Is liquidity a good thing? Our society certainly seems to think so. Things are not so much things, as numbers. Homes are not so much places to keep the rain off as investment opportunities. I won’t deny that there’s a certain ease and convenience to that perspective. If the weather changes, or your attitude does, or your health, you can up and leave a place. It might make you sad, but you can do it. 

What troubles me is when it becomes the logical conclusion, and the only obvious choice. 

My parents generation has decided that retirement fund-funded nursing will be the solution to their later in life care. They’ll pay others to do what kids have done in the past. It’s not a bad choice, I see the appeal to not changing diapers. It’s not the choice everyone is making, but it does seem to be the prevailing decision. 

It’s not a decision being made by one side of the generation gap alone. Some parents don’t want their kids taking care of them because they’re assholes, and some kids don’t want to take care of their parents for the same reason.

I don’t feel like thinking about people who don’t want to take care of their parents or be taken care of by their kids because they hate eachother. I want to think about people who don’t want to take care of their parents and parents who don’t want to be taken care of by their kids because they think it’s the right thing to do. 

I don’t think it’s the right thing to do, to not be taken care of and to not take care. Because as I’ve written about before, things that are uncomfortable are not bad. Unpleasantness is not the same thing as badness. Often times these things are Good with a capital G. 
I suggested to someone today that I likely won’t have much of a choice wether or not to be taken care of by my kids later in life because I simply will not have the money to afford a nursing home. Given the reality of my financial situation I had best make my home a place that can sustain multiple generations, and I had better raise kids that like me enough to wipe my butt. 

The person I was talking to pointed out that I did, in fact, have the finances to fund my end of life care in a nursing home...it was just tied up in my house.

You know, the place where I’ll be raising my kids, making art, improving and caring for for the next thirty years. Sell that and you’ll be good to go.

This is a profane idea, and it is one most people are making.

This house isn’t mine, it’s Roby’s. I’m not working on it and improving it and making it beautiful with art and labour for me, I’m doing it for her and her children. If I sold it in 30 years...what was the fucking point of doing any of this?

There is, of course, the chance that she’ll want to move to New York City, or anywhere other than Plainfield. But I’ll admit I really hope she doesn’t. I think we, as humans, have an opportunity to build things that extend past ourselves, but you have got to choose a place in which to do it and you’ve got to stick around. 

The lie of liquidity has untethered us from our parents and our souls. We were told we could go anywhere, be anything. We can’t, we can only become ghosts, or modernist architects.