The Pursuit of Square Footage
(Page 3 of 3)
May - June 2008
by Charles Montgomery, from the Walrus
“A slight boost in neighborly trust has a greater effect on happiness than doubling your income,” Christopher Barrington-Leigh, one of the study’s authors, assured me.
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It’s hard to put happiness theory to work in a personal real estate strategy, especially when you are part of a species programmed to make the wrong decisions.
But the market may have been kind to my man and me, in a roundabout way. We weren’t employing happy economics when we chose our new abode. We just couldn’t afford a house of our own. That’s how we came to buy a third of Keri’s 100-year-old creaker on the cheap side of town. The house was cramped, but interest rates were low. It seemed natural to borrow more cash and invest it in a renovation. Everyone else was doing it. Now the place has grown three extra bedrooms. It’s bigger than the neighbors’ houses, bigger than all our friends’ houses, too, and our mortgage payments have grown apace.
According to the arithmetic of well-being, this financial maxing out is a recipe for misery, especially if we decide to feed our monster mortgage by working harder or longer. Instead, we have chosen not to let our house become proof of Rayo and Becker’s unhappiness formula.
No, we’re not selling it. We’re filling all those spare rooms with renters.
I never imagined I’d be living with a gaggle of roomies when I hit 40. From a distance, the prospect has the appearance of a kind of half-assed slackerism, a failure to maintain a respectable status trajectory. Yet on good days, I envision a model straight from the hedonic textbooks. We will fill those rooms with four, five, six bodies. We will all cross paths in the unfinished kitchen. Since we won’t have the money to eat out, we will share meals on an old table alongside our recycled cabinets. There will be wine, too. Lots of wine.
Our acquisitive, status-hungry genes may wish for a life more grand, more private, more sweepingly elegant and expansively lonely. But scarcity will have relegated us to a life of conviviality and trust. It will be hard to avoid the shared moments that drench baboons, cavemen, and even middle-aged slackers in feel-good neurotransmitters. If the economists are right, this big house just may render us happy, in spite of our unrealized desires.
Journalist Charles Montgomery is the author of the award-winning book The Shark of God. Reprinted from the Walrus (Jan.-Feb. 2008). Subscriptions: Canadian $29.75/yr. (10 issues) from Box 915, Station Main, Markham, ON L3P 9Z9, Canada; www.walrusmagazine.com.
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