Putting ourselves on hold, or why we need to move out of our parents’ house

In the last few weeks, I have looked at so many apartment rental ads that I can no longer see the difference between the good ones and the bad ones, between the decent ones and the inhumane ones, and between those I saved and those, I ditched. They were all washed away and merged into one in a glitched haze of frantic scrolling and right-clicking. District heating, central heating, and oil heating stoves overheated my brain, and I gave up, frustrated. I closed my laptop and threw myself on the bed. 
I feel the texture of the bed linen with my fingers. Cotton satin, smoothness with hints of roughness. I look around, counting five red objects in the room: the wall behind the bed, the stripes on the bed cover, the small wooden box on the desk, the drawing pad, and that curious peg on the shelf. I hear: the TV in the other room. I smell: dampness? I slide down until my feet touch the floor and through my sweaty socks I feel the hard and cold laminate floor.  

After a nearly successful escape from my foggy brain into the present moment, I ask myself: here are my walls, bed, and floor, in the safety of the family home. I do not have to pay for them – so why do I want to move out? 

This is the same question my parents are asking themselves when I express my wish, if not the need, to move out. I would say that, in our and in their heads, this question is motivated by fear. Parents are afraid because their child is moving out of the family nest. This is a huge turning point, and it is easy to understand that parents are not going to accept this automatically. However, what parents are often not aware of is that family relationships may actually improve if their child moves out. Parents and children will no longer avoid one another by shutting themselves in their rooms and having small passing exchanges, but that they will devote specific time to the family and find new activities in common, arrange to meet, to play board games, etc.
The fear of children moving out usually occurs in parents who do not see their children as formed adults but still regard them as children. It is not unusual that such a distorted parental perspective affects our own view of ourselves.  

As long as we are living under our parents’ roof, we cannot leave our adolescent frame of mind.

We have to ask permission for many little things, although we have been of legal age for a number of years. We do not know in how many ways we can explain to our mother that we cannot eat the sausages in the bean stew because we are trying to become more aware of what we eat and want to cut out animal products from our diet. If we do not have a job and we are still at university, we have to ask our parents for money.  If we do not have our own room in the family home but share it with a member of the family, we miss our peace, and privacy is crucial for maintaining our mental health. Quality time alone with ourselves is important for the development of any person’s self-awareness. The yearning for our own space and life choices is therefore constantly quashed by the reality of financial dependence, and this is how our fear can be explained – moving out from the parental home means a lack of financial security.

Moving, in general, is a stressful event, but it is also an incredibly exciting step in the life of any young person. Family life is often full of tension and suppression, and the creation of our own space, where we have the freedom to take as much room as we need, brings about great relief and long-awaited freedom. When we choose our own place to live, we begin to discover our own system of values and priorities. 
Perhaps what is important is that the flat is situated in a well-connected part of town near our friends. Perhaps even more crucial is that the flat has a bathtub because at home we could never relax in a bubble bath after a stressful week of exams. And maybe it is most important of all that the landlord allows pets because we finally do not have to ask for permission to take in an animal that will enrich our everyday life, and through whom we can learn to be responsible for other living beings. 

Certainly, the decisive factor for all of us is the amount of rent and overheads. Since we are probably still studying and earning a student’s minimum wage, or we have just recently graduated and do not yet have a job, we may not be able to afford the flat that we liked the most because it will surely be out of our range. Therefore, if we cannot financially support ourselves, how can we think of moving out and how do we dare even attempt something like that? 

Younger generations are frequently punished because they take longer to become emancipated than was the case for their parents. Among the present generations, there are more students, and we tend to take gap years to “find ourselves”. Even if we graduate on time, we take longer to find a job, because there are no jobs, or we do not meet the conditions, or we do not have enough experience, or we are just too anxious to network. Millennials are often treated as a collective punchbag; they are judged as lazy, unprepared for life, naively ambitious and lacking work discipline, etc. Although I was born in the second half of the 1990s, and I fall somewhere between the millennials and the zoomers, I regard myself more of a millennial, and this also matches my conviction that, in our country, everything was delayed, including the millennial culture. 

The fact that we need longer to begin autonomously supporting ourselves does not mean that creating a place for ourselves in this world should be denied, put on hold, or prohibited. 

There should be no equals symbol between “an adult” and “having a stable income”. The maturity of our generation manifests itself in something that is apparently negative, which is our enhanced sensitivity that makes us potentially more emotionally aware than previous generations.  

The fact that our parents already had a job and a flat in their early twenties, while we are still studying and living at home, does not mean that they were any more adult or more mature than we are now. This only means that they were more independent than us, which is not surprising considering the difference in the length of education. What we and our parents have in common is the burning desire to stand on our own two feet, to create our own lives and become the persons that deep inside we already are – the persons that we have been imperceptibly suppressing at home for years.

I am writing this from a flat into which I moved with my boyfriend and his cat less than a week ago. The moving process was gruelling and stressful, but now that we have unpacked everything and when we wake up each morning together and sit at our desks (in my case this will be the dining room table for some time to come), I feel grateful. I am grateful that we succeeded in breathing a sigh of relief after the search for a flat. I am grateful for the space where we can work undisturbed from home, now that this is the prevailing part of everyone’s life. I am grateful that we do not have to be jealous of our friends from small towns who moved to Zagreb from their parents’ homes to study when they were only 18 (ironically, we were jealous of them even though we who live in Zagreb were supposed to be the ones with more freedom and opportunities). I am grateful that we can learn together to live in accordance with our aspirations, principles, and possibilities. However, I am aware that this new life, just like our faulty water heater, will surprise us every day with a cold shower.