Attachment to Places

[ysabetwordsmith]

This article talks about attachment to places, and the lack thereof.  The more people move around, the harder it gets to form and maintain attachments, both to places and to people.  Without attachments, there is little incentive to take care of anyone or anything.  If they stop being fun, you can just leave and find another.  Then everyone wonders why they feel unfulfilled.

Comments

[matrixmann]

Indeed, this is true.
The behavior scheme "if something doesn't suit you, just cancel everything/give up and try the same in another place" is actually something that should be concerned in why do the younger generations throw in the towel so quickly, if they don't succeed in an instant or don't get that what they want from a subject.
It's something which they don't get born with, it's something they learn.

On the other hand, regarding this subject, I know it so very much myself if you don't feel like home anywhere. But that's not necessarily due to changing locations a lot.
It's rather... finding no-one to rely and to lean on. It's "you're not important enough to anybody so that he voluntarily skips something of his life to (even) just look after you". It's the constant absence of someone reaching out for you - and not just a facade or something you can do for them or a habit because someone might be related by blood to you and "families ought to stick together" (such forced nonsense).
I think inside a part of me aches from that for more than half my whole timespan of existence already.

[arlie]

I'm probably a poster child for lack of attachment; there's even a psychological term for me - though when I googled today I found a different set of terms I don't recognize. The one I remember is something like insecure-avoidant attachment style/disorder. I'm told I spent the first year of my life in the care of social services, and I actually remember being back in foster care for a year at the age of 6 or 7. Message received: people go away, en masse, and you can't control it. Conclusion: so you had better concentrate on things you can control, or at least influence, which are unlikely to involve other people.

From where I sit, the big advantage of modern willingness to dump it all and leave, is that people can get themselves out of some pretty bad situations, without having to accept being socially stigmatized and relatively disadvantaged for the rest of their lives. I was a lot better off three thousand miles from my birth mother. My gay ex-Mormon friends were a lot better off a long way from their families. The offer of "we'll tolerate you, and only pick on you a bit (once you reach adulthood), provided you accept that you are subnormal" is not worth accepting, however much it allows the weird to survive in traditional societies.

The alternative to abandoning a bad situation is fighting back - and I mostly mean that quite literally. If I can't escape the local bully for whatever reason, my best choice is for some person-unknown to do him in; I just need to avoid being either caught or blamed. I don't think that this is an improvement. (For every person who gets away with a justifiable homicide, there will be some who get caught, and others whose homicide really wasn't justified - a custom of getting the hell out of dodge [instead] means the ones who are overreacting will do less harm, and the ones who are unskilled or unlucky will themselves receive less harm.)