It's True and They Should Say It

[rynling]

(Here's a link) to the Buzzfeed article if you're interested. Although the writer doesn't come right out and say this, it's mainly about how people in their twenties and thirties can't afford to live in cities anymore and feel intense loneliness and anxiety about feeling forced to relocate to the suburbs.

While I completely understand that it's horrible not to have the agency to choose where you live, and while I understand that it's emotionally devastating to be torn away from your friend group, I agree with the artist that the specific anxiety concerning "living with your parents" is largely based on an ideology of "independence" that's socially constructed by a very small subset of people.

I don't think this is a "white" thing, necessarily, but it's definitely an American thing. A lot of other cultures, including most cultures in Europe, see the American insistence on single-generation households as not just absurd but actively pathological, and honestly, I tend to agree.

Comments

[runicmagitek]

Very lovely read. Also agree it's not 100% a white thing, especially when I run out of fingers to count my non-white friends also feeling this struggle.

I saw a post the other day on Tumblr that was pretty much "fuck independence" and talked about how it's ok to be interdependent, because we can't do EVERYTHING on our own, like run a farm for food, sew our own clothes, etc. It was really heartwarming, because it's hard when you're not privileged enough to move out and live wherever.

[lassarina]

when I was out of work in 2009, I was absolutely terrified I'd have to move home with my parents, but mostly because it would have uprooted me from literally anyone I spent time with and flung me 850 miles across the country with no real way to get back. It wasn't an anxiety about living with my parents on its own merits, but more, I will lose my entire offline life. If my parents lived in the same city I wound up in, it would've been a big shrug (but! I am super lucky to have a supportive and loving family.)

I look at the struggle my mom has with helping my grandmother because they live at a decent distance (8 hour drive) from each other, and it just makes me wonder why people are so determined to go it alone, although I'm sure American exceptionalism ties into that to some extent. I mean, there's a degree of privacy in living space that I really like having - I wouldn't want to go back to that student/immediately after graduation life when we were all kind of living on top of each other - but something like a group of reasonably soundproofed residences clustered where we can share socialization, cooking/cleaning/land care duties, and go be by ourselves if we gotta? Sign me straight the fuck up.