“Home blindness exists in the murky realms of abstraction, somewhere between tacit knowledge and the past tense”

The old adage that chores pass unnoticed until they cease to be done neglects those segments of the home—certain surfaces or corners, perhaps even entire rooms—that remain untouched and untidied, shielded from scrutiny by some sort of force field or invisibility mirror.

Drawers, by their very nature, get full; things, as they tend to do, pile up. “Oh, it still works if you…”, one might say about a door handle that requires an elaborate, secret handshake to open. Or, “You get used to it” is muttered to excuse the rattle of an AC vent, as if it were a particularly interfering aunt about whom people say, “Take no notice—that’s just her way.”

The Swedes use the word hemmablind to describe this phenomenon, which translates roughly to “home blindness.” It means adapting to environments without questioning fault. We stop seeing problems to the extent that finding a solution slowly makes its way to the bottom of a to-do list until it drops off into passive acceptance.

“One could say that hemmablind is a word you would never use to describe yourself, because the moment you address something that you’ve become home blind to, is the moment it is no longer a matter of home blindness,” explains Mark Vacher, an associate professor of ethnology at the SAXO Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark.

In that sense, home blindness exists in the murky realms of abstraction, somewhere between tacit knowledge and the past tense. It does not allow for an ambiguous grace period, unlike procrastinating doing the laundry until you’ve run out of clean socks, nor can it serve as an excuse: “The danger of becoming home blind is that you don’t perceive the flaws or destructive patterns that you have,” says Vacher. You don’t mean to ignore the problems; you just don’t see them anymore.

Vacher also extends home blindness to relationships, academia and the workplace. “It’s used within business lingo as a way of detecting or talking about internal problems that have become routine to such an extent that you’re all unaware of them—that’s why companies hire external consultants to point out things that are counterproductive to the organization.”

But it’s not just the flaws we stop seeing. In fact, even if the home is just as one always hoped it would be, one can still become blind to its beauty. “A good home is a place where there aren’t challenges, or where there’s not even a reason to discuss them,” says Vacher.

“The strength of routines and habits helps us to order the world and regard it as reliable,” he continues. “And when you regard the world as reliable, you don’t have to think about it—you don’t have to be as alert. If you can trust your environment, then it becomes a foundation for more outgoing activities. Hemmablind allows us to go outside and meet new people, or go to the workplace and deal with challenges or problems.” Taking the home for granted—regardless of leaky plumbing or impeccable interiors—actually becomes a way of defining home: If ignorance is bliss, then what better place to be blissful than at home?

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Location Graanmarkt 13 in Antwerp, Belgium