No Strings / All Strings
Disclaimer: I'm not going to dismantle what I've built...I like my home
I could ditch the car tomorrow, turn it in with one days notice. I could sublet my Venice apartment in under the time it takes to write this sentence with the liquidity premium of my location. I could power on my computer in Albuquerque and have everything I need to do my job. I could fly East to New York and feel at home, I could return back West in LA to plug & play. When you set up nodes in your life around community and structure, you can make anywhere feel like home or remove the sense of home and always feel like the place you are right now is your place.
People avoid discomfort like the way they avoid spiders. They see it in the corner spinning webs of complexity and they run in hopes of someone else squashing it and returning back to normalcy - welcoming the disillusionment. We see change and we freak. We get tossed from our routine and we wilt. We see the couch and we smile - return us to the place where everything feels easy and right. When you set up a singular home, the box of exclusivity gets smaller and xenophobic principles start to dictate your ocular lenses. Not bad when you have a family, toxic when you haven't settled into your life yet. What happens though if you take the opposite approach? What happens if you lead with setting up people and disparate communities as your home bases and the physical accents of place become plug and play? What if you knew the car, the house, the couch could be found everywhere? What if nomads weren't just lost souls dancing amongst the masses but we lived in a society where everyone was fluid - we all paid inclusive, not exclusive, membership to live anywhere, at all times in an interchangeable network of geolocations.
WeWork created a global brand around work and consciousness. Buddhism put the collective effort of eliminating suffering to the test in the hills of Tibet or in the napping pods of Mountain View. Amazon Prime made it possible to get your packages next day to any door, not just one door. Soho House made you feel that you were part of a global society of cultured individuals whether you showed up in Moscow or Miami and blockchain networks are allowing immutable copies of entire data sets to be stored on every server. Plug and Play my dear. Show up in Amsterdam tomorrow from Chicago and you have what you need to feel at home if you have the right mindset...and don't feel the need to write home on letter days.
It's a hard concept to appreciate because as American's we grew up with the sense of an idealist life seeking the white picket fence of insulation. As a Jew we believe that our one true home is Zion, our Mashiach end point. What if you in turn believe the world is your home and there is no one place for you? Sounds very flower power hippy-liciuos but I mean it in a very sophisticated way - a way that re-prioritizes people and experience and de-prioritizes the location. Amazing businesses have modeled this ideal for years.
When you no longer feel the pride of ownership of physical objects and instead you feel the effects of community and network, it all starts to come into focus as to what home really means. You upgrade your car so you feel a sense of improved worth. You buy the top watch brand and you feel like you can fit into a new echelon of people. You have the perfectly furnished home with the most manicured lawn. Do you think it ever stops? Do you think when you have a 4,000 sf home you don't want a 6,000 sf mansion? Do you think when you close your first mega deal, you stop and say, "Ok that's all I needed, I'm done." No. It fades. It all fades. IT will never be enough if it's rooted in the physical manifestation.
The only manifestation of true home in the network effect is to look longitudinally, latitudinally, depthwise and then create a 4th dimension of our consciousness and recognize we can establish a new sense of place.