Home means different things to different people. But more than ever before, people find it easier, more prosperous and indeed more enticing to emigrate to other cities or countries. By contrast, people also tend to be more fierce and proud of the city or country they call ‘home’. So what defines home? Can you have more than one? How long should you live somewhere before you can call it a home?
The natural answer to questions about home is the obvious “different things for different people”. So instead, let’s try and figure out when most people will start calling a place home.
I suggest the following model – the ‘Bodily Fluids Test’. This alluringly-named system can be somewhat universal and resilient: most people will find the cities they have loved or lived will meet it’s criteria.
The test: You will likely feel a city is your home if you leave:
- Blood
- Sweat
- Tears
- Phlegm
- Vomit
This simple model is based on probabilities. To leave a trace of each of those five bodily fluids in one city you would require a significant amount of time in it (or be tremendously unlucky). Most of the world’s population could count on one hand the number of cities that have had all five of these bodily fluids in them. As it happens, they would likely call those places home too.
This model is not deterministic: leaving these five bodily fluids in a place is not what causes a deeply emotional reaction to that place. Rather, it is probabilistic: perhaps 99% of the time you call a place home, you also coincidentally have left these five fluids there too.
Finally, you might argue, a sense of home comes from a multitude of delicate, subtle and lasting personal relationships with a place… something that cannot be measured by an unfortunate coincidence of human excretions. After all, by this method, you could fly to a new city for just a single night and cut your finger, slice some onions, run in the hotel gym, stay out all night to get a cold, and make yourself throw up.
Well if you did all of those things in a night, you must be very emotionally attached to that city to try so hard to make it your home!