I have read that a Kosher residential kitchen has a warming oven because even full-time homemakers are forbidden from working on the Sabbath. You can reheat leftovers in your warming oven so everyone can eat and doing it in a warming oven proves you didn't "cook" because it doesn't get hot enough for real cooking.
Jewish culture seems to do a better job than average of treating women like human beings and as a former homemaker in a culture that treats women like me really badly, my feeling is that these strict rules forbidding ALL work -- even cooking -- are intended to protect against that human tendency to treat traditional women's work differently than other kinds of work and to heap abuse of various sorts onto the people who do it.
We have sayings like "A woman's work is never done" and homemakers -- full-time wives and moms -- tend to never get seen as ever being off duty. No matter the time of day or night, they get imposed upon by family members and then all of society tends to generalize this and women generally get imposed upon by people generally for things that fall broadly under that heading of "women's work," like so-called emotional labor.
Poor people suffer a similar fate in that if you don't enough income, you never feel like you can really relax. You constantly feel like you "should" be doing something because there's never enough money.
When I was homeless, I had to discipline myself to take care of myself first so I was capable of working and making money occassionally. It became an edict that I had to just look after myself when I was sick because trying to do paid work when I was too sick just made my problems worse not better.
So it became a strict rule, sort of like Jewish rules about how to be Kosher: Though Shalt Not Work On The Sabbath, even if you are a homemaker. You can reheat leftovers so you can eat, but you can't cook.
This seems to be a primary difference between privileged peoples and underprivileged peoples: Poor people never can really relax and take care of themselves. Even when they are trying to relax, they feel guilty, they feel like they should be working, there's never enough, etc.
This is true even though you don't really need much to keep body and soul together and this world has unprecdented wealth. Yet, the system isn't designed to make life feasible for the ordinary Joe who didn't inherit vast wealth, wasn't fortunate to have good health and good schooling and good parenting and so forth.
In recent decades, we've torn down about a million SROs and largely zoned out of existence the ability to build Missing Middle Housing. If you don't have housing, trying to eat well gets a lot more expensive because eating cheaply is dependent on having a kitchen so you can store cold foods, buy basic ingredients and cook from scratch.
In the conversation that inspired me to start this site, someone talked about someone spending a million dollars to buy all kind of records or something and that YouTube allows you to similarly access all kinds free music and movies. He remarked "I don't have a milloin dollars and yet..."
He was agreeing with my basic point that the world has changed and we don't know how to meausre "the economy" anymore. Historically, only very wealthy people could access all the music they wanted at will.
Of course, to watch YouTube for "free" all the live long day you need a device -- laptop, PC, tablet or phone -- and you need some basic literacy and you need access to internet and electricity. But if you've got those things, there are a zillion things you can do online for "free" and it goes well beyond listening to music or watching videos of various sorts.
Devices have become pretty affordable. You can get a tablet or Android phone for not much money these days, but you still need to keep them charged and you still need access to internet.
When I was homeless, internet was reasonable accessible, though I did work at trying to download some things to my phone or tablet for doing offline when I was on battery power in my tent in the evening. The big bottleneck in the system was access to electricity.
Clothes wasn't too hard to come by. I sometimes was given clothes for free by people randomly stopping their car, but it was hard to keep myself adequately fed in part because the way to eat healthy and cheap is to cook from scratch and that means having a kitchen and that means having a home.
If we could bring back SROs or some variation thereof as part of a walkable neighborhood where you could live without a car and get your basic needs met (groceries, some eateries, etc), then it would be feasible for a lot of people to work a part-time minimum wage job and cover the essentials of food, shelter and clothing while having time and energy leftover for college, freelance work or otherwise trying to work towards a dream if they wanted to do so.
Of course, it should also be okay to just exist and not be laboring virtuously towards something larger, but currently poor people can't dream. They have to keep running faster just to stay in place and it's not working.
One of the results is far too many homeless people in the US.
Housing is an essential human need, especially in a world with nearly 8 billion people. It carves out a place you can be. It gives you some degree of control over a little corner of the world.
The US is poisoned by these ideas that a "home" needs to be some 3 bedroom, 2 bath garden apartment with at least one assigned parking space minimum in order to be acceptable. And the reality is that is a space designed for a nuclear family with a primary breadwinner father, a wife whose primary obligation is catering to the family even if she also has some kind of paid job, and your standard issue 2.5 kids.
I talk to people online and they more or less literally tell me that it's better to let people remain homeless than make something like SROs available because SROs are "slum housing." I've been homeless and I've lived in an SRO. Being in an SRO is better.
And it doesn't have to be "slum" housing. It can just be a small, affordable space.
College dorms are not "slum housing." They are actually pretty similar to SROs.
Military barracks tend to be somewhat similar as well. The thing that barracks and college dorms and SROs all have in common is they are all kind of historically aimed at single young people who need a place to sleep and a little space to store some material possessions.
We've forgotten that standard that a single young adult just needs a clean, secure place to sleep, store their relatively small pile of belongings and be allowed to hang at will without being hassled for existing.
We need to bring back that concept. We need to make it possible for someone to make their life work without having inherited vast wealth or already having a college education and sufficient health and what not to have a good paying job.
We need to make housing available where you have some essential privacy and security even if you only have a part-time minimum wage job. Without that, having a low income is the exact same thing as poverty and poverty is expensive and you are more or less trapped.
Having a low income shouldn't be the exact same thing as poverty. Your life shouldn't come unraveled if you can't currently arrange an upper middle class lifestyle.
Our housing issues are a large part of why poor people cannot ever relax. It doesn't have to be this way and it shouldn't be this way.
Jewish culture seems to do a better job than average of treating women like human beings and as a former homemaker in a culture that treats women like me really badly, my feeling is that these strict rules forbidding ALL work -- even cooking -- are intended to protect against that human tendency to treat traditional women's work differently than other kinds of work and to heap abuse of various sorts onto the people who do it.
We have sayings like "A woman's work is never done" and homemakers -- full-time wives and moms -- tend to never get seen as ever being off duty. No matter the time of day or night, they get imposed upon by family members and then all of society tends to generalize this and women generally get imposed upon by people generally for things that fall broadly under that heading of "women's work," like so-called emotional labor.
Poor people suffer a similar fate in that if you don't enough income, you never feel like you can really relax. You constantly feel like you "should" be doing something because there's never enough money.
When I was homeless, I had to discipline myself to take care of myself first so I was capable of working and making money occassionally. It became an edict that I had to just look after myself when I was sick because trying to do paid work when I was too sick just made my problems worse not better.
So it became a strict rule, sort of like Jewish rules about how to be Kosher: Though Shalt Not Work On The Sabbath, even if you are a homemaker. You can reheat leftovers so you can eat, but you can't cook.
This seems to be a primary difference between privileged peoples and underprivileged peoples: Poor people never can really relax and take care of themselves. Even when they are trying to relax, they feel guilty, they feel like they should be working, there's never enough, etc.
This is true even though you don't really need much to keep body and soul together and this world has unprecdented wealth. Yet, the system isn't designed to make life feasible for the ordinary Joe who didn't inherit vast wealth, wasn't fortunate to have good health and good schooling and good parenting and so forth.
In recent decades, we've torn down about a million SROs and largely zoned out of existence the ability to build Missing Middle Housing. If you don't have housing, trying to eat well gets a lot more expensive because eating cheaply is dependent on having a kitchen so you can store cold foods, buy basic ingredients and cook from scratch.
In the conversation that inspired me to start this site, someone talked about someone spending a million dollars to buy all kind of records or something and that YouTube allows you to similarly access all kinds free music and movies. He remarked "I don't have a milloin dollars and yet..."
He was agreeing with my basic point that the world has changed and we don't know how to meausre "the economy" anymore. Historically, only very wealthy people could access all the music they wanted at will.
Of course, to watch YouTube for "free" all the live long day you need a device -- laptop, PC, tablet or phone -- and you need some basic literacy and you need access to internet and electricity. But if you've got those things, there are a zillion things you can do online for "free" and it goes well beyond listening to music or watching videos of various sorts.
Devices have become pretty affordable. You can get a tablet or Android phone for not much money these days, but you still need to keep them charged and you still need access to internet.
When I was homeless, internet was reasonable accessible, though I did work at trying to download some things to my phone or tablet for doing offline when I was on battery power in my tent in the evening. The big bottleneck in the system was access to electricity.
Clothes wasn't too hard to come by. I sometimes was given clothes for free by people randomly stopping their car, but it was hard to keep myself adequately fed in part because the way to eat healthy and cheap is to cook from scratch and that means having a kitchen and that means having a home.
If we could bring back SROs or some variation thereof as part of a walkable neighborhood where you could live without a car and get your basic needs met (groceries, some eateries, etc), then it would be feasible for a lot of people to work a part-time minimum wage job and cover the essentials of food, shelter and clothing while having time and energy leftover for college, freelance work or otherwise trying to work towards a dream if they wanted to do so.
Of course, it should also be okay to just exist and not be laboring virtuously towards something larger, but currently poor people can't dream. They have to keep running faster just to stay in place and it's not working.
One of the results is far too many homeless people in the US.
Housing is an essential human need, especially in a world with nearly 8 billion people. It carves out a place you can be. It gives you some degree of control over a little corner of the world.
The US is poisoned by these ideas that a "home" needs to be some 3 bedroom, 2 bath garden apartment with at least one assigned parking space minimum in order to be acceptable. And the reality is that is a space designed for a nuclear family with a primary breadwinner father, a wife whose primary obligation is catering to the family even if she also has some kind of paid job, and your standard issue 2.5 kids.
I talk to people online and they more or less literally tell me that it's better to let people remain homeless than make something like SROs available because SROs are "slum housing." I've been homeless and I've lived in an SRO. Being in an SRO is better.
And it doesn't have to be "slum" housing. It can just be a small, affordable space.
College dorms are not "slum housing." They are actually pretty similar to SROs.
Military barracks tend to be somewhat similar as well. The thing that barracks and college dorms and SROs all have in common is they are all kind of historically aimed at single young people who need a place to sleep and a little space to store some material possessions.
We've forgotten that standard that a single young adult just needs a clean, secure place to sleep, store their relatively small pile of belongings and be allowed to hang at will without being hassled for existing.
We need to bring back that concept. We need to make it possible for someone to make their life work without having inherited vast wealth or already having a college education and sufficient health and what not to have a good paying job.
We need to make housing available where you have some essential privacy and security even if you only have a part-time minimum wage job. Without that, having a low income is the exact same thing as poverty and poverty is expensive and you are more or less trapped.
Having a low income shouldn't be the exact same thing as poverty. Your life shouldn't come unraveled if you can't currently arrange an upper middle class lifestyle.
Our housing issues are a large part of why poor people cannot ever relax. It doesn't have to be this way and it shouldn't be this way.