People don’t do things that don’t make sense. If someone does something that appears to be irrational or doesn’t make any sense, it’s because part of their context is missing.
Mick Everett, author of Memoirs Of A Homeless Bookstore Owner
This quote helped put me on the path of writing. It’s from the perspective of someone who was running a bookstore as an entrepreneur while actively being homeless and raising kids out of an RV in a parking lot. The book investigates many of the different ways that people’s lives look like when they’re struggling and the different kinds of hard choices one has to make when they’re struggling and homeless. There is addiction, trauma, and more involved. We condemn people so quickly for making a decision that we think looks reckless or lazy or wasteful. But when we really think about what their life is like and what needs they’re trying to meet, there’s always a context, there’s always a reason. We really need to appreciate those things so that we can see people in their full humanity and stop moralizing the struggles that they have and the decisions that they make when they’re struggling.
Devon Price, Ph.D. is a social psychologist, professor at
Loyola University of Chicago’s School of Continuing
and Professional Studies and
author of Laziness Does Not Exist
