The Atlantic suggests an article for me — from a couple years ago — that's right in my zone. It's by Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic's happiness expert, who — I'd noticed — has a new article in The Atlantic that I'd seen but chose not to click on: "Think About Your Death and Live Better/Contemplating your mortality might sound morbid, but it’s actually a key to happiness."
Did the Atlantic somehow see that I looked at the death article but decided not to read it and calculate that I might want to contemplate falling in love with someplace other than home and moving there?
The "Find the Place You Love" essay begins with an anecdote about a man who grew up in Minnesota, moved to Northern California, and then missed Minnesota. When I read the title, I thought the idea was to cast a wide net, consider everywhere, and fall in love with something. But if it's just look back on your life and understand what was your real home, that's a much more restricted set of options. There's a good chance you already live in what is for you the most home-like place, and if you were to leave, thinking you'd found a better place — Northern California is "better" than Minnesota — you'd become vividly aware of the feeling of home.
There is a word for love of a place: topophilia, popularized by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in 1974 as all of “the human being’s affective ties with the material environment.” In other words, it is the warm feelings you get from a place. It is a vivid, emotional, and personal experience, and it leads to unexplainable affections....
It is worth reflecting on your strongest positive synesthetic tendencies—and the place they remind you of. They are a good guide to your topophilic ideal, and thus an important factor to be aware of as you design a physical future in line with your happiness.
Could a place that has never been your home become the place you love in this way? It's possible that none of your homes over the years ever felt like home? What is this idealized notion that there's a place that's "truly your home"?
It makes me think of the old gospel song "I Can't Feel at Home in This World Anymore":
This world is not my home, I'm just a-passing through
My treasures and my hopes are all beyond the blue;
Where many Christian children have gone on before
And I can't feel at home in this world anymore
Over in glory land there is no dying there
The saints are shouting Victory and singing everywhere
I hear the voice of Nell that I have heard before
And I can't feel at home in this world anymore...
Heaven's expecting me that's one thing I know
I fixed it up with Jesus a long time ago
He will take me through though I am weak and poor
And I can't feel at home in this world anymore....
Back to "Find the Place You Love. Then Move There":
Among the entrepreneurs I studied, I noticed a tendency to put personal capital at risk in exchange for explosive rewards—rewards that can be hard to see at the time the risk is taken, but that the entrepreneurs intuitively feel will come. As the economist Joseph Schumpeter described the entrepreneur’s impulse, “there is the dream and the will to found a private kingdom.”... [Y]ou can... be an entrepreneur in the truest sense, occupied in the enterprise of building your life, your private kingdom. And sometimes, that means risking your emotional capital for explosive rewards that you feel in your heart will come.
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As Dorothy said, "There's no place like home." If you're looking, Althouse, all you'll need to do is click your heels together, and you'll be back in Kansas!
Home is a part of a person. Which is why we keep it maintained, landscaped and furnished just right. And it helps if our neighbors feel the same. That includes having a private Lake behind the home.
"Think About Your Death and Live Better/Contemplating your mortality might sound morbid, but it’s actually a key to happiness."
That was a topic of a recent Mike Rowe podcast. The notion is that the more you contemplate mortality, the more value you see in the life you have. I'm not sure what contemplating mortality has to do with where you live and how you love it. And if you are truly happy, does it take something material as where you live to make that happiness occur, especially if your happiness springs from your contemplation of mortality?
[now click more]
Home to me has always been where my family is, and more particularly now my wife (as opposed to my parents or children). My wife is who I love, so I guess I found the place where I find happiness. A place I never been before could be home, if she is there with me. It happens quite often when we travel.
I have friends from NH who moved to near Asheville when nearing retirement. Meeting with a financial counselor, he asked one of them what he would do if the other died. He said he would move back to Manchester. His wife looked surprised, then laughed that if he died she would also move back to Manchester. So despite the snow and the cold they moved back to Manchester.
I have little attachment to other places I have lived, and even actively dislike most of them now. I could live in a lot of places in a 25-mile radius, perhaps. A few previous New England vacation places that are very slow in the winter might attract me. I have children all over the world and could go those places for even a year or more, but not for the entirety of my last years.
Where the grass grows wild,
where the wind blows free
Come, Come
There's a wondrous land
For the hopeful heart, for the willing hand
Come. Come
There's a wondrous land
Where I'll build you a home in the meadow
I couldn't imagine living anywhere else than Omaha.
@Meade
I know that's from your favorite movie "How the West Was Won," but the picture it brought to mind for me was this scene from "Howl's Moving Castle."
It is interesting to me what it is that makes some place feel like “home.” It’s different for everyone. For some, it’s simply where family is and has been…for generations. I didn’t grow up that way. We were the outliers on both sides of my family…always moving, always relocating. For me, it’s place and terrain. Sierra Foothills and Sierra Nevada themselves will always be my heart’s home. I’m at peace there in a way like nowhere else. But I don’t live there and don’t really want to. I now live in NE WI, where my husband is from. But…interestingly, his “home” is New York City. It’s the people and culture (yes, museum/film culture but more people and lifestyle culture) that defines it as home for him. He chafes at being here, and I like it just fine…because there are bits of terrain and trees and water that speak to me. But…I’m like that gospel song…no place is really my home.
I saw Arthur Brooks interview former NE Senator Ben Sasse on Book TV. Sasse said it is a good idea to move to a town and buy a cemetery plot. Brooks was so impressed with Sasse's description of Fremont that he said he wanted to move there.
I've been to Fremont. Not that great.
Ann, your ruminations are becoming like "Breakfast with Costanza." That's not a bad thing. I love it and am looking forward to the morning when you ponder whether you should do the opposite of what you originally think you should do.
I could never afford to move back to socal so that's that.
It's tough to move when you have bodies buried in the basement.
I am Laslo.
My husband's whole family lives in a southern California beach town. So he has the advantages of a near perfect climate, beautiful scenery, eclectic culture, AND family in one place.
I have fought in vain for any other place for thirty years - or, really, just for him to consider the possibility that there might be any other place.
As a military brat, I didn't have one place where I grew up, so I've had to use different criteria to define "home." And, my family is not very demonstrative (his is, very), and my parents moved halfway across the country from their families and stayed there (my brother and sister, unlike me, seem to have been able to rest from travel while I've been busy drinking life to the lees, so to speak). Unfortunately they're all in a place that I don't particularly like. So I have nowhere that both feels sufficiently mine and would be sufficiently attractive to my husband - so southern California it is, even if (thank goodness) we can't afford to move there while living the way we'd like to live.
I find it very interesting that often the writing Althouse finds most interesting is in the comments not the professional journalism that has been assigned and polished and edited by professional news curators. TBF some editor somewhere allowed the reader comment through but still the interesting part is not the part the headline was promoting.
"For this world is not our home; we are looking forward to our everlasting home in heaven."
Hebrews 13:14
My wife and I moved almost 2000 miles southwest of our adult children, hoping to recruit them to get out of what we regard as the nihilistic culture there. But that didn’t happen, for a variety of barriers (like job licensing). Now grandchildren are on the scene and we are feeling our age, so there is heartache in the mix that we didn’t realize would be so strong. The only family oriented solution would be for us to move back, but we moved away because we despised that location (we were there due to a spectacular job that I could not replicate elsewhere until a position opened up here in the southwest). I am retired now and like living here but we are stuck in terms of missing out on family matters.
Laslo - Good to see you.
Dave B - I am no environmentalist, but I am anti-cemetery. We humans are running out of space. When I die I want the wife to spread my ashes in some neighborhood parks. Or stick a bone up my ass and throw me to the dogs.
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Rupert Brooke, 1914
I have never lived anywhere that really felt like home.
Lived in Newark and Wilmington, Delaware when I was too young to be connected to the things you'd do in town. I've gone back and it doesn't feel like going home. The people seemed distant and cold and the places I knew were small suburban developments of a type I wouldn't want to live in now.
Lived in Wayne, New Jersey as a high school student for 5 years, but my parents moved at the point where I went to college, so I didn't get to come back home to that place during college. To go back there now wouldn't make sense to me.
Went to college in Ann Arbor, which is also where my grandparents lived when I was growing up, but I haven't gone back there since 1977. Like Wayne, it seems like a place in the past, which can't be returned to.
Went to live in NYC in 1973 because it was for my first husband *his* home. Stayed there until 1984 (and lived there again for a school year in 2007-2008), but have always felt that I was not fully integrated into the place.
Have lived in Madison since 1984, so I've spent by far the most time here — almost 40 years. It's the only place I've owned a home and I've been living in that home since 1986. It's where my sons grew up, where my first marriage broke up, where I learned to live alone, and where Meade came to live with me. It's where I long to return whenever I go away. If this still doesn't feel like home, what are the chances some other place would?
A rule of thumb is that home is where the heart is.
It's tough to move when you have bodies buried in the basement.
Pet cemetery?
Where would Meade live if he had freedom of choice, and wasn't such a good husband?
I'm a 6th generation Southern Californian, and my parents grew up on farms, all the generations before them were farmers in Los Angeles county (my great-grandpa O was a farmer in Venice, California for a long while. I wish we still had that property).
I went to a good college near Chicago, and that sense of "not home" was ever present, not just in usual away from home ways, but because I deeply ached to see mountains around me and so many other things from the way people saw the world and humor and so much else. I lived in Sacramento for five years between 2015 and 2020 and while it was, in many ways, a great situation, I likewise never ever felt it was home. I'd come back to SoCal for family or work and just driving on the freeway gave me a deep sense of belonging.
We moved back to the SoCal mountains in 2020 and this is deeply home for me, something that crosses racial or the usual cultural boundaries.
And it can't just be the weather, since I still feel this way after our historic blizzard, not being able to leave the house for 17 days, a couple months ago.
Andrew said...
“Where would Meade live if he had freedom of choice, and wasn't such a good husband?“
I could feel at home in any state of the Upper Midwest.
https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vector/upper-midwest-of-united-states-vector-20162463
@Meade,
Very cool. Thanks for answering.
"For this world is not our home; we are looking forward to our everlasting home in heaven."
Hebrews 13:14”
I’ve been watching accounts of people who have had near death experiences. An overarching theme is that they had a feeling of being “home”. It was reported that angelic beings joyfully welcomed them home after their earthly executions.
"There is a word for love of a place: topophilia"
Grew up in Minnesota. Traveled nearly all of America except the desert southwest.
I do not know why, but despite never having been more than a tourist there, I feel both at home and alive while in the bayous of Louisiana. Intensely visceral. Unlike anywhere else. Even a picture of the bayou has that effect on me. Must be that forest primeval thing.
I am curious to know if anyone here has experienced something similar, irrespective of where for them that place might be.
On a good night, I go to sleep. I dream of my mother and father and brother. There is always some obscure architectural problem to be solved. We re-build a deconstructed home. That's actually what I do in life too.
I don't need Freud to explain this.
I grew up in the Southwest and lived in CO for 11 years before moving away to a completely different place. We've been here for over 4 years now and it does feel like home. Colorado never felt like home, but even returning to the place I grew up doesn't feel right. If my spouse died, I would move back for the family support, but not because it was home.
I am a poor wayfaring stranger
Traveling through this world of woe
Yet there's no sickness, no toil or danger
In that bright land to which I go
The Hayde Bluegrass Orchestra (from Norway) has a beautiful cover of this old song.
" Dave Begley said...
I couldn't imagine living anywhere else than Omaha."
We played there several times back in the 1980s. I remember just two things about the city. First, I'm pretty sure that's where I encountered a drive-through liquor store, something unimaginable in Minnesota at that time. And the other thing I remember was a random guy on the street telling me he really liked my shoes.
Convenient access to booze and a citizenry friendly to strangers. It's easy to understand Omaha's appeal.
There is always some obscure architectural problem to be solved.
When I "go home" in dreams, it's always to a house that is familiar in every aspect, except for a sort of mezzanine suite that I've never seen before, between the first and second floors. That's where I am staying, in the dream, and I always wonder why I never saw it before even though some part of me always knew it was there.
I'd love to say I understand what's going on there, but the best I can come up with is that I am not much like the rest of my nuclear family - I don't really "belong." (My extended family is another matter, but my nuclear family doesn't really seem to belong with them.
My nuclear family is kind of an independent entity.)
Ann Althouse wondered aloud: Did the Atlantic somehow see that I looked at the death article but decided not to read it and calculate that I might want to contemplate falling in love with someplace other than home and moving there?
What if I told you that there is an AI watching you as you peruse the Atlantic. It's watching what you scroll to, how fast, when you hover your mouse over something, everything you click on ... and then that AI automatically sends you a message (via Twitter, or email, or chat ... however they are communicating with you) suggesting other content that the AI predicts you will like, based on everything you've ever read at the Atlantic and every behavior you have exhibited.
What if I further told you that another AI was used to write the new article that you just got emailed and that this AI will monitor whether you read the article, how fast, how far, etc. and tune its writing specifically to your desires that it discovers over time.
That's what's happening (or will very shortly). No humans will be involved in any of this. Just a bunch of computer AI in the background writing things it knows you will consume and that it will teach you to trust. In that way, it will slowly groom you however it's programmed to groom you and only show you things it knows it wants you to see. It will begin programming YOU.
Welcome to Hell.
"I am curious to know if anyone here has experienced something similar, irrespective of where for them that place might be."
I had this experience in the southern an SW part of Ireland. I have some Irish heritage but not much and not recent
Please stop moving here.
Political Junkie,
We humans are running out of space.
Handle you final rest, in any manner that makes you happy. But you don't need an excuse. Some years back, the numbers were run, and every family in America could live in a 2000ft home on an average lot. All of them fitting in Texas.
Room, we got.
"We humans are running out of space."
We seem to have plenty for increasing numbers of wind and solar farms.
Leland: I loved this sentiment.
“Home to me has always been where my family is, and more particularly now my wife (as opposed to my parents or children). My wife is who I love, so I guess I found the place where I find happiness. A place I never been before could be home, if she is there with me. It happens quite often when we travel.”
My husband and I both agree this is perfect.
I did find that place and I did move here. Going fishing with those fish heads today.
Home for a lot of people is a word for where they grew up, or their parents lived. Not a description, necessarily, of where they currently or prefer to live.
Conversely, 'home' is used to describe simply the place they most enjoy living, or action that makes them content. Based on the latter, home can actually be anywhere.
Thanks for questioning this article. It was a bit glib.
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