people only think about things they think they can get

Like, as long as I feel that my own work will not earn me enough money to buy a house, I don't even think about buying a house.

But wanting a house, that's still a pretty deep-seated security-generator for me. Pretty high up on the Maslow list, wouldn't you say? Basic security, building toward the future, knowing you have a place of your own where you can't be thrown out or rejected or whatnot (though the current spate of foreclosures would say otherwise). But the concept is still pretty important, especially among a people whose ideas about property and land-owning are so central to their notions of what any given human is worth.

(There's another post in there somewhere about how it can be that people are so adamant that every child must be born, and yet, once that child actually physically exists in the world, there's no equal level of concern for that child's future survival, let alone happiness - for instance, someone might insist that even homeless mothers should be required to have their babies once they're pregnant by insisting that every fetus has the same rights as an actual person; yet once that baby is born, suddenly everybody's looking the other way. Nobody's helping this mother, who they've insisted must give birth in her mandated role as human incubator, and yet now that the infant is a real, living, breathing creature with needs for food, shelter and whatnot, suddenly there's no one there to follow through.

If I were in charge of the world, I would insist that no new people could be born unless there was a guaranteed piece of land, in other words, a dedicated physical space in which they could safely exist, for every human ever born. My rules would say that every human born must be guaranteed a minimum amount of decent, usable land that has access to a minimum number of all the amenities necessary to a comfortable life: Food, water, clean air, peace and quiet. It would not be up to every human to prove their right to exist by earning it, when they had no choice about being born in the first place! When their very existence may have been forcibly brought into being by a society that couldn't care less about their actual future safety, well-being or happiness, but only about its power to coerce women into having babies. And what that's all about is the subject of many a feminist post.)

So even though I may not consciously think about a house when my rational mind says it's not something I can attain, somewhere underneath it all I still continually feel the need for a place of my own, as the accepted status marker in this society of a person who has 'grown up' and 'made it in the world'. Not to mention the whole safety/security thing. People who don't have dwelling places of their own (even a trailer or a boat or something) tend to feel always temporary, always subject to the whims of others, always vulnerable.

Because in this materialist society, a person's worth is directly related to how much personal property they own. We may bullshit to our heart's content about zen ideas of personal value and so on, but it's all so much hot air in the face of how capitalism (and especially our particular brand of unchecked, predatory capitalism) really works. Case in point is the fact that nearly anybody who says to you, "Oh, I don't judge you by whether you have a house or not," is nearly always someone who has a house of their own. In other words, they are somehow unable to extrapolate from (or even recognize) the sense of security that they themselves derive from owning a home. They dismiss it as being irrelevant, unimportant, that they could do without it any time.

And of course not everyone is this unaware - some people actually acknowledge how important a house is to their sense of security and well-being, why else would they dedicate such a huge portion of their life energy to achieving this exact thing??? Yet it's funny (not in the 'ha ha' sense) how often people who finally achieve this goal act like it's no big deal.

Weird. Humans are just weird.