Homesick

I’m drafting and redrafting my second book, which is proving even harder to write than my first book, which was hard enough. The first one was about running away. This one is about coming home, or about trying to. It’s about how the value of being at home is cancelled out by the soaring cost of having a house. I’m using Walden, by Henry David Thoreau, as a lens to help me understand how the current housing crisis sweeping across many parts of the world is a symptom of a deeper homesickness, and how it’s also manifesting as crises in ecology, social justice and mental health. I’ve been exploring the reasons why I felt so homesick when I lived in a house, and yet, now that I live in a shed, I don’t feel homesick at all. I’m trying to explain that living in a shed isn’t a cop-out, or a bum’s choice, or a romantic hippy dream, but my answer to an impossible question: how to balance on an economic system that is fundamentally unsound.

Since I was a teenager, the number of people suffering from eating disorders had been rising by about seven percent every year. Iain Pirie, Associate Professor in Politics and International Studies at Warwick a University, argues that it’s not just the way women are represented in the media that’s helping to fuel this rise (a well-documented problem), but capitalism itself which has corrupted our relationship with our own bodies and the food that sustains them. Pirie argues that the cycle of bingeing and purging that categorises bulimia nervosa is similar to the accelerated and chaotic consumption that underpins modern culture and is vital for economic growth. The conflicting expectations placed on our bodies by advertisers – bombarding us with messages that food is a reward and a compensation (Have a break, have a KitKat), while at the same time telling us that not eating puts us higher on the moral and social hierarchy – are actually deadly. Eating so much it hurts and then throwing it up in a fit of utter self-loathing is the perfect metaphor for consumerism. There is a fatal conflict between the needs of the economy, manifested as increasingly raucous advertising and a fetish for growth, and the needs of people, animals, and the ecosystems that support us, the planet we must all call home.

Economy and ecology are two sides of the same coin. Social justice depends on a healthy ecosystem. The poor will pay with their lives when countries shrink and flood and burn because of climate change. The poor will pay with their lives when the air becomes unbreathable. The poor will pay with their mental health when they lose even more access to nature. If we keep building houses that cost the earth, to protect the greedy from having to share, then our houses won’t be worth the earth they’re built on, because the planet will be uninhabitable. So-called wide-eyed, romantic love for the natural world, what Thoreau and his contemporaries would have called Transcendentalism, is more rational than the kind of economic fundamentalism that seems to want to sacrifice existence for money.

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The peace of knowing that the true art of living is not to gather things and polish them and lay them out for others to admire, but to have next to nothing, get plenty out of it, and give the rest away.