I realize now at this moment, that this whole online journal thing has deviated from “writing down my thoughts and it all just happens to be on line” to “worrying about stream of consciousness being too confusing to a reader.” That wasn't ever really my intention, so if this ends up incoherent and you end up reading it, then too bad for you.
Don't read this.
It's probably incoherent and thus a grand waste of your time.
Seriously.
In my extremely limited experience, I've been struck by the feeling of a really strong correlation between social class and what I'll initially call “privacy space” for lack of a better term. Maybe by writing this, I'll help clarify for myself. Who knows.
A friend of mine is sharing a house with three other people. My impression that these other three people are between well off to wealthy. Certainly in the 99th percentile in the world; maybe even in the 99th percentile among Americans. This friend of mine moves into the house, given how he (in his understanding) is a ¼ owner of the house and how the house is in this town and he's in this town. Seems reasonable. Why not live in a house that you co-own?
But there's the rub. The other partners had been imagining this house as a co-op vacation house kind of thing, so having someone in the house full time was kind of contrary to their expectations. Not quite the same thing when you bring friends to your vacation home in Shangri-La if someone's already there.
So my friend decided to move out.
The thing is, I can see why the other partners would feel this way. I met a girl living in San Francisco with her mom and a friend all together in a small apartment (a studio even, if I remember right). Seemed strange to me at the time – how do you deal with so little privacy?
Earlier on here, it was perfectly normal to Zhuoma to let people in our room (even to let them sleep in it) and for me to think that was perfectly an invasion of my privacy somehow.
Now, I've changed my mind. I don't think I'd particularly care, or even necessarily find it all that strange (unless say the guest's feet were odorous enough to prevent me from sleeping. This is an actual risk here. I blame the popularity of synthetic socks).
So obviously it's not just "social class"—there's an environmental, learned aspect to this.
(speaking of which, who thinks socks absolutely need to be changed every day no questions asked? Who doesn't? This seems like one of those toilet paper direction arguments. Or maybe highly correlated with things like whether you wear your shoes indoors?)
But back to something approximating the original topic.
Beds.
How sacred is your bed? Would you mind if other people slept in it? A bunch of other people? Mere acquaintances? I mean, we're talking about situations where you're not using it anyway. Maybe you have a bed in two different towns and you're in one and this hypothetical acquaintance is in another.
Would you wash your sheets first? Would you care if they washed the sheets? Do you care if someone jumped on your bed in their shoes?
I've met people that just don't care.
I've met people that are extremely finicky.
The people that don't care – it's not that they don't care about your bed – they just don't care about any bed. They might walk on your bed with their shoes, but that's because they'd walk on their own bed with their shoes.
The people that do care – it's not that they only care about their own bed – the bed is like this sacred clean thing and they wouldn't desecrate someone else's bed either.
What does this have to do with social class? I'm not sure. But I've sensed a correlation that goes kind of like: People that don't care about beds are also very hospitable – if you want to crash at their place, well, it's just a place so why wouldn't they let you do whatever you want? People that do care about beds are a bit less open in one way or another. Maybe it's because it's not clean or tidy or not up to snuff or not elegant or luxurious or comfortable enough, but there's maybe some guilt there and some reservations.
And this is where it gets much less certain in my own brain (and we're not even close to anything like actual data or statistics), but it seems like people that have experienced being poor (not just in theory, but I mean actually “what do we have to eat tonight, maybe we can boil some of these potatoes into a big stew and eat that for the next few days and we can't even really go anywhere else to look for opportunities because the transportation i expensive” kind of thing), well those people seem to be more hospitable—the “this bed is just a bed; this flat is just a room” kind of people.
Why did class come into my thinking? Partly because I've been thinking along those lines recently (say 6-12 months). Partly because I'm probably engaging in confirmation bias in that I already believe that there's a positive correlation between the amount of money that you have and how much of a jerk you are. And partly as follows:
Does the idea of renovating a house and then just leaving it empty most of the year make any sense? To some, that idea is perfectly reasonable—it's a matter of something like "planning" or "preparation." Since I may want to
go live in this city for a week or two at some point in the future, it sure would be nice and convenient if this house were there waiting for me.
But one could also argue that the house just sitting there is a waste—why wouldn't you just let people use it, I mean, it's just sitting there empty otherwise.
There are definitely interesting, objective things one could measure, like "how many unprompted times does a person offer the use of their home to others in a year" or "how many people have slept in this person's bed in a year," though those two examples are fresh in my mind and perhaps specific to my particular life, or maybe even specific to this past week?
On the money side I'm sure there are tons of ways to measure class—minimal annual income over one's lifetime, minimal annual expenditures over a lifetime, parents' combined income from your age 1—18.
As it ends up, I do feel sort of guilty about where I live. It's fine by me, but I have trouble offering to let people stay here because there's no normal amenities and I somehow expect that people expect these things.
Perhaps the better way to go about things is to offer to let people stay here, and if they decide that they don't want to repeat the experience, to let them decide for themselves. =)
