Homelessness: a new way to deal with stress
Global trends are born in California and then spread throughout the world. Today, what people want most in California is to calm down—spirituality and mental health are in vogue. Anything and everything is used - mushroom and ketamine therapies, Vipassana, lithotherapists with crystals, energy therapists, marijuana meditations, camps where dominatrixes save the psyche after abusers... and even homeless people.
American rich people are now using them to treat burnout in San Francisco. This type of moral recovery is called a street retreat - when for a day or a week you become homeless without a phone, money, a warm bed and friends. From a well-fed life, you are allowed to take with you only a blanket, a bag and one set of underwear. The tasks are to survive physically and make friends with the homeless. Before the homeless begins, the participants voice their requests for life and scatter in all directions with their mentors - real residents of the streets.
People who have lost their taste for life and motivation and who could not find them in a psychologist’s office decide to undertake such an experience. They say that after several days of sleeping in tents under a bridge, searching for restaurant scraps, and begging, procrastination, stress, and spleen will disappear. Such retreats are organized by the public organization Faithful Fools, which fights myths about poverty and street life, for a symbolic $50. They carry them out because they want deep social changes from humanity.
The street retreat is popular among the inhabitants of Silicon Valley - local geniuses and geeks systematically order a survival course for employees and take it themselves. So don't be surprised if you see Elon Musk in rags begging for a Tesla. I would include the street retreat in Tatler’s ranking of places teeming with eligible bachelors. And she would have passed on her own.
Author: Yunia Pugacheva
