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Homelessness is never a choice. It is always circumstantial (i.e. very very bad luck and nobody to turn to for help) or based on something like a mental health or substance abuse disorder.
For me, my homelessness was caused by being abused and then abandoned by my family members and the resultant depression.
I am incredibly lucky that I have had people come through and support me and give me a place to crash and distractions from my misery long enough for me to process it until I could get back to a decent working mental order.
On a purely financial basis I'm doing really fucking good. I made a little over $150,000 last year, I live in a three-story home, I drive a relatively new car and things are generally pretty good for me in that aspect, but I also have practically no friends and very few people that I can rely on that live anywhere near me and there are unseen costs attached with reaching those levels of depression and misery that I don't have the ability to express in text format.
But yeah if it had just been on me none of that shit would have ever happened in the first place. It wasn't that I was lazy. It wasn't that I was miserable. It wasn't that I was useless. I didn't have issues with drugs.
I was my high School valedictorian.
I did everything that I was supposed to do the way I was supposed to do it.
I still got to experience several years of homelessness because the people who chose to bring me into this world also chose to use me as a punching bag and then throw me away when I got old enough that if they continued to beat me mercilessly they would go to jail for it.
It took me a total of 12 years to pull myself up out of that funk and get back on solid ground again.
Glad to hear that you've done so much better. Hoping that you can surround yourself with people that bring you peace.
It seems like 100% the problem is a lack of support. Substance abuse is tied quite a bit to having a lack of support and connections to healthy people. It's why things like AA help people, they have access to a real person who cares about their recovery. Bad home life, being abused, mental health leading to homelessness, it all sounds like ways of saying "unsupported and left to the elements."
For me, it was a lack of internal drive. I've been homeless twice. Both times, a lack of drive. But more deeply, that came from a lack of emotional support when I was a child, so you could be right.
I've met enough homeless people in San Francisco who live that way on purpose to know that first sentence isn't 100% true.
Everything we put up with in life is a choice, even if the only other option is bad (i.e. suicide). People in a bad situation may say that they choose it, only in order to maintain a sense of control and personal agency. It's not really meaningful to say that some homeless people choose to live that way, unless we know what their alternatives are. And if they have options that most people would consider better, I'd argue that they're not what most people mean by the homeless problem.
No, I mean they have told me they like living like that; not by consequences of their own actions. Like modern day Diogenes. Just a super minimalistic lifestyle that includes not having a home. There is a scene for that kinda thing in San Francisco.
I've got a very small home by choice and it's amazing. Diogenes knew what was up.
I'll grant that California might be different because of the climate, but I've heard the same thing from people here in the Midwest, and, well, I'm not sure that I believe them. I got the sense that they didn't leave behind privilege and wealth to live a minimalist life. In a nutshell, they couldn't just at a whim decide to give it up and do something different.
Suicide isn't an option. I know nobody will believe me, but I've done it. I just woke up in a slightly different parallel universe: this one.
Other people die. The self does not. Death only exists out there.
Yikes. That must have been quite the shock! In any case, I still figure that everything we put up with in life is a choice, although the bad alternatives might be prison, starvation, torture, ostracism, or any number of bad things that happen to living people.