Housing and happiness

Lately there has been much in the news about declining home sales and prices and concern about the impact on the U.S. economy. For going on a decade now, real estate has been hot hot hot. And like so many things, we've lost sight of the connection between a thing and its supposed purpose, not to mention how those things--and we ourselves--fit into the environment around us.

I remember being in Siena with Dad in 2002. We were sitting in a small restaurant on the ground floor of a house that was centuries old. Above us the intricate ceiling was composed of arched sections of bricks... countless blocks mortared together, seemingly suspended in space. How amazing, I remarked, that this place is still standing.

In the conversation that followed, it occurred to us that when that building had been built, it had likely been built as a family residence: one that the family would occupy for generations. With that sort of intention, one would want to build the best possible structure, something that would endure for ages.

Today a house only needs to be good enough to be sold. As long as you can convince someone to buy it, it's good enough. No other objective exists. It doesn't really matter if it's still in good shape in 50 years; the builder won't be around to care.

In the last decade or two, home ownership has undergone a transformation. Houses were once primarily a place where people lived; their status as an investment was a distant and secondary consideration. Today some people buy and sell homes like they are stocks, trading up as often as they can (which the tax code happily supports), taking on more and more debt. While certain areas of the country have long known that kind of real estate speculation, it seems more recently to have become a nationwide phenomenon. And people pay no heed to historical data that shows that the price of housing has increased over the long run roughly at the rate of inflation. Just as with the dot com era, there are oh-so-many explanations for why the old rules no longer apply. And what do I know, perhaps they don't.

I BOUGHT MY FIRST CONDO in 2000. By a happy coincidence, 20 new condos came on the market next door to my apartment that spring, and I cashed in some stock options to fund the purchase. With a couple of weeks, the stock market peaked and began its long decline: this was one of my luckiest moves ever.

Two years later, my company relocated me to Portland, and I bought a loft in a beautiful building in a trendy neighborhood. I kept my San Francisco condo and rented it out.

The Portland loft was wonderful and offered a view I thought I could never afford in San Francisco. I lavishly decorated it... a few months after moving in, I held my first party, and one of my friends said that it was "absolutely complete." Everything was just so, just as I wanted it.

I seemed to be sitting pretty, but a year later I got nervous when my tenants talked about moving out. The SF housing market had moved sideways that year; I was feeling a bit over-extended on my payments. I ended up selling the condo.

And something still wasn't quite right. I wasn't enjoying my job anymore; it was no longer satisfying. I was still earning a Bay Area salary in a much cheaper city, and I have to say that that was pretty nice. But I was growing to hate my job... and feeling trapped because there was no way I could make my housing payments without it.

So I decided to downsize and eventually found an adorable 1907 house. I bought it; I thought that then I'd look for a job that was something I'd really enjoy. Instead I spent six months living with the inconvenience of having the kitchen and bathrooms remodeled. I still needed the job as I was now paying a bunch of contractors, and besides, the furniture that had been in my loft didn't work in the house, so I put it into storage and bought a bunch of new stuff. Eventually I had everything just the way I wanted it. I thought I'd never move.

And then I immediately got the itch to do so and found myself heading back to San Francisco. I sold the house; I made back all of the money I had spent on it. But now I enough stuff to fill a two story house and the full basement beneath it. In San Francisco I planned to start a new career; I wouldn't be buying a house for awhile. And everything went into storage.

That's right. I was now paying to store two households worth of furniture in addition to all of my other belongings. I remember the day the movers came thinking, "How in the world can one person own so much stuff?"

IT'S NOT JUST ME. A 2005 Slate magazine article says that one in eleven households rents a storage unit, a 75% increase from ten years before. No doubt the figure has increased in the year and a half since the article was written. In the way of explaining the increase, the article suggests:

Another obvious suspect, then, is American consumerism. No other country in the world spends as much on consumer goods. As Morgan Stanley notes, in just one telling index, "Over the 1996 to 2004 period, annual growth in US personal consumption expenditures averaged 3.9% — nearly double the 2.2% pace recorded elsewhere in the so-called advanced world." The real prices of many consumer goods are as much as 50 percent less than they were a century ago. It's never been so easy for so many to amass so many consumer products. And who doesn't take pleasure from owning things? But living in a land of wants, not needs, creates its own dilemmas, as evidenced by the concurrent rise of stores like Hold Everything and the Container Store—stuff to hold stuff. Note the curious growth in the "home organization" market: reality shows like Clean Sweep and magazines like Real Simple, or, more strikingly, the robustness of the National Association of Professional Organizers, which saw a 50 percent rise in membership in the past year.

But as consumption has grown, so too has the average size of the American house. The National Association of Homebuilders reports that the average American house went from 1,660 square feet in 1973 to 2,400 square feet in 2004. So, let's get this straight—houses got bigger, average family sizes got smaller, and yet we still need to tack on a billion-plus square feet to store our stuff?

I'VE BEEN READING The Spirituality of Imperfection, a fantastic book that explores the profound truth in the statement, "I am not perfect." It bridges the wisdom of ancient traditions with insights from modern movements like Alcoholics Anonymous, interweaving stories from Hebrew prophets, Buddhist sages, Christian teachers, and ancient Greeks.

In a chapter that seeks to explore the essense of spirituality, the book offers a story about Socrates and provides the following insight:

Socrates believed that the wise person would instinctively lead a frugal life, and he even went so far as to refuse to wear shoes. Yet he constantly fell under the spell of the marketplace and would go the there often to look at the great variety and magnificence of the wares on display.

A friend once asked him why he was so intrigued with the allures of the market. "I love to go there," Socrates replied, "to discover how many things I am perfectly happy without."

Material possessions are not "bad" in and of themselves, but as Socrates knew, the material realities that we possess tend also to possess us. The more we have, the more we want; and the more we want, the more we are possessed by our possessions.

And there's something more: invariably we become attached to objects. And to them we attach memories. We attach remembered conversations or interactions; we attach emotions from events in the past. Again, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But when we surround ourselves with objects that are so strongly tied to the past, we're constantly called back to another time and away from the present. We lose our ability to just exist in the present moment.

LAST SUMMER I WAS SPEAKING to my mother about the commercial nature of the world we live in. There came a point in American life where we were able to produce in abundance everything we needed to live comfortably. And then when faced with a choice of what to do next--and we could have done anything, really--we chose a path of always needing more. More things. Bigger houses. We could have made sure everyone had enough. We could have created a world for ourselves where everyone had the opportunity to develop fully and beautifully as a human being. But we chose the route of "progress" and endless buying, which leaves us with thousands of self-storage units and Christmas decorations in stores in October. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the most patriotic thing we could do, we were told, was to go buy something.

I know, utopian ideas. Everyone's needs being met, crazy! And truly, I don't have something that is better than capialism to offer as a replacement. I want to only make the point that we chose this path that we're on when we could have chosen an infinite number of other paths. And that there are consequences for this path we are on: our impact on the environment, on the very climate of the planet; our need to exert force in the world to ensure that we have access to what we "need;" the fact that despite all of the material wealth around us, people don't report being any happier now than they ever were. In fact, a recent study reported:

The journal Science reported last week yet more evidence and another theory about why wealth does not make people happy: "The belief that high income is associated with good mood is widespread but mostly illusory," one of its studies concluded. "People with above-average income ... are barely happier than others in moment-to-moment experience, tend to be more tense, and do not spend more time in particularly enjoyable activities."

Wait, there's more. "The effect of income on life satisfaction seems to be transient," the researchers added. "We argue that people exaggerate the contribution of income to happiness because they focus, in part, on conventional achievements when evaluating their lives and the lives of others."

Wow. Let's pause a moment to let all priests, nuns and anarchists take a bow and say, "I told you so!"

"People grossly exaggerate the impact that higher incomes would have on their subjective well-being," said Alan Krueger, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and an author of the study.

The problem is that once people get past the level of poverty, money does not play a significant role in day-to-day happiness, Krueger said. It certainly can buy things, but things do not usually address most of the troubles people experience in daily life -- concerns about their children, problems in intimate relationships and stressful aspects of their jobs.

(For more on the fact that we're not getting happier despite being wealthier, check out "The Progress Paradox" here and here.)

In "(Can't Get No) Satisfaction" in the March 2007 issue of Scientific American, Michael Shermer shares this tidbit:

Imagine you have a choice between earning $50,000 a year while other people make $25,000 or earning $100,000 a year while other people get $250,000. Prices of goods and services are the same. Which would you prefer? Surprisingly, studies show that the majority of people select the first option. As H. L. Mencken is said to have quipped, "A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband."

So it seems we care an awful lot about what others think. :-) I remember the day I sold my loft and drove with my last load of stuff across the river and toward my new and less extravagant home. For an awful moment, I thought, "You're crazy! What are you doing? You lived in one of the best buildings in the most desirable neighborhood in town. Everyone wants to live there!" And then, I realized, that I was simply creating suffering for myself. Perhaps the step I was taking that day was the first step in my doing what I wanted with my life rather than what I thought other people wanted.

LAST FRIDAY I LAY IN BED with all of these sorts of thoughts swirling through my head. I was having a garage sale the next day. I had moved everything from Portland down to San Francisco a few weeks before, and I was going to sell everything that didn't fit into my one bedroom apartment. I wasn't going to put excess stuff into a storage unit. I was going to live simply with what fit into the limited space that I was occupying.

I'm not sure of my path ahead. I've gone from owning two houses to owning nothing. I can easily think that I've regressed or fallen behind; I'm sure many people do. But for whatever reason, I wasn't content with how things were. And so I'm exploring something else.

I've been listening to Zencast lately, a podcast on Buddhism. I'm intrigued--no, I'm drawn to--the idea of living more simply, in harmony with myself, those around me, and the world around me.

In Matthew 19:21, Jesus says, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." What is this to mean? Who could live this way? In fact, so many of Jesus' teachings are so radical that we can scarely imagine anyone following them. And while we claim to be the most Christian nation in the world, our culture is in so many ways inimical to the teachings of Christ. (See "The Christian Paradox" in the August 2005 Harper's magazine.)

I was once told by someone that I wasn't very spiritual. At the time, I found it hard to argue because I didn't really understand what it was to be spiritual. But as I look back over what I've written--and the years in which I've bought, furnished, remodeled, and sold homes--I'm thinking that maybe that's exactly what has been missing: some spiritual sense of my place in the world.

In talking to a friend recently, we found ourselves akin in a way: well-educated, intelligent, but not exactly sure of what we wanted. We contrasted ourselves to those people who seem to just know--"I want to make this much money," "I want a house with a white picket fence," "I want three cars"--and then set out with an unshakeable industriousness to make good on their goals.

Maybe there is something to not wanting things.

FROM THE SPIRITUALITY OF IMPERFECTION:

Spirituality points, always, beyond: beyond the ordinary, beyond possession, beyond the narrow confines of the self, and--above all--beyond expectation. Because "the spiritual" is beyond our control, it is never exactly what we expect....

We can't hold it in our hands and touch it, manipulate it, or destroy it. Because it is beyond control, it is also beyond possession: We can't own it, lock it up, divide it among ourselves, or take it away from others.