This paper explores intimate scenes of masculine domestic life in a sakan shababiyy, a shared apartment inhabited by a shifting cast of young Syrian men living and working in indefinite exile (ghurba) in Lebanon’s Beqaa valley. The sons of middle class families from an opposition-aligned community decimated by the Assad regime, these young men describe ghurba in double-edged terms: the most effective mechanism for the production of ‘a man in the meaning of the word’ (rajil bi ma’ana al-kalima) and the cruelest means for reducing him to nothing. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in the same residence, this paper examines how this paradox winds its way through domestic relations between non-kin as they negotiate the uncertain temporalities of precarious work, psychological exhaustion, and fantasies of return and escape in the context of dramatic shifts in the economic and legal status of Syrians in Lebanon. In dialogue with a growing literature on domestic practices of care in contexts of social abandonment, I argue that the sakan shababiyy is a space where the interactional repertoires and moral economies of middle class urban domesticity, Islamic piety, and youthful experimentation are remixed to produce distinct material and ethical practices of masculine concern that mediate relations within the home while mitigating the worst excesses of the everyday violence that envelops it. This concept––indexing both an empathic concern for and a critical concern about others in the shifting domestic collective––draws our attention to how practices of care and judgement intersect in the construction of tenuous hierarchies of authority between peers against the looming spectre of ‘reduction to nothing.’