Living in Someone Else s House

What struck me was not simply the fact that Hegel worked as a private tutor after university, but how long it lasted. For about seven years—from 1793 to 1800—he lived in his employers’ homes: first in Bern, then in Frankfurt. Seven years of living with others. Seven years without one’s own space, without the right to a silence that belongs only to oneself.
His letters from that period—especially to Schelling and H;lderlin—are filled with sadness, irritation, a sense of stagnation and wasted years. He writes not as a future systematic philosopher, but as a person acutely aware of the disproportion between inner life and external position. Educated, thinking, already a philosopher—yet dependent, subordinate, forced to adapt to someone else’s household, someone else’s habits, someone else’s will.
This touched me personally because, upon arriving in the United States, I went through a similar experience myself. I worked as a live-in babysitter and lived in my employers’ home. Formally, it was temporary, practical—“nothing serious.” But I couldn’t endure it for more than a month. Not because it was physically difficult, but because it proved almost unbearable inwardly.
To live with others means to exist constantly on someone else’s territory. You are never fully off work. Even when you are silent, even when you sit in your own room, you remain part of someone else’s household, someone else’s gaze upon you. You have no time that is fully your own, no true solitude, no neutral space where you simply exist rather than perform a function.
That is why I was struck by this question: how could he endure it for years?;How can one live like this for so long without being destroyed?
Perhaps he endured it because there was no choice. Perhaps because at the time it was considered a normal stage in the life of an educated but poor man. Or perhaps because this very experience—life in subordination while preserving inner freedom—became for him a kind of knowledge that could not be expressed otherwise. A knowledge that later took shape as a philosophy of dependence and unfreedom, in that very dialectic of master and slave.
His letters are not yet a system, but they are already a nerve. Already an experience of unfreedom lived not abstractly, but physically. An educated person in someone else’s house is a special form of humiliation that is rarely spoken of directly. It is not slavery, but it is not freedom either. It is an execution without a whip, sustained by constant inner tension.
My own experience was brief, and for that very reason—absolutely clear. I understood that for a person of words, of thought, of inner hearing, such a life is destructive. Not because it is “hard,” but because the essential thing disappears—the ability to be oneself without witnesses.
I often wonder: those who endure live-in arrangements for years—do they truly endure, or do they simply grow numb over time? Do they get used to not fully belonging to themselves, to considering this normal, virtuous, a form of patience?
Sometimes leaving earlier means preserving more.;Not a career or money, but the ability to hear one’s own voice