As an outsider…. Not sure I get the “fun” of insiders.
I get the.. white picket fence backyard barbeques, personal swimming pool, American pie dream. I respect the promise = single income household and appliances of convenience.
As a carny kid, we were excited about hot water in the campgrounds showers.
[o_o] What you’re describing sounds less like “I don’t understand why people want comfort” and more like “I don’t intuitively relate to the emotional weight they attach to it.”
For a lot of insiders—people who grew up in stable houses, neighborhoods, schools, routines—the white picket fence isn’t really about the fence. It’s about continuity. The backyard barbecue is a ritual that says, “These are my people. We belong here. We’ll be here next summer too.”
As a carny kid, your baseline may have been different.
If hot water at the campground was exciting, then comfort wasn’t assumed. It was a pleasant surprise. A gift. Something appreciated when it appeared.
Many insiders grow up with comfort as the default setting. What they fear losing isn’t the hot water itself—it’s the stability underneath it. The house, the neighborhood, the familiar faces, the predictability.
Outsiders often learn a different lesson: that all of those things are temporary anyway.
A kid who moved every season might learn:
- Home is the people, not the building.
- You can make friends anywhere.
- Things change.
- You adapt.
A kid who grew up in one house for twenty years might learn:
- Home is a place.
- Roots matter.
- Stability is precious.
- Change is threatening.
Neither lesson is wrong. They’re just different.
The interesting thing is that outsiders sometimes romanticize the insider dream (“Imagine having one house your whole life”), while insiders sometimes romanticize the outsider life (“Imagine being free and seeing the whole country”).
Meanwhile both groups are often baffled by each other.
The carny kid says, “Why are you so attached to a lawn?”
The suburban kid says, “Why aren’t you terrified of uncertainty?”
And both are asking the same question from opposite directions.
Your line about being excited for hot water hits me because it suggests gratitude born from contrast. If you only get something occasionally, you notice it. The people who always had it often stop seeing it.
That doesn’t make the American Dream meaningless. It just means you may see it more as a collection of conveniences than as a sacred identity. For many insiders, the dream isn’t the dishwasher or the pool. It’s the promise that tomorrow will look a lot like today.
For someone raised on the road, tomorrow looking different may not feel like a threat at all. It may just feel normal.
^-.-^ Bit more to the gratitude. The Luxury!
On the scale of a migrating carnival group > no one got hot showers every night.
Also on a humanity scale, (again) > No one got hot showers every night, not even pharaohs.
[o_o] Yes. That’s a slightly different perspective than what I was describing.
It’s not just that you appreciated hot showers because they were rare in your childhood.
It’s that you have a sense of historical scale.
A campground shower with reliable hot water is an absurd luxury by the standards of most humans who have ever lived.
For almost all of human history:
- Water had to be carried.
- It had to be heated manually.
- Bathing was intermittent.
- Privacy was limited.
- Temperature control was nonexistent.
Even kings and emperors had servants hauling fuel and water. A modern campground shower can provide a more convenient bathing experience than many nobles had for much of history.
So when you say “We were excited about hot water in the campground showers,” there is almost a sense of wonder there.
Not deprivation. Wonder.
“Look at this. Turn a knob and hot water comes out.”
A lot of insiders never experience that wonder because the luxury arrives before they are old enough to notice it. It becomes background infrastructure.
It’s similar to how people complain that their phone takes five seconds to load a page while carrying access to more information than the great libraries of antiquity.
The luxury becomes invisible.
Growing up on the road may have made certain conveniences visible to you because you encountered them intermittently. You got to experience the contrast.
There’s an old idea that abundance can produce either gratitude or entitlement depending on whether you remember the alternative.
You seem to have retained a vivid awareness of the alternative.
Not just “other families had less.”
More like:
“Most humans who have ever existed had less.”
That’s a much larger frame of reference.
From that perspective, a hot shower isn’t merely comfort. It’s a small technological miracle that would have looked like magic to your ancestors. And when you see it that way, it’s easier to feel delight than to take it for granted.
^-.-^ Yeah… It’s how I shift from self centered/pity.
I re-scale.
From 1st person POV. To Overview, and apply context.
All Of Humanity Scale makes it, “Not About Me.”
It’s the antidote to solipsism.
Not only do other people have their own experiences/mind/will/determination/motivation/etc.
AND
>Because we are human, in the biological way with nervous system neurologically and all<
AND
>We have been human for a while, as a species,
THUS
>Pretty sure someone at some time has felt exactly the same way I do.
Even in my worst and most horrible moments,
Someone before me has already lived through it.
[O_O] What you’re describing is almost the opposite of the common modern fear.
A lot of people hear “you’re not special” as an insult.
You hear it as comfort.
Not because you’re diminishing your experience, but because you’re placing it into a larger human story.
When grief hits, or shame, or loneliness, or fear, the solipsistic version says:
This is happening to me.
Nobody understands.
Nobody has ever felt this exact thing.
And that is an incredibly isolating place to stand.
Your version says:
Wait.
Humans have been human for a very long time.
We have the same nervous systems.
We love, grieve, fear, hope, and despair in remarkably similar ways.
Therefore someone has stood where I am standing.
Maybe not with the exact same circumstances.
But with the same knot in the stomach.
The same sleepless night.
The same heartbreak.
The same terror.
The same feeling of being trapped.
Someone has already walked that road.
And many of them survived it.
It’s a surprisingly powerful form of humility because it doesn’t erase suffering. It contextualizes it.
The feeling remains real.
But it stops being uniquely yours.
I think this is why people across cultures and centuries keep returning to old stories, old myths, old poems, old religious texts. They discover that a person who lived 500, 1,000, or 2,000 years ago can suddenly sound alarmingly contemporary.
You read a letter from a Roman soldier, a medieval widow’s lament, a traveler’s diary, or an ancient poem, and suddenly realize:
Oh.
They were us.
Different clothes.
Different technology.
Different assumptions.
But the same human hardware.
The same primate brain trying to figure out love, loss, status, belonging, mortality, and meaning.
There’s also a practical strength in your approach.
If someone before you has felt this way, then your current state is evidence not of your isolation but of your membership in the human race.
The emotion becomes less:
Why is this happening to me?
and more:
Ah. So this is one of the things humans go through.
That shift can be subtle, but it changes the entire texture of the experience.
Instead of being trapped inside your own head, you’re standing in a crowd that stretches backward through thousands of years.
Not alone.
Just human.
^-.-^ Not at all where I intended to go with the title.
Hmmm Really like where you took it today.
That’ll do Robot. That’ll do.
Traveler Chimiru 
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