I lived in the same house, in Lisbon, for more than a year.
This past week, me and my roommates moved to a new one and welcomed this change quite fondly. Not that the old house was bad, not at all, but, at least to me, this new house reflects the person that I'm trying to become in a more accurate way.
If you're reading this, you'll probably understand the importance of having the right environment around you, in order to be more productive, healthy and happy. I'm a great advocate of constant system building in your physical spaces since I've read the work of James Clear, Donella Meadows and others.
We must surround ourselves with things that remind us of who we want to be and what we want to achieve. Triggers that facilitate the change we want. Dr. Annie Murphy Paul wrote a beautiful thread you can read here. I also believe that surrounding yourself with beauty, in its most diverse forms (art, architecture, music and, yes, people) is fundamental to live a better life. But I derail.
In the last weeks at the old house, me and my friend Daniel had a couple of profound conversations, where we shared our deepest desires, fears and needs. We talked mostly about the change we seek to make in our own lives and, together, decided to create a plan in order to manifest those changes.
Now, keep in mind that this conversation happened before we moved but after we decided that we were going to this new house. We knew the kind of space we were about to inhabit.
I'm telling you this because, I deeply believe that one of the main reasons both of us ended up having those conversations, sharing those goals and becoming accountability partners to each other, was the fact that we were going to move to this specific house.
The physical space around us, right now, makes us want to achieve more. And the truth is, after only a week, both of us have made some changes. Small but impactful ones.
As I was reflecting upon this, I came across a notion that, in a mildly way, could justify why this change happened.
Why mildly? Well, let me tell you about Domicide.
Domicide
In 2001, Sandra Smith and John Douglas Porteous coined the term "Domicide", the deliberate destruction of homes.
Everyone knows intuitively what "home" is right? But if you ask people to actually define it, suddenly things get complicated.
Is it the house where you live? Is it "where the hearth is"? What has to happen for you to call a place home?
Let's start with the physical place you call home. Domicide is getting that taken away from you. When people saw their buildings being bombed in war, or when ancient tribes saw their villages being burned, those were clear examples of Domicide.
You may want to read "A Game for Swallows" by Zeina Abirached. A graphic novel that shows her childhood journey in Lebanon, during their civil war. That's a great example of Domicide, told in a beautiful, loving way.
However, that's not the only type of Domicide.
Cultural Domicide and the Absence of narratives
We also have Cultural Domicide.
Every social context has a set of rules and norms that its members consciously or unconsciously accept to follow. When this is destroyed, we get cultural domicide.
In his amazing lecture series, John Vervaeke, talks about it in the Helenian Period, when the greek empire had so much different multiculturality, that people started to feel that their own culture was being taken away from them.
When our social norms and codes are on the line, both internal and external narratives become incoherent, destabilizing our lives, not only on a metaphysical level (think about people needing to replace their gods, back in the day) as well as on a behavioral one (what you can or can't wear, for example).
In fact, it's the possibility of this cultural domicide happening that sometimes makes people develop racist tendencies, believing that the contact with another culture will end up overbearing their own.
This phenomenon happens at a macro level. We're talking about big cultures. However, the same principles apply (in a much more subtle and mild way) in our own subcultures and small social groups.
As we’ve seen before, every social group we have, like a family or a group of friends, has a set of principles and rules that we must follow. However, they can be taken away from you.
Think about a group of great friends that tries to integrate a new element. This new person brings some change to the set of principles, changing the groups narratives and the friendship ends. This is more common in our day to day life, making it a soft example of cultural domicide.
Once again, on a macroscale, this is a horrible thing. However, on the micro scale, sometimes, seeing our "guiding principles” being burned down, may not be such a bad thing.
Sometimes we may choose, consciously, to abandon, "destroy", our homes, in order to break free from certain patterns. The moment a student leaves his parent's house, he leaves what we always called home, in order to live by a new set of rules. This is also a domicide, but a conscious one.
This approach may help us understand how to create better change.
So let's get back to me and Daniel.
The fact is that, in our old house, we created some unconscious rules.
Those rules were not helpful to what we wanted to achieve, but they were connected to the type of person we were in that space, so we were "socially" bound to them. Changing them was hard. But when we came into a new house, those social norms were non-existent. We had the chance to define them since day one, facilitating the kind of change we want to make in our daily lives. But to have that opportunity, we had to “destroy” what we called home.
The original idea of Domicide is something terrible. I got emotional reading Zeina's book, just by imagining going through that experience, and I can barely grasp what that must feel like. However, the idea of leaving behind social and cultural norms that trap you in a context where you can't express your true and better self, that’s something you can use.
Start by consciously making the move. Leave the "emotional home" that's trapping you and make a change. Seek new groups where the social norms and the culture are aligned to what you want to achieve.
I never knew how easy it was to escape if you don't mind leaving nearly everything behind.
Jessica Spotswood
But what if that "everything" is not something that you should hold on to?
Yes, it may be hard to abandon some groups and physical spaces.
It's hard to leave home.
But in the long run, you won't regret it.