I’ve just had a holiday, and unlike many my dream holiday is being at home. One of my greatest pleasures is…

I’ve just had a holiday, and unlike many my dream holiday is being at home. One of my greatest pleasures is to work ON my home, not just in the DIY sense but on ‘home-making’, making it an increasingly pleasant place to be. To me this is also a deeply political issue. /1

It bemuses me to see the great rush to travel, that fundamental lack of groundedness cultures now seem to have, where our greatest pleasure comes from visiting other peoples’ homes, rather than being in our own. I think we forget that’s what travel is, the consumption of…/2 https://t.co/dtG7bGb9q1

…the beautiful homes of others. Homes built over generations. They’re beautiful because the people who built these locations had a sacred feeling of place, which allowed them to make these places sacred. But I think we know our own places increasingly don’t have that quality. /3

Modern suburbia is not going to attract tourists, and that tells you something. We’re living off the fat of previous generations and their understanding of place, that allowed them to beautify all of the places tourism is now trashing. I don’t think it’s a stretch to see the…/4 https://t.co/E6tgH6dM0z

…obsession with travel as some deep need to try to reconnect with that groundedness. We’re not finding it at home, so we go looking elsewhere for it. But it never really scratches that existential itch, and thus we keep travelling, obsessively, trying to fill a void. /5

Women have said for years that home-making should be given the same priority and compensation as all other work. It’s the most fundamental work in our entire society, and yet is paid nothing and is increasingly marginalised. And it always fell to women to do it. On my holiday…/6

…I did home-making. The sorts of labour which work would normally prevent me from doing, on not just my physical house but on the lifestyle of the people in it. Economy politics destroyed this by requiring all adults to work (away from home) to be able to subsist. /7

And so we arrive at ‘working from home’ politics. Where our labour is now so divorced from that basic home-making, that in usual economic politics fashion, we have to find ‘work-life balance’. That balance word is always a sure sign bullshit is in play. /8 https://t.co/LfOHpFCt31

What are we all working for, in the first place? Surely it’s to improve all of our lives, and our home is the core of those lives? Like the nonsense about balancing public health against the economy (work). Why would any sane society make that two opposing things? /9

This is the heart of the modern hijacking of society by the economy. The dislocation of people and their community resources. A shift that takes your labour away from your home and community, and makes you ‘commute’ elsewhere, to work. Economies are just the old empires,…/10

…given a new modernised name. Empires work by dislocating people and resources, and driving them through transport networks back towards the centre of the empire. Once empires exhaust those resources elsewhere, in other peoples’ homes, the people who live there…/11 https://t.co/lNgC2utJrs

…mobilise towards the centres who have exhausted their homelands, looking for the subsistence that was taken from them. This is their travel, and I’m not sure we see a deeper equivalence here with our own. While we don’t travel to look for somewhere to live or to…/12 https://t.co/3IYxXLKGhW

…find food and security, in both cases we are people who have lost the sovereignty and sanctity of our own homes. Housing is one of the economy’s greatest ‘markets’. You have to pay for the right to occupy a spot on the planet, and increasingly many can’t afford to. /13

We even call it the ‘cost of living’. Life now has a cost, in monetary terms. Life has always required hard work, but that’s fundamentally different to it having a cost. My holiday home-making rammed that home even more strongly for me, the deep pleasure in regaining some…/14

…grounding with my own space. Aboriginal people have been trying to tell us this in the entire unfortunate time they’ve had to deal with us, that place is the heart of life. But we huddle that minuscule strip of coast, flying in and out on home-consuming tourist jaunts,…/15

…oblivious to our own land and any sense of sacred connection to it. Wage-slaves trying to re-energise any sense of the sacred by consuming centuries of culture and tradition elsewhere. Rather than making our own sacred, doing our own home-making. /16

This is ultimately why economy politics goes to war against ‘lockdowns’. There were many who discovered the joys of being able to prioritise home again, in lockdowns. The idea that freedom is going to work, and being at home is tyranny, is crazy stupid. It points to the hard…/17

…core of economy politics, it’s about dislocating you. ‘There’s no place like home’, now replaced by ‘there’s no place like a boring shit job, in a daily commute’. How dumb do we really need to get before all of this collapses? The UK is finding out. /end https://t.co/h4UDRhJH59