Home Is Where You Are
Chasing a Feeling
Brisbane, December 2024
TL;DR: We treat “home” like a noun – a place you buy or rent. It’s actually a verb. Your comfort zone follows you everywhere; it just lands three weeks late. The question isn’t where to live. It’s which chapter you’re writing.
Most of us are just trying to find a place where we can finally exhale.
What is home, anyway? The cottage with the peeling paint? The urban loft with the overpriced rent? Or is it a biochemical signal in your brain telling you that you are safe?
Chasing a Feeling
“Home” isn’t about square footage. It’s about a feeling. The question is whether you can pack that feeling in a suitcase.
As you get older, your needs shift. Uprooting your life feels like jumping off a cliff. But at worst, you gain a scar and a story to tell over drinks. Who wants a deathbed smooth with caution?
When you step into the unknown, you’re greeted by the Fog of War. Just like in Age of Empires, you have to move your unit forward to uncover the map. You can’t see the resources or the enemies until you’re standing right next to them.
But here’s the thing nobody tells you: your comfort zone tags along for the ride. It just arrives late – like luggage showing up in a different time zone.
You land in the new city today. Your feeling of “home” lands three weeks later.
Wherever you end up, you will build a new comfort zone. That’s the human trick – adaptability. And the old comfort zones don’t disappear. They’re archived. Nothing is lost. Change requires the sacrifice of convenience, but it often yields unexpected returns – like finding a $20 bill in a jacket you haven’t worn in years.
The Psychology of Home
Attachment theory says the bonds you form in childhood shape your sense of belonging for life. That tracks. Your relationship with “home” is less about architecture and more about emotional anchoring – the messy bookshelves, the smell of garlic and onion, the specific way light falls through a window you’ve looked through a thousand times.
Cultural context matters too. Community, language, the rhythm of a place – these reinforce the signal that says safe.
Home isn’t a GPS coordinate. It’s a collection of feelings attached to places, and the collection travels with you.
The Perfect Place Is a Myth
The search for an ideal home is a series of trade-offs.
You get the view but lose the convenience.
You get the space but lose the community.
You get the city energy but lose the silence.
Call it the housing apps illusion – the belief that somewhere, right now, there’s a sun-drenched apartment with affordable rent, walkable streets, and neighbours who aren’t insane.
You will scroll for it at 2 AM. You will not find it. Because it doesn’t exist. It’s a composite of every good thing you’ve experienced in different cities, assembled by your brain into a property that violates the laws of geography.
Life unfolds in chapters. What works for the bachelor chapter (pizza boxes and loud music) will destroy the new parent chapter. The trick isn’t finding the perfect home. It’s finding the one that fits the chapter you’re writing right now.
I may not know my next destination. I’m walking through the Age of Empires fog, trusting that the map will reveal itself one step at a time.
I’ll probably laugh at my missteps once I’m settled into my latest version of home. A version yet to be discovered.
excellent points, thanks Julián.
"the perfect place is a myth; it's about finding what resonates with you at that particular moment in life."
But the reverse ain't true: were you're at isn't always home.