Existential Tuesday: Can We Live Without Private Space?

How would you solve the housing crisis, the (elderly) care crisis, and the loneliness and mental health crises in one fell swoop?

Try communal living today! Share your private space, your facilities, your balcony or garden, even the key to your front door with people who will eventually stop being complete strangers. By living together, we can overcome all these societal problems and live a more Meaningful Life™ to boot.

Jokes aside: these are huge issues and there may be some potential here. Problem is, Dutch culture doesn’t seem to facilitate communal sharing; we tend to just buy everything individually.

To discover the potential of communal sharing and living, we need to ask ourselves what our essentials are in life, and where our boundaries lie. Would you share your living room, for example? including the tv, music, decoration, etc? How about a bathroom, kitchen, or garden? Or even your bedroom, like people did in the past? Maybe your office space, or a laundry room, or tools, hedge trimmers, pets, soap bars, toothbrushes, utility bills, etc, etc? Let’s find out where the boundary lies for us, and what an increased level of sharing would do for our quality of life.

I’ve arrived at this question not just because we occasionally touch upon communism in our conversations, but because having lived the life of a student (dorms, housemates), a bachelor, and a family man, I’m curious now if having our own house, our own everything, makes us bad at living together with others?

(photo by lindsaybayley, Party Mess under share-alike license)

Existential Tuesdays

Existential Tuesdays are small weekly* lunch discussions in the Nook of the TUD Library. Practice your critical thinking skills, learn to see the world from different perspectives, and hang out with your fellow deep thinkers in Delft.

Interested in other events in the Nook? Sign up for the newsletter to find out what else we’re planning.

*no sessions during exam weeks or study weeks

Organised by: Studium Generale