I’ve worked helping homeless people in the past on many occasions, had friends whos family members were homeless, had homeless friends, and had even been homeless myself for a small amount of time. There are a lot of people that are homeless through no fault of their own, there are people that are homeless because of drug abuse (which perpetuates the cycle). Both of these people need more access to the help that can be provided to them, but I mainly wanted to talk about a third category of homelessness: People that are homeless by choice.
People that are homeless by choice have told me that they enjoy the lifestyle and enjoy the freedom that it brings despite the negatives. They actively rejected help from people and expressed their desires to me to intend living that lifestyle forever. While I think every person has the right to live their own life the way they see fit, homelessness often has negatives to the people that aren’t homeless. Feces and needles in the streets, breaking and entering into homes, garages, sheds, vandalizing and burning them down in the process. Of course all homeless people aren’t like that but the point still remains: a healthy society generally doesn’t have homeless people. How do you achieve a balance to allow the people whom are homeless by choice to live in a way they see fit while also minimizing the perceived issues of homelessness? What are your thoughts on homeless people?
I ask these questions in good faith and I hope you also do the same. Thank you for your thoughts and opinions.
These people who genuinely desire to remain homeless do so because for several million years it has been an effective social strategy/adaptation for primates. It’s a low percentage strategy, but one that was, until relatively modern times, a viable one.
In North America (post-colonization), you’d have the tales of mountain men who were alone for months or years at a time, only to occasionally wander into civilization. The assumption was that they were out there building log cabins (and in some cases they were), but others were just wanderers who sought out primitive shelter, or none at all. Pre-colonization likely saw similar, those who lived solitary lives away from the native civilizations and settlements.
There are more than a few European myths dating back to ancient Greece and earlier that sound eerily similar. Brutally monstrous men out by themselves somewhere, until a hero wanders through and attacks, slaying them and putting an end to their savagery. Kind of makes you wonder what the other guy’s perspective was before he took a bronze sword through his throat.
As modern civilization has expanded, there are fewer places for such people to be. We’ve sort of “encroached on their habitat”.
But evolution isn’t nearly quick enough to eliminate the personality traits that make this lifestyle appealing to some.