TLBMiSF earned a lot of credit in its slightly off-kilter but beautifully framed opening scene, combining flavors of both Spike Lee and Barry Jenkins right out of the gate. It continued on, just strange enough to feel like a dream, gorgeous enough to look like a painting; but that level of abstraction can also put you at a slight distance. Is this literal, or metaphor? Are these characters and their challenges meant to be related to directly, or are they meant to represent the ways in which we’re victim to much larger forces — the ones driving people out of their cities and homes, and away from their sense of history and self?

Thanks to heartfelt performances from the two leads, the answer ends up not mattering so much, because the film accomplishes both. Home is a place. Home is a feeling. Home is people that matter. We find a way to hold on to what we can, or to take with us the things we can carry from one place to wherever we find ourselves next.

Crucially, the film isn’t purely us-vs-them. The detail that the three-generation black family of San Franciscans were only able to buy a house in the city when the Asian families that came before them were forced out should not be overlooked. The home Jimmy fights to preserve from a new wave of invading residents was once someone else’s too. We only ever rent our right to call a place home, in the larger sense. All of America is that way. For almost everyone, none of us were first.

This idea left the biggest emotional impression on me, walking out of the film. I have never lived anywhere for even twenty years. I’ve never had, and may never have, that kind of history with a block, or neighborhood, or town. Am I going to lead a poorer life for that? Will everywhere I ever live be the result of pushing out someone who does have that, diminishing the overall level of rootedness in any city I call home? Should I rearrange my priorities to achieve that? Or is it mostly nostalgia and revisionist history to prize a place so highly? Can we only hold on to a sense of home if we also refuse to move on, move out, and move forward?

More practically speaking, when does a place become home?

When do you earn the right to call a city or neighborhood yours, if you weren’t born there?

If it’s not just a matter of time, what do you have to do to earn that?

Pro-tip: party with people who also love cleaning up at 7am.

This article on a Margaritaville-themed retirement community makes for an easy-to-smirk-at headline, but raises a lot of interesting questions if you bother clicking through. We’re about to have a massive aging population who aren’t going to quietly get consigned to traditional senior living. Our whole conception of seniors and their role in society — especially as they live longer and longer — is weird and undefined and in flux.

But on the matter of themed retirement communities this… actually sounds kinda fun? And even for those of us who have no particular fondness for Jimmy Buffet, it’s useful to think of what’s really important as we age and what the ideal scenario in which to spend our golden years might be.

What would your ideal retirement community look like?

What kind of space, what kind of people, what kind of activities would make your later years the most enjoyable? Where would it be? What would its theme or name be?

For a post-Cold War generation, socialism is more appealing than scary.

Of all the diagnoses for the reasons behind the financial collapse and slow (or at least uneven) subsequent recovery, this Time piece on the “financialization” of the economy seems to pinpoint the broadest underlying cause with the most specific reasoning. Well worth a read. This excerpt gives you the general idea:

Over the past few decades, finance has turned away from this traditional role. Academic research shows that only a fraction of all the money washing around the financial markets these days actually makes it to Main Street businesses. “The intermediation of household savings for productive investment in the business sector—the textbook description of the financial sector—constitutes only a minor share of the business of banking today,” according to academics Oscar Jorda, Alan Taylor and Moritz Schularick, who’ve studied the issue in detail. By their estimates and others, around 15% of capital coming from financial institutions today is used to fund business investments, whereas it would have been the majority of what banks did earlier in the 20th century.

…

“Across all advanced economies, and the United States and the U.K. in particular, the role of the capital markets and the banking sector in funding new investment is decreasing.” Most of the money in the system is being used for lending against existing assets such as housing, stocks and bonds.

To get a sense of the size of this shift, consider that the financial sector now represents around 7% of the U.S. economy, up from about 4% in 1980. Despite currently taking around 25% of all corporate profits, it creates a mere 4% of all jobs. Trouble is, research by numerous academics as well as institutions like the Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund shows that when finance gets that big, it starts to suck the economic air out of the room. In fact, finance starts having this adverse effect when it’s only half the size that it currently is in the U.S. Thanks to these changes, our economy is gradually becoming “a zero-sum game between financial wealth holders and the rest of America,” says former Goldman Sachs banker Wallace Turbeville, who runs a multiyear project on the rise of finance at the New York City—based nonprofit Demos.

And after this broad introduction it goes into finer details. The decrease in small business loans (and hence small businesses being started), the increase in cash upfront home purchases (and hence the decrease of younger families entering the home market), and the skyrocketing of debt, both personal and corporate.

How has this rampant “financialization” — lower interest rates, higher debt, lower loan availability, greater income inequality — affected you?

Have you put off or ruled out any options that would have been more viable at this stage in your life, say, 20 or 30 years ago?

Would you be happier in a world “pre-financialization”? How would your life be different?

Also rising: awkward mornings after.

A seemingly depressing statistic about young adults’ living situation comes from Fusion, who say:

The never-ending sleep-over continued in 2014: the share of 25-34 year-olds living with their parents increased again last year, new Census data show.

The overall ratio for this group climbed to 14.7% from 13.9%.

Here’s the chart, which is broken down by gender. Interestingly, the share of 18-24 year-olds who are living at home continued to decline, to 54.9% from 55.3%, which likely reflects extended schooling for this group.

As a non-homebound adult, my heart goes out to these souls whose growth has been stunted by lack of opportunity in the modern work force. But if the situation is this dire, considerations must be made.

If you have to live at home as an adult, what rules would you impose to stay sane while still living with your parents?

Are there unexpected benefits beyond saving on room and board? What are the biggest drawbacks?

How will living at home that much longer end up affecting this generation, for better or worse?