In the age of telecommuting and social networking, what is “home”?

Does it still make sense to feel at home under these conditions? What if we don’t? author of Philosophy of the house. Living space and happiness (Ed. Payot-Rivage), Italian philosopher Emmanuel Coccia examines our homes and their adaptation to modernity.

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Mysterious alchemy

“This sense of home is difficult to define,” summarizes the philosopher about these “precise places where we feel good, where we must return every evening and wake up every morning.” Like happiness, he continues, “for which it is impossible to know what makes us happy or unhappy, we search, try, guess, and move forward in the dark, trying to invent new recipes.”

Will it be a matter of arranging multiple ingredients like in the kitchen? “It’s almost an alchemical process where we distill a disproportionate array of objects, shapes, geometry, colors, smells, people and events into our daily formula for happiness.” And all this without a method. Because, as we all know, “the idea of ​​happiness changes over the years.” Marriage, children, divorce, new loves change the cards. “We have to constantly cook at home and find the spice that will change everything. With the constant risk of facing failure.

The multiplication of our halls

Thanks to Airbnb and social media, we’ve gotten into the habit of slipping into slippers that don’t belong to us. Is it that simple? “We used to be driven by the idea of ​​calling only one place in the world home. Today, I wouldn’t say that we are at home everywhere, because we sort according to the image of what makes us happy, but we know that there are several places.

We realized that the house is much bigger than we imagined and that WhatsApp and Instagram act as virtual corridors

Emmanuel Coccia

Especially since the pandemic, home sharing has changed as it compensates for meeting spaces that the city provides less and less. “We realized that the house is much bigger than we imagined and that WhatsApp and Instagram act as virtual corridors that allow us to organize two living rooms, two apartments and enjoy them.” At risk of losing our privacy. “There was always a room for welcoming guests in bourgeois houses. The difference is in the frequency and intensity with which the outside now penetrates it.”

So have our smartphones become our new living rooms? “Somehow, notes Emmanuel Coccia, the house is no longer tied to the space, the context, but it adapts and follows us, like clothes. No matter where I am, in Chile or the US, I know that all I have to do is connect to my phone to immediately and instantly find myself in almost the same room with my daughter and the people I love.

Home is not a shelter

Our interior “makes us alive, active, happy.” But treating it as a refuge is “a bit pathological,” he warns, reminding us that the outside world, most of the time, “isn’t something that attacks us or puts us in danger.” Therefore, be careful not to give too much importance to our house. Thus, these family homes, from which “we cannot get rid of, and which end up turning into a tomb, depriving us of contact with the other.”

Because the house is not “possession”, Emanuel Kocha reminds. “It is the dog, the cat, the beloved, the flock, this broken chair that we carry everywhere for years, a landscape that tells us, speaks of the past and the future.” Hence the anguish when we have lost everything and need to “reorganize the little world around us so that the big world becomes habitable.” The real house. For the philosopher, “it determines what is essential to us.”

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