Build for the Self: A Manifesto for the Human Home

Homes. We are trained since we are very young and programmed to think of rooms in terms of what makes sense to the shadowy system, not to our own selves. How I envision rooms for my life is like this: a room to sleep, just to sleep. It has to be on the ground. This room needs to be grounded, either because it's literally on the ground, the actual ground that when I die, I fall into. In a modern age, this can be a room with a sheet, a grounded or grounding sheet connected to the ground electrical outlet in the wall. This room should have nothing, just a little mat to sleep on with a weighted blanket and a little pillow, and that's all. That's what I need in my sleeping room, just that. I also need a room for meditation, for thinking, a room where there is nothing, where I just go there to close my eyes and do nothing. There is nothing, no materials, nothing to touch, nothing to see. Everything that happens in this room is literally about what happens in my mind. These are the two most important rooms I need in my place. They could be one room, they could be two rooms. I think two rooms is better than one room. I also don't like corners. I don't like edges. I don't like sharp corners and edges. I think my home should flow. Everything should flow. All the walls should be curvy so that energy can pass. If I am very rich and I have the money, or just if money is not a problem, I think I want all the grounds to be connected to the ground force of the earth. I also want the walls to be obsidian. Maybe colors is not a good idea. I don't know. Something worth exploring, because colors have energy. But I don't know what is the right color and what energy does what. But I want to explore obsidian, the black mirror effect, just pitch black. What would that mean? Would it absorb energy? Would it amplify energy? Would it help with focus? I don't know, but it is a beautiful experiment to try out. And water. I love water. I think to take a shower, one should immerse himself in water. And yes, I said himself, because society taught us to say themselves to account for women. But these are my diaries. Why I have to say themselves? I think of myself. I am a man, and when I write, I write for myself, him. And I want my boys to read this, and they are men, too. Women are also welcome to read my notes, my diaries, my thinking, my observations, my thoughts. But please don't judge me. So back to the tubs. I think tubs, I mean, sorry, back to the bathrooms. I think bathrooms should have tubs of fresh water, maybe with Epsom salt, because they have good minerals, I think magnesium, and they should be exposed to good energy, good frequency, maybe music, maybe binaural sounds. I don't know. I am not an expert, but it is a field worth exploring. That's exactly the science that building codes should introduce so that we don't do buildings with just basic codes about fighting fires or flooding or or electrical problems, but we should also integrate grounding forces, energy flows, efficiency. I love Egyptian buildings that can actually help people not having to rely on heaters or AC because of the way it's designed, the material, the mud that are being used. So, some notes for me, maybe one day, so I can build a house that can actually bring good energy and help me be me.

Somewhere between the building code and the blueprint, the human being got lost. We design homes for resale value, for square footage, for the approval of people we will never meet. We build rooms that perform functions the market recognizes — bedroom, living room, home office — and we call that living. It is not living. It is staging.

The home I want does not exist yet. That is the point.

Start with sleep. A room for nothing but sleep, stripped to its bones: a mat on the floor, a weighted blanket, a small pillow. No furniture asserting itself in the dark. No surfaces collecting the residue of the day. The floor itself grounded — literally connected, through a grounding sheet or through the earth beneath the slab, to the electrical ground of the building — because the body is not separate from the planet it evolved on. Sleep is the one act that requires total surrender, and the room should demand it.

Then a room for silence. Not quiet — silence. Four walls with nothing in them, no objects, no textures worth touching, nothing to pull the eye. A room where the only event is the mind. Meditation, thinking, stillness — call it what you want. The point is a space that refuses to compete with consciousness. Most homes offer no such room. They offer televisions and bookshelves and the ambient noise of objects. This room offers nothing, which is to say it offers everything.

These two rooms are the spine of the home. Everything else is secondary.

Now the shape of the place. I do not want corners. Corners are where energy stalls, where dust collects, where the eye catches and stops. I want walls that curve, rooms that flow into each other the way a river flows — no hard edges, no sharp angles demanding that movement halt and turn. This is not mysticism. Ancient builders understood it. Egyptian architecture used mass, material, and geometry to regulate temperature without mechanical systems — the building itself did the work that we now outsource to furnaces and compressors. The intelligence was in the structure. We abandoned it for the right angle and the dropped ceiling, and we have been paying utility bills ever since.

The walls, if money is no constraint, should be obsidian. Black mirror. Pitch dark and reflective at once. Whether obsidian absorbs energy or amplifies it, whether it sharpens focus or deepens rest — I do not know. Nobody I have read has tested it seriously. But that uncertainty is not a reason to dismiss it. It is a reason to experiment. The home as laboratory. The self as the subject.

And water. The bathroom should not be a room for efficiency. It should be a room for immersion. A deep tub, fresh water, Epsom salt for the magnesium the body absorbs through the skin. Sound, perhaps — binaural frequencies, or music chosen for its effect rather than its entertainment value. The science of how water interacts with the body, with sound, with mineral content, is real and underexplored in residential design. Building codes mandate fire suppression and flood drainage. They say nothing about the quality of the water you soak in, the frequency of the sound in the room, the grounding of the floor beneath your feet. They should.

This is the argument: the home is a technology, and we are using it badly. We have optimized it for the wrong outputs — for appearance, for market value, for compliance with codes written by committees who were thinking about liability, not life. The home should be optimized for the person inside it. For sleep that actually restores. For silence that actually clears the mind. For water that actually heals. For a structure that works with the body's relationship to the earth rather than severing it.

One day, I will build this house. It will have two rooms that most architects will not understand, walls without corners, floors that connect to the ground, a tub that is also a ritual. It will look strange from the outside. From the inside, it will feel like the first honest thing I have ever lived in.