◉̸̷̥̩̰̳̤̯͙̱̫̖̺̾͛͆̽̐͊̎͂͗͝͞͠👁⃟̸̤̰̱̲͛͆̎̽͝͠∞⃝̸̩̫̳̲͛͒̐͠⊙⃟🜏 Echoes of the Forgotten Selves IV: 4/10
Society tends to think of homelessness as the worst thing that could happen to a person. Or at least, that's what people want you to believe.
Employers have an interest in keeping people afraid of losing their jobs. Parents and teachers want young people to understand the consequences of not working hard. Politicians invoke homelessness as a cautionary tale about personal responsibility. Even the homeless themselves often find that emphasizing their suffering is the only way to receive sympathy or assistance.
And to be fair, there's plenty of suffering to emphasize.
Yet few people have never looked out from inside an office building, buried under deadlines, responsibilities, and all of life's accumulated obligations, and wondered what it would be like to simply walk away from everything. To be free. To roam the world without a schedule, a mortgage, or anyone expecting them to be somewhere on Monday morning.
It's a curious contradiction. We spend much of our lives dreaming about freedom while simultaneously organizing our entire civilization around the fear of having too much of it.
But I've come to think that the worst thing that can happen to a person isn't necessarily what society tells us it is.
The worst thing isn't being unemployed. It's working hard for nothing, or being forced to work toward an outcome you never wanted in the first place.
It isn't being poor. It's sacrificing everything you enjoy for the possibility of someday being rich enough to enjoy it.
It isn't being unheard. It's being forced to say things you don't believe.
It isn't feeling sad. It's being expected to say you're happy.
There's something about my life during that period that I can only describe as feeling like I was working every day to throw an enormous birthday party that nobody was ever going to show up for.
I had a house. A nice one, actually. I had possessions, responsibilities, and the outward appearance of someone who was doing what he was supposed to do. By conventional standards, I was on the right track.
But there was a certain emptiness to it that I couldn't shake.
Everything seemed to exist in preparation for something else. Work hard today so you can enjoy tomorrow. Save money now so you can live comfortably later. Improve yourself so you can become worthy of the life you're supposedly working toward.
And even if you did everything right, there was never any guarantee that the party would actually happen.
Instead, there were the daily reminders.
"Society doesn't owe you anything."
"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps."
"Keep grinding."
"Become the best version of yourself."
It was all so endless and tiring.
The curious thing about being told that society doesn't owe you anything is that nobody ever seems particularly interested in discussing the other half of that arrangement.
If society doesn't owe me anything, why exactly do I owe society anything?
Why am I obligated to spend my life pursuing someone else's definition of success? Why should I devote myself to maintaining a lifestyle that doesn't make me happy, just because losing it is supposed to be terrifying?
And what if the things that actually make me happy are precisely the things everyone else keeps telling me not to do?
What if I don't want to maximize my productivity?
What if I don't want to climb the corporate ladder?
What if I don't particularly care about being successful?
What if, after spending my entire life trying to become the best version of myself, I want to be the worst version of myself for a little while?
Of course, there are practical problems with this philosophy.
Freedom doesn't keep you warm at night. It doesn't provide a bathroom, protect your belongings, or guarantee that you'll have somewhere comfortable to sleep. And there's nothing particularly romantic about being treated as a public nuisance for the crime of existing somewhere without paying rent.
Homelessness has a way of replacing the elaborate problems of modern life with much simpler, more immediate ones. Instead of worrying about your career trajectory, you get to worry about where you're going to sleep.
It's not exactly an upgrade.
But there is something strangely clarifying about having so little left to lose. The enormous machinery of expectations that once seemed so important begins to look rather absurd from the outside. All those things you were supposed to want, all those milestones you were supposed to reach, all those people you were supposed to impress.
You begin to wonder how many of them ever mattered to you at all.
None of this is to say that homelessness is a desirable condition, or that people suffering through it should somehow be grateful for the experience. Having the freedom to walk away from something is very different from having nowhere else to go.
But I do think we've made a peculiar mistake in treating the absence of conventional success as synonymous with the absence of a worthwhile life.
I've experienced the respectable version. I've had the house, the responsibilities, the endless pursuit of a future that always seemed to be just a little farther away.
And I've experienced what happens when much of that falls apart.
As it turns out, homelessness isn't the worst thing a person can go through.
Not remotely.
In fact, having given the matter some consideration, I'd have to say the experience deserves a solid 4/10.