A Home is a Place
place, not just people, make a home
Home, let me come home
Home is wherever I’m with you
Oh, home, yes, I am home
Home is when I’m alone with you
~ Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
The importance of geography is often neglected in our cultural estimation of what makes a home. “Home is where the heart is!” is the common turn-of-phrase. In some sense, it’s true, love can turn even the most rundown of places into a home when necessary. But we are rational animals, and our perception of our own subjectivity cannot be divorced from objective reality. We exist in a certain place, at a certain time. The nebulous, bohemian notion of home as anywhere I want it to be sweeps aside how our environment and place affect our ability to be happy and to love well.
Geography is essential in a few ways in our experience of home. The two that I will explore in this essay are the effects of the natural world on our lives and the rootedness and connection to others that living in a specific place affords us.
The Natural World
Research and everyday experience show that humans are far happier in environments filled with green and blue spaces.1 There are also just personal preferences that stem from temperament and what we’re used to. Those who grew up in a big city probably feel more comfortable in an urban environment. Someone who grew up on the beach probably wouldn’t like living in the Midwest. My husband would be perfectly happy living in Florida, whereas I would be melting 365 days of the year. You see my point.
On some level, we all realize the limits of our ability to change our external environments, yet we often mistakenly believe ourselves to be endlessly malleable in new conditions. I could move to Finland, the “happiest country in the world,” but that wouldn’t change the fact that a lack of sunlight makes me batty.
The natural world promotes happiness and human flourishing, and personal preferences proclude each of us from being content in certain environments. We can channel all the happiness and love in the world into any house we might live in, but our external environment limits from being able to truly settle down anywhere.
Community and Roots
Another thing that gets looked over in our desire to be untethered from any specific place is the importance of community and family roots. Isolation and loneliness are major contributors to the pervasive malcontent that permeates the lives of modern man. Without community and family support, every responsibility that otherwise would have been undertaken by a few, or even several people, falls squarely on our own shoulders. This creates barriers to many things, such as getting married and having children.
Communities serve not only as a source of people to help us, although serving others is a necessary component of a functioning community, but also, we are social creatures. Sometimes it is not even a helping hand that we need, but simply someone to talk to. In isolation, we tend to despair, and the mere presence of other people combats this.
Family is also necessary for a healthy community, but even more than that, our family and homes connect us to the past. Our existence is temporal, but through people and places, we can find connectedness to the past. Legacies, family land, and generational stability all contribute to our sense of well-being. New things are exciting, but often it is better for things to stay the same as they have been for generations.
Realizing and acknowledging the importance of geography in our lives is crucial to helping solve the loneliness and fertility crises of our time. There are many causes for these issues but, as Lane Scott has pointed out several times, our disconnect from nature and general lack of interpersonal roots are surely among them. In addressing the financial malaise plaguing young people, many pundits retort that if it is too expensive to live where you have lived your whole life, then you obviously need to pack up your whole life and family and move to Mississippi. The dismissal of any importance our environments might serve is to imply that human beings are maliable, disembodied objects whose flourishing is completely independent from the space around them. This is silly. Of course, where we live matters. It is, unfortunately, not simply enough to have ‘love’ in the abstract sense when it comes to making a home. We exist in time and space, and so must our homes. Otherwise, our attempts to solve our modern maladies will be futile.
I feel like this really is common sense, but I recently finished the book The Nature Fix by Florence Williams, in which she relays her experience participating in studies and the results of the studies themselves, showing how much our flourishing is dependent on access to the natural world
The way you pushed back on “home is where the heart is” felt less like rejecting the sentiment and more like insisting that embodiment and environment actually matter in shaping how we live and relate to people. That grounding in physical reality made the argument feel more serious than most cultural takes on “home.”