‘Home’: The often overlooked need we all live inside, from human hearts to potato cellars

By Lukie Pieterse, Potato News Today

Reflecting on what “home” means for people, animals, and the potatoes we bring in from the field

Many people end a workday with the same easy phrase: I’m going home. It rolls off the tongue so casually that we seldom stop to reflect on what it really means.

For some, it means stepping through a door into warmth, conversation, and familiar faces. For others, it means walking into a quiet apartment, switching on a light, and hearing nothing but the hum of the fridge. And for too many, going home is not an option at all – not because there is no roof, but because there is no place where they feel they truly belong, where they are loved.

The same is true, in their own way, for animals. Wild creatures defend dens, nests, burrows, and territories with ferocity. Our dogs, cats, and other companion animals attach deeply to the spaces – and people – they trust. They are also creatures of home.

This article explores home as an overlooked basic need for humans and animals alike – not just a physical location, but a web of safety, belonging, love, and continuity that quietly holds lives together.

More than a roof: What we really mean by “home”

A house is a physical structure. A home is the story we live in it.

When people say home, they rarely mean bricks, drywall, and roof trusses. They mean:

• A place where they are expected and loved and not merely tolerated.
• A space where their presence makes sense and is not questioned.
• A small territory where they can let down their guard without calculating every word and gesture.

Home is the environment where our nervous system stops bracing for impact. It is where we can be unfinished – tired, confused, grieving, hopeful – and still feel that we have a rightful place at the table.

You can own a beautiful house and not have this. You can sleep in a simple room or a modest rental and have it in abundance. The difference is not in the furniture or the structure, but in the presence – or absence – of connection and of course love.

Home as a basic – and often overlooked – human need

We tend to list human needs in familiar ways: food, water, shelter, security, work, health care. These are real and non-negotiable. But quietly interwoven with them is another need that is easier to ignore: the need for a place in the world, tethered to other people, that we recognize as ours.

You can see how fundamental this is in several ways:

• Emotional regulation: People who feel securely “at home” somewhere tend to bounce back faster after stress. A difficult day at work feels manageable if you know you are heading towards a place of acceptance. Without that, minor stresses accumulate into exhaustion and despair.
• Identity: Home is where we keep our personal evidence – photos, old letters, familiar tools, books, and objects that remind us who we are. Remove all of these, and a person can feel strangely erased, even if their basic physical needs are met.
• Belonging: Humans are social by nature. We are wired to look for signals that we belong to a group, a family, or at least a small circle that “claims” us. A home is often where those signals concentrate – someone asking how your day was, a coffee mug that is always “yours,” a chair where people expect to see you.

Because we cannot measure these elements as easily as we measure square meters or property values, it is tempting to treat them as optional. They are not. They sit much closer to the core of human well-being than most of our economic language allows.

When a house is not a home

There are countless people around the world who technically “have a place to live” yet feel profoundly homeless inside their own walls.

• The newly divorced person who returns after work to a house that used to echo with family noise, now filled mostly with silence.
• The elderly person in a care facility whose physical needs are met, but whose emotional world has been reduced to scheduled visits and institutional routines.
• The migrant who has relocated for safety or opportunity, living in a perfectly acceptable apartment, yet feels as if their real self is still somewhere else – in another country, another language, another life.

Externally, everything may look “fine”. The rent is paid. The lights work. There’s food in the fridge.

Internally, there is a sense of dislocation – as if the body is present, but the heart has not yet arrived.

This gap can be psychologically brutal. It is a quiet kind of homelessness – not defined by sleeping rough on the streets, but by not having a space where one’s inner life and outer life line up in any coherent way.

The homelessness we don’t see

We are used to thinking about homelessness as the visible crisis of people living in tents, shelters, or under bridges. That reality exists and deserves full attention and action, no doubt. But there is another layer that rarely makes headlines: emotional and relational homelessness among people who technically have housing, but not a home.

Consider:

• A person living alone after the breakdown of a marriage, going for years without anyone waiting for them to walk through the door.
• Young adults renting rooms in cities far from family and community, drifting between work and a screen-lit bedroom with no stable human anchor.
• People estranged from their families, who may sleep in safe accommodation but carry a constant sense that they belong to no one and nowhere.

This form of homelessness does not show up in statistics easily. Yet it has consequences for mental health, addiction, depression, and even physical illness. The body may be indoors. The soul feels exposed and lonely.

Animals and home: dens, nests, and safe bases

The importance of home does not stop with humans. In the animal world, place is also a matter of survival and psychological stability.

Wild animals invest enormous energy in creating and defending their versions of home:

• Burrows, dens, nests, and hollows where offspring are born and raised.
• Territories that hold food, water, and shelter, mapped in memory with extraordinary precision.
• Migration routes that act as “moving homes” in a seasonal rhythm, returning to the same breeding grounds year after year.

When these places are disrupted – by habitat loss, pollution, construction, or climate shifts – animals do not simply “relocate” in a calm, orderly fashion. They often experience stress, disorientation, and increased vulnerability to predators and disease. A lost den or nesting site is not just a lost location – it is a broken pattern of safety.

In the domestic world, our companion animals show their need for home even more clearly:

• Dogs often have a spot in the house – a bed, mat, or corner – where they retreat when overwhelmed. This becomes a secure base where they regulate themselves.
• Cats claim windowsills, couches, and favorite hiding places, mapping the home into zones of comfort and control.
• Rescue animals that have been abandoned or mistreated can take months or years to fully trust a new home. They may cling to routines, follow their human around relentlessly, or react strongly if furniture is moved or if the household changes suddenly.

These behaviors are not trivial quirks. They are visible signs that animals, like us, need a stable, predictable environment to feel secure. A home is not only a shelter from weather; it is a psychological anchor.

Shared vulnerability: humans, animals, and displaced “homes”

There is a quiet kinship between a person who has lost their sense of home and an animal displaced from its territory or family group.

• A person who moves countries, cultures, or languages may feel constant low-level anxiety, not knowing the “social rules” of the new environment, much like an animal forced into a strange landscape.
• A dog surrendered to a shelter may show separation anxiety, pacing, or refusal to eat – mirrored, in human terms, by insomnia, loss of appetite, or agitation after major life upheavals.
• Wild animals pushed into fragmented habitats may come into conflict with humans, just as displaced people can clash more easily with systems and communities when they are under extreme stress.

At the heart of all these situations lies the same fracture: the loss of a stable, familiar base where needs for safety, belonging, and continuity were once met – or at least partially met.

Bringing the crop home – what potato farmers know instinctively

In farming communities, the language of home is not reserved only for people. Potato growers often talk about bringing them home when a crop is lifted from the field and moved into storage. It is more than a casual phrase. It carries a quiet understanding that those tubers are no longer exposed to frost, rain, wind, or theft in an open field. They are now in a place where they can be watched, protected, and carried safely towards their purpose.

A potato cellar or modern storage facility is, in its own way, a kind of home for the crop: a controlled environment where temperature, humidity, airflow, and disease pressure are managed with care. When a farmer closes the doors on a well-filled, well-run store, there is often a deep sense of relief. The year’s work is not finished, but one critical step has been taken: the crop is no longer vulnerable in the same way. It has been brought in.

That feeling is not so far from what many of us long for in our personal lives – the sense that we, too, have been brought in from the elements. That there is somewhere we can rest without constantly scanning the horizon. In the same way that potatoes in a good store stand a better chance of reaching their destination in sound condition, people who have a real home, in more than the physical sense, stand a better chance of weathering the shocks and seasons of life without falling apart.

For readers in the potato world, this parallel is almost instinctive. We know how much effort goes into creating the right conditions for a crop to store well. Perhaps it is worth asking, with equal seriousness, what it would look like if we invested the same thought and care in the “storage conditions” of human and animal lives – the homes, relationships, and environments that keep us steady once the work in the field is done.

Home in a restless age: why this matters now

Modern life has multiplied the ways in which people move – for work, study, safety, and opportunity. Many change cities or countries multiple times in a lifetime. Remote work and digital connections mean that people can, in theory, live “anywhere”.

On paper, this sounds liberating. In reality, it often comes with a subtle price:

• Relationships become more transient.
• Communities become more fragmented.
• The idea of a single, lifelong “home base” becomes less common.

At the same time, our collective attention is pulled into screens and platforms that are everywhere and nowhere. We spend hours in digital spaces that mimic some aspects of community but cannot replace the embodied reassurance of a real place and real people.

In such an age, home is easy to misjudge. We may tell ourselves that a stable internet connection and a decent apartment are enough, even while an unspoken loneliness grows. We may underestimate how much we – and the animals who share our lives – need familiar spaces, routines, and bonds to stay grounded.

Learning to build – and rebuild – home

For those who have experienced divorce, bereavement, migration, or estrangement, the concept of home can become painfully complicated. The place that once felt like home may no longer exist. The people who made it feel that way might be gone. The routines that gave structure to days and nights may have been shattered.

Rebuilding a sense of home in such circumstances is not a quick project. It is more like slow reconstruction, stone by careful stone.

Several elements seem to matter:

• Ritual: Even simple routines – making coffee the same way each morning, walking a familiar route, feeding a pet at the same time – send signals of continuity to both body and mind.
• Personal evidence: Putting up photos, keeping meaningful books in sight, placing a few objects that carry memory in visible places helps stitch one’s life story into the new environment.
• Connection: Inviting others into that space, even occasionally, changes it from a storage unit for a body into a living environment for a person in relationship.
• Care: Looking after plants, pets, or shared spaces adds a layer of purpose. Many people describe how a dog or cat “made the house feel like a home again,” not because the floor plan changed, but because the emotional climate did.

For animals, we have a responsibility to acknowledge that they, too, are going through transitions when homes change. A move, a new family composition, a change in routine – all of these can unsettle them. Consistency, patience, and gentleness are not luxuries; they are what allow them to form a secure sense of home in the new reality.

Extending the circle: how we respond to those without home

Once we understand home as a basic emotional and psychological need, the way we look at others begins to shift.

• The colleague who always stays late at work may not be “just ambitious”; they may be delaying the ache of walking into an empty space at night.
• The neighbor whose dog cries when left alone may be dealing with an animal that has not yet fully settled into the sense that this new place is truly safe.
• The family sleeping in a shelter or temporary accommodation is not only lacking space and privacy; they are living without the stabilizing force of a place they can shape, claim, and trust.

We cannot solve all of this on our own. But we can make choices that widen the circle of home in small ways:

• Offering a meal or invitation to someone who routinely goes home to silence.
• Treating our animals’ need for stability as central, not peripheral.
• Supporting policies and projects that create not just housing units, but livable, humane environments where people can actually build lives.
• Paying attention to refugees, displaced communities, and the uprooted, recognizing that what they need is not only documents and shelters, but the chance to grow new roots.

A quiet word with enormous weight

Home is one of the quietest words in our vocabulary, but it carries enormous weight.

It is possible to survive without much of a home. People do it every day. Animals adapt, sometimes in remarkable ways, to fractured habitats and unstable environments. But survival is not the same as living well. Without some form of home, human beings drift. Animals struggle. The world becomes a series of temporary stations rather than a place where beings can truly belong.

To take home seriously is to take our own vulnerability seriously – and to recognize it in the creatures that share our lives and landscapes.

When someone says I am going home, there is a whole universe hidden in that sentence: a hope that on the other side of the door, there will be more than walls and ceilings – there will be at least a fragment of safety, continuity, and love.

For those who have that, it is worth cherishing.
For those who do not, it is worth noticing.
And for all of us – human and animal alike – the need for home is not a luxury. It is one of the quiet foundations on which a life can stand.

Afterword – a personal note on living “between house and home”

For nearly two decades after a divorce, I have technically had somewhere to live – four walls, a roof, an address that works on a form. Yet for much of that time, I have also lived what I can only call a “homeless” life in the emotional sense of the word. I went home to quiet rooms and apartments, not to a place where someone was waiting, or where the day ended in the small rituals that quietly say: you belong here.

Over the years, I found ways to live with that solitude. Work, purpose, friendships, and a kind of hard-earned inner peace helped soften the edges of loneliness. I have built something that functions, that even carries moments of deep joy and meaning. But it is not the same as having a home in the full sense – a place where your presence is woven into the lives of others, where your absence is noticed, and your return matters.

I mention this only to say that the difference between shelter and home in this article is not theoretical. Many of us move through life in that grey space in between – housed, but not fully at home. Naming that reality, in our own lives and in the lives of others (and even in the way we think about our animals and our crops), might be one small step toward taking this quiet need more seriously.

Author: Lukie Pieterse, Potato News Today
Image: Credit Potato News Today