(no subject)
Oct. 8th, 2019 11:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: poverty, kind of discourse-y (though I tried to keep it toned down)]
[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (bysiderea)
I left a comment on "The Privilege of Property" two months ago, but it remains stuck in the moderation queue. Maybe she doesn't like necro-ing? The post was only about two months old at the time, but some would say that's a long time.
(or possibly I didn't tone it down enough)
Either way, I'm going to post it here instead.
---
I find it intriguingly strange that you consider living alone to be more economical (in aspects other than the cost of housing), given that I've long considered roommates to be a very important part of living economically (and *not* just for housing-cost benefits).
I feel like maybe this sentence is more important than the rest of your post treats it as being:
"Also, I was sharing the space with fellow medievalists, so nobody had a problem with it when I took over half the kitchen table for months at a time in service of brewing my own booze, and by "my" I mean "our and our friends'"."
The problems with roommates you point out mostly sound like they're specific to *arm's-length* roommates, rather than more communal households. Having more mouths to feed makes bulk food *more* practical, not less...unless you're not sharing food with each other. The four of us have one Costco membership (mostly for the cheap gasoline, but the following is a nice bonus), and we buy the big packages of toilet paper there and don't keep track of who uses how much of it. The toilet paper, like most everyday expenses, is paid for out of a pool of group funds to which we each make usually-monthly contributions.
Please don't get me wrong: I know that I'm very fortunate to have been born into a group that works reasonably well together, to have parents (and brother) such that "living with my parents" does not strike me as a mark of failure or desperation. Finding people you can form a household with is hard, and also some people just *like* living alone and they (you?) should get to have that. But I worry that...I see a lot of societal messages against households other than a married couple and their (if applicable) minor children--blood families of other configurations are either Pathetic or, conversely, Privileged Bastards†; chosen families are Just A Phase and/or Probably Cults--and so I worry that the option may be under-explored.
---
†Can you tell that this is the brush I'm worried I'm going to get tarred with, even though we are all too often in the red? (our expenses are low, but our income is even lower; layoffs and underemployment are big issues)
[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by
siderea)I left a comment on "The Privilege of Property" two months ago, but it remains stuck in the moderation queue. Maybe she doesn't like necro-ing? The post was only about two months old at the time, but some would say that's a long time.
(or possibly I didn't tone it down enough)
Either way, I'm going to post it here instead.
---
I find it intriguingly strange that you consider living alone to be more economical (in aspects other than the cost of housing), given that I've long considered roommates to be a very important part of living economically (and *not* just for housing-cost benefits).
I feel like maybe this sentence is more important than the rest of your post treats it as being:
"Also, I was sharing the space with fellow medievalists, so nobody had a problem with it when I took over half the kitchen table for months at a time in service of brewing my own booze, and by "my" I mean "our and our friends'"."
The problems with roommates you point out mostly sound like they're specific to *arm's-length* roommates, rather than more communal households. Having more mouths to feed makes bulk food *more* practical, not less...unless you're not sharing food with each other. The four of us have one Costco membership (mostly for the cheap gasoline, but the following is a nice bonus), and we buy the big packages of toilet paper there and don't keep track of who uses how much of it. The toilet paper, like most everyday expenses, is paid for out of a pool of group funds to which we each make usually-monthly contributions.
Please don't get me wrong: I know that I'm very fortunate to have been born into a group that works reasonably well together, to have parents (and brother) such that "living with my parents" does not strike me as a mark of failure or desperation. Finding people you can form a household with is hard, and also some people just *like* living alone and they (you?) should get to have that. But I worry that...I see a lot of societal messages against households other than a married couple and their (if applicable) minor children--blood families of other configurations are either Pathetic or, conversely, Privileged Bastards†; chosen families are Just A Phase and/or Probably Cults--and so I worry that the option may be under-explored.
---
†Can you tell that this is the brush I'm worried I'm going to get tarred with, even though we are all too often in the red? (our expenses are low, but our income is even lower; layoffs and underemployment are big issues)
no subject
Date: 2019-10-09 01:39 am (UTC)