I’m the wrong person to write this.
I’ve spent years moving. The Netherlands, Aruba, Ibiza – and my present work takes me through cities I stay in for a few weeks and then leave. I’ve made a life out of not being anywhere for very long, and I’d choose it again tomorrow.
Which doesn’t stop me noticing. Everywhere I go, I find people who have the thing I gave up, and they don’t know they’ve got it.
a home used to be something else
Somewhere along the way, a home became a thing you own.
Not a place. An asset. Something you buy as early as you can, watch the value of, and take advice about. We talk about property the way we talk about a portfolio, and we’ve done it for long enough that it sounds like the natural way to talk.
It isn’t. It’s quite recent, and it’s quite strange.
Because a home was never mainly a thing you had. It was a thing that had you. A set of streets that knew your face. A shop where you didn’t have to say the order. Somebody on the floor above who noticed if the light stayed off.
That’s a relationship, not an asset. And we’ve quietly stopped counting it.
Aristotle put the good life in the city. Not the house — the polis, the shared thing you’re part of. He’d find our version peculiar. We’ve more or less sorted the shelter and mislaid the part that made it worth having.
the two questions
There are two questions hiding inside the housing question, and only one of them gets asked.
Can you afford to be here?
That’s the loud one, and it’s real. Rents across Europe are up nearly a third in a decade, and in the worst places people hand over close to half their earnings for a roof. Whole generations have been quietly told that the city they were born in is not for them. It is worth being angry about, and plenty of people cleverer than me are working on it. I’d take that win tomorrow and go back for the rest.
Does anyone here know your name?
That’s the other one. Nobody measures it. It doesn’t turn up in a rent index or a planning application. And yet ask a person what they loved about the place they miss, and it’s what they’ll describe. Not the square metres. The people.
Win the first question and you have somewhere you can afford. Win the second and you have somewhere you belong. They aren’t the same victory, and only one of them is on the agenda.
the case for leaving
Before I make the case against my own life, let me make the case for it, because it’s a good one.
Moving keeps you honest. Every place you land shows you people doing life a completely different way and getting on fine, which quietly dismantles the idea that there’s one right shape for it. Settled people rarely find that out. They inherit a way of living and it works, more or less, and the question never comes up.
Being unknown is also, sometimes, a gift. Nobody has decided who you are yet. You get to put things down. There’s a lightness to a city that has no opinion about you, and anyone who’s ever been trapped by other people’s version of them will know exactly what I mean.
So I’m not writing this from regret. I like my life. I’d recommend a few years of it to almost anyone.
and the cost of it
Here’s where I have to be straight, because it would be easy to write this from a terrace and sound wise.
I have not lost connection. Moving gives you plenty of that – new faces, good conversations, more of them than most people get in a settled life. If connection were the whole story I’d have nothing to complain about.
What I gave up is being depended on.
Nobody’s parcel comes to me. Nobody knocks because their tap’s gone. No one clocks it if I don’t come down for three days – not because they don’t care, but because nobody’s had time to start expecting me. I get the warmth and I skip the obligation, and for a long time I thought that was the good deal.
It isn’t, quite. Because the obligation is the belonging. Not the nice evenings – the inconvenient ones. The favour you’d rather not do. The neighbour you check on because there’s nobody else to. That’s the bit that makes a place yours, and it’s precisely the bit that travelling lets you off.
That’s the trade. I’m not pretending I’ve solved it.
being missed
Which means the test isn’t an address.
Plenty of people have lived on the same street for twenty years and nobody would notice if they stopped coming down. Staying isn’t the thing. Being useful where you are is the thing, and it takes as long as it takes.
Would you be missed?
If you vanished for a fortnight, is there anyone whose day has a hole in it? Not a friend who’d eventually text. Someone whose ordinary week is shaped, a little, by you being in it.
You can ask that anywhere. It just gets harder to answer yes to if you keep leaving – or if you stay, and never make the connections.
your question, not mine
A home is where you belong. A house is the building you own.
Which means we could fix the money and still find the loneliness sitting there, waiting.
I’m in Athens as I write this, in a flat I’ll leave in a fortnight, running into all of it again. And I should be clear: I’m used to this life, and I like it. I’m not standing here telling you the settled life is the better one. I don’t think there’s a right answer, and I’d be suspicious of anyone selling you one.
What I’d say is that most of us only ever ask the first question. Can I afford to be here.
The second one is quieter, and it’s yours to sit with. Does anywhere know you? Would anyone miss you if you went?
Only you can answer that. It’s worth knowing what the answer is.
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