Last time, I explored (with some crowdsourced help) how domestic cozy is a retreat from public life along four vectors: discomfort, danger, deprivation, and ceremony, or DDDC. I also proposed four archetypal spaces that domestic cozy is not like: airport, minefield, desert, and mansion. When you intersect those four qualities in a Venn diagram and try to label various intersections, you get a map of the negative space of domestic cozy. The residual public is at the center, surrounded by various pure and composite archetypal spaces.
What used to be a liberating crossing of a threshold, from the constraints of domesticity to the freedoms of public life, is now a complex descent, from the freedom of intimate spaces, into an imprisoning hell-of-other-people, via increasingly dank stages and levels. The Arrow of Freedom™ now points in the other direction. Escape now lies inwards.
What is left behind when there is this kind of systematic but incomplete retreat from particular aspects of a situation?
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