There are some good things I learnt from my three week experiment with homelessness a month ago. I won't romanticise it, but perhaps some of us will find the information useful:Dan Rowden wrote:It's interesting that the content of a truly thoughtful person's mind is so readily seen as sufficiently dysfunctional so as to warrant clinical diagnosis. But then, for such people living in countries whose national ethos includes some form of compassion for the ill and aberrant this is a matter of rather good fortune. Life on the streets doesn't appeal.
- women, far more often than men, leave good food in rubbish bins
- women don't like finding strangers in out-of-the-way places, like deserted canyons, and will be the first to make contact to sus one out
- there are no lone "normal" women venturing into such places, and every one of them has a car and companion
- it's not worth reasoning or fighting with a naked drunk man
- exclusively raw food isn't healthy
- the attachment to having a lockable shelter is created by needing to sleep
- it's possible to undergo fairly intense activity with very little food, and remain calm and reasonable
- football grounds are "safe" places in towns to camp in
- it's difficult to display lowliness to people, since having a home and "creature comforts" are assumed to be human characteristics (deviants are suspected of criminality, and the snobbery is very obvious)
- overcoming particular attachments needs lots of reasoning to build up practical plans that one can have faith in, a bit like conscious hypnotism. I gave up the homelessness experiment because my attachment to a lockable shelter was so exhaustingly difficult to overcome, that it was a distraction
- stealing is as difficult as begging, psychologically
- I made some of my silliest financial extravagances, e.g. restaurants, newspapers, cafes, while being homeless
- my thinking became quite idiotic (as the above list shows), despite thinking frequently of Diogenes and Socrates' cynical attitude to comforts
- men were far more open to discussing truth, misogyny and reasoning, while i was perceived as a solo female traveller, and the calibre fell remarkably when i was perceived as a local female (potential gossip)
- cleanliness is a psychological relief
- it's better to relieve the pressure of an attachment that one agonises over, because the mind is freed from the agitation enough to get to know the experience at first hand, and then next time it appears, there is a habit created to take it on with reasoning (a feeling of familiarity and confidence)
Kelly
