Why does everyone care so much where the twenty-somethings live?
A couple of years ago, I wrote a post for Mamamia – my first piece for Mamamia – about why I lived at home. I was 23 at the time, fresh out of uni, and – in hindsight – terribly naïve.
Looking back now, I realise I probably shouldn’t have listed expensive cheeses and fancy shower gels as reasons to stay at home. Ditto those laundry facilities I was so very fond of. Those comments did not make me any friends. The post had me jumping for joy one minute and crying on the phone to my friends the next. Even now I’m still trying to work out what made people so angry.
Anyway… It was probably ironic that only a week after I wrote that piece, I was offered a job that would see me moving out of home or facing one heck of a commute. So I packed up (Mum’s) toaster and entered into the share house life – a life so many commenters had pleaded with me not to let pass by.
Today, I’m still living out of home, and I want to broach that original subject again. Because in the two years since I wrote the original post the conversation hasn’t gone away and if anything, the debate on how long people should stay in the family home is feistier than ever.
And as my friends start to drift from the mid-twenty age bracket towards the ‘holy shit I’m pretty much 30’ cohort, living at home is becoming less and less socially acceptable. At the age of 21 it was normal, at 25 it was justifiable, but at any age thereafter living at home is just an awkward conversation.