As a home owner, I acquired every skill necessary to fix or improve each facet of my house. Self reliance meant freedom – freedom from dealing with contractors, freedom to build ANYTHING, regardless of how outlandish or impractical. But…after 17 years of home ownership, I’m thinking I got it all wrong. Self reliance did not give me freedom. Paying someone else to do all that lousy work seems more like freedom – freedom from back pain, freedom from projects dragging on for months (years actually).
I would go as far as to say that a truer domestic freedom would be to rent, not owning a house. Taken further, my ultimate freedom would be to own NOTHING (especially not a car), renting furnished apartments in urban locales.
So I asked Mrs. Neill if she could one day live possessionless. She said, “no…I like to have stuff”. So there’s that.