’t want to do, is shame. Christianity was able to channel people’s sexual drive into monogamous heterosexual married relationships for centuries using shame. If it’s able to control such a fundamental desire as sex, it can stop people from buying useless junk. This will have to wait until the culture gains majority, because a minority shaming a majority just results in the minority being ostracized.
We have to do that as free equals, not the family hierarchy system
I agree, some family situations are shit and any post-capitalist society would have to provide the resources to leave those situations.
The idea that people SHOULD leave there parents home at 18 is consumptively motivated, the idea that people CAN leave there parents home at 18 is liberating
It can be both.
I mean, the us government put out multiple PSA style propaganda videos after WW2 pushing to reshape how Americans lived into the nuclear family unit that mostly lives in suburbs like we see today. It was a concerted effort, and only kind of worked due to the unprecedented prosperity of post war America
i suppose you’re one of the people who insists that they are always right solely based on the fact that “it has always been like this”. i.e. you claim “it’s natural that we all live in individual houses”, though that’s actually a fallacy:
people are naturally tribal animals and we used to live in rather large groups of around 30 people or more for most of human history. it’s an incredibly young thought that people live in 4-person homes. (i couldn’t track down the exact time when this started but it must have been sometime within the last 200 years, i guess.)
what are your actual arguments in favor of the single-family home?
I don’t think we should incentivise single family homes but I also thing people shouldn’t be stuck living under the ownership of their parents. You know it won’t be an equal relationship even after age 18 the dominate continues as long as the dependence does
yeah, i recognize the problem of power imbalance. in fact, i recommend people sleeping at their aunt/uncle’s house for that reason, because there’s not so much of a power imbalance. just an idea ;-)
Yeah. This is ignoring the fact that not only did they live in the same house, but also the adults used to have the absolute authority over their children. Living standards changed and it’s okay. Even now, my parents dread me living with them as an adult because that would mean me never becoming fully independent.
Sure, I can contextualise this with the fact that every single year since the 2008 crash the economy has worsened as the mega rich have collected massive amounts of wealth. Wealth extracted through endless advertising and social engineering, across every single denomination in the world while paying basically zero tax through exploiting tax loopholes. This forces every single country’s central bank to print more money which drives inflation. Which is absolutely meaningless to the absurdly wealthy because billionaires will notice no change whether it’s 50 dolllars to fill their gas tank or 5000. If we continue as we are now, generational living will become absolutely necessary for everyone because in 2 generations the wealth gap in the west will grow to resemble some of the poorest parts of India. This is reality, there is a reason 2 working adults with full time jobs cannot afford a 1 bedroom apartment in san francisco and homelessness is rampant. It’s why it’s 1.2 million euro for a fully-attached, 1 bedroom bungalow on the South Side of Dublin city. As the rich acquire more and more wealth they will out compete us all for resources, for our homes, food, politicians, countries. It is why most millennials will never retire and it’s the reason for the rapid decline in birth rates across the globe. The internet and social media have been nothing more than a giant skinner box, used to redirect your ire away from the Billionaire class and at other members of the working class. Be that racially, with immigrants and asylum seekers. Or, politically, left and right. Wake up comrade.
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I think it’s more complicated than that , I immensely despised living with my parents and even if it was unaffordable I didn’t want to move back even though I did a few times
Yes, that’s the psyop working
Imagine your preindustrial ancestors having this feeling
Damn I really struck a nerve. My preindustrial ancestors would have shared a house between three generations, like most humans across the world and throughout history
My pre-industrial ancestors would have been dead from what is now preventable disease or mutilated by slave owners. 🤔 But assuming they weren’t I’m pretty sure they’d be in a better position to move out since they’d probably know how to build a house and would have a community to help do it.
My preindustrial ancestors would just murder their parents, hell my one of my industrial ancestors butchered half of their kin for being early lost causers.
It is still normal in many parts of the world.
Here’s the thing.
It shouldn’t be stigmatized, and it shouldn’t be something that’s any of anyone else’s business beyond being an interesting fact about a person. Just one more nugget to find.
There’s no single right answer for everyone.
Families are fucking complicated. Some of them, you could happily live together your entire life. Others, you might need a giant house and you’d still have friction. Some, you don’t even want to be in the same state, much less share a house.
It is, however, true that as the number of people in a group increases, the work required to maintain healthy relationships increases exponentially.
If there is not parity between those relationships, it multiplies the effect. Which means that everyone involved has to be willing to adapt and change over time for things to stay hair and healthy. When that isn’t the case, the household is going to split in some way or another, and that usually means someone leaving is essentially necessary.
Think about it. Two people that love each other have work to do to maintain their relationship, be it romantic, friendship, parent/child, siblings, whatever. You add a third person to that, and instead of one relationship you have 4, not three. Because each individual relationship exists, and now the three way one does.
Now, think about two people starting a family. Say they only have one kid. The kid becomes an adult, with adult needs, responsibilities, wants, and habits. If the parents keep treating them like a child, dissonance will occur in most situations.
Now, have that child get married too. You’ve now got 4 individual relationships to maintain, the original triplet, the new triplet with the spouse and parents, plus a triplet with each parent, the child, and the child’s spouse, then the quartet.
That’s a shit ton of work. You’ve got all those people having to compromise, adjust their habits and remember boundaries. That’s not something where everyone is going to major the optimum decision every single time. It’s impossible almost, though if everyone puts in the effort roughly equally, it can be maintained for a lifetime.
Now, the second couple have a kid. Map out those connections and the level of difficulty spikes hard.
But, as hard as it is, if you find someone that’s living in shared space, people still assume there’s something wrong with the younger adults involved. And there may be, but it isn’t a certainty the way people assume it will be.
There’s benefits and drawbacks to every option when it comes to how a family lives, be it centralized, spread out, or fully disconnected.
Now, I’ve done all of that. At various points, I’ve lived with my sibling and parents as an adult; we’ve all lived apart as individuals, we’ve lived as duos (though not in every combination), and I’ve had two partners that lived with me during all of that, and a best friend that was there through damn near all of it, and his husband for a while, plus my kid in the mix.
At various points, different people owned the house, even though it’s been the same house that I grew up in for most of that. It was originally my dad as owner, with my mom having her share of that as a spouse. Then they divorced, and my dad got the house and my mom got a big check. She still lived here, but that’s a separate thing. Then my dad fucked up, and me and my best friend bought it. Now, I’m the only one on the mortgage.
The dynamics of that meant that the “power” shifted as ownership did because at the end of the day, whoever is on the mortgage/deed has final legal responsibility, financial responsibility, and that means having final say on some matters, no matter how democratic everything else is. That creates an extra dynamic on top of all the others.
I can tell you for sure that it takes work, hard emotional work, to navigate every iteration of that. When that work isn’t being done by everyone, shit can get bad fast.
But it’s also amazing. The amount of good in it is mind boggling if you take each family unit being apart as the goal that is the only measure of success. When everyone is clicking along, and there’s equity between everyone, gods it’s beautiful.
Just on a practical level, everyone with income had more left over than they otherwise would have, and none of us have ever had to face the bad times alone. We’ve had each others back more times than I can even count (I tried, and I kept remembering more until I gave up, and I was creeping on triple digits where the level of support was part of at least one of us making it through).
And on the emotional level? It can be chaotic, yeah, but if you don’t know the goodness of being able to just hug your dad any time you want to because he’s just in the other room, I’m sorry. Right now, I can go hug my dad, and don’t have to leave the house. He’ll laugh, and ask what’s up. I’ll say “nothing, I just love you”, and then we’ll get teary eyed and he’ll say it back, and then we go about our days.
It isn’t for everyone. But gods damn, it sure as hell isn’t a bad thing to try either
Wow, what a write-up, this is lovely.
I’ve also been in a lot of the situations you’re describing and ultimately became the person providing shelter and stability for others, too (of course it’s far more complex than such a simple statement, as you know).
We’ve never made those arrangements permanent, it’s always been phases of some years where people who’ve needed it most have come and then gone when they’re ready. To be clear we’ve never kicked anyone out, nor (many years earlier) have I been kicked out, nothing like that. I just suspect the genetics in my family make it very difficult for us to be told how to live by another for long, no matter how reasonably or gently, lol.
For instance my pops having to ultimately be subject to my rules (I just mean in the ways you described) was eventually too much for him and he made the necessary steps to move on, and the relationship stayed healthy.
Like you said there’s lots of different ways to do things and the most important part is that everyone’s dignity is preserved, and everyone involved is prioritizing each other person as best they can in addition to their own needs, which is hard to do.
I’d be open, perhaps, to a more unconventional long-term arrangement with several of the family members in my life (including chosen family), especially as the world gets harder and harder, but I’m also content to be a temporary place of calm and respite for folks as I can.
And like you said, the mutual give and take that’s involved is everything. With the right people, anyway - I have to acknowledge there’s a broad swathe of folks I’d never want to live closely with and who I expect would be largely uninterested in compromising and prioritizing the well-being of others. Quite unfortunate for folks who grow up surrounded by too much of that.
That resonates a lot for me :)
