You'd think it would be a straightforward question to answer, but it's not. Fifteen years ago, it would have been a plausible "yes" when speaking about the house I've now decided to leave. Five years ago, even. So how could it ever be a plausible "yes" ever again? You simply don't know how events will unfold.
I mean... if I'd died five years ago, it would have been my "forever house" and nobody would have been able to prove me wrong.
So, no... it's probably not my "forever house". There's probably a retirement home that hasn't been built yet with that label on it.
The process of house-staging, decluttering, and then triaging what will and will not follow you to the next life forces you to assess what important to you now vs. what was important to you in the past. Sometimes it's like looking back at a different person, even if the core hasn't changed.
So here's my list, with a clear and apparent bias toward real estate. All of these things came up at some point in some strange way when assessing the above situation, even if they don't seem directly relevant.
What has always made sense to me
- Owning a home
- The clarity that you don't really "own a home" until the mortgage is paid off.
- Supporting endeavours, products, and business dealings that allow people to earn a living wage, sometimes in lieu of charitable donations with an unclear destination.
- Walking - leaving the car at home.
What I used to "get" but no longer do (mostly related to "growing up")
- Artisanal food
- Farmers' markets
- Adbusters magazine
- "Health food stores" that advocate many conflicting theories of health attached to the products they sell, as if there is no conflict
- 100% efficiency. It's too costly (in multiple ways) to achieve.
- Reel lawn mowers, regardless of the size of your lawn
- The idea that multiple walks of life living in the same neighbourhood enrich the neighbourhood for everyone and motivate aspiration upward. This used to be true but I'm not convinced that it still is.
What never made sense to me
- Self-declared "health stores" that only sell jars of dried powder
- 4 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms
- Snout houses
- Dishwashers
- Fridge water dispensers
- Ceilings that are so tall that nobody can figure out how to change the lightbulb that is installed there.
- Swimming pools and deep fryers. How are these related? For all of the hassles, cost, waste, and other shortcomings of privatizing these facilities, it's best to use public pools and buy your fried food outside.
- Tattoos
- Drugs of any kind
- Drunkenness
- While we're in this category: laughter that gets louder when a more important person is in the room, and the tendency or desire for a job promotion to motivate putting a sportcoat over almost any base layer at all.
- Water softeners
- Houses without chimneys
- Sardine-style neighbourhoods with no memorable trees
