A relatively short history of housing part two

Americans by and large turned to their houses to fund these new and extravagant pursuits. It was decided by one person and some other people thought it was a good idea that flipping a house was a great way to earn cash. These people also decided that shelter was worth a hell of a lot more than had previously been thought. Enough people agreed and the housing boom was born. This allowed everyone to start paying for all those new things that were also not making them happy.

However, those things changed, and became things like watching television, paying someone else to cut that damn big lawn you thought was a great idea, getting your nails done, pick out a nice class to take to get away from the kids, just pampering yourself a little because the world as it turned out yet again, is not out to do anyone any f-ing favors.

Now women joined in the crusade and pretty much everyone was constantly walking around wondering just how they were going to make themselves happy. But thank god for those houses, which cost infinity billion times more than caves, which allowed them to pursue the root of their unhappiness. People were still putting up pictures on the wall, but now everyone pretty much had their own unique style, which was oxymoronic of course, the style having come from somewhere. And everyone was pretty sure that they were the arbiter of truth for their own life, and pretty much everyone else's life as well. And people like experts or academics were regarded as snobs. And humanity all had a nice moment of patting themself on the back and realizing how far they had come from those thatch houses. In general the era of choice was regarded as a positive step for humanity, even if the amount of choices was occasionally overwhelming and people still felt soul-crushing sadness and were unsure why.

The living conditions were much better, though it was largely agreed by "scientists" that the indulgent lifestyles that were being lead were eventually going to result in some real problems. Everybody had a nagging suspicion that that was true, but they also really enjoyed, (or thought they enjoyed) things like cable television, Internet, trips to foreign countries, cars, freeways, commutes that don't involve nasty public transportation and big homes. Thus, things sort of continued as they had before but now with people feeling sort of guilty about something only identifiiable if you really stopped and thought, which was avoided at all costs. It's sort of like religion for those that have left the church but still have the nagging feeling taht something is missing.

"Morality has nothing to do with the decisions that you make every day and everything to do with where you stand on pro-choice vs. pro-life." This is my sarcasm quote.

At some point in this timeline a relatively young couple decided to buy their first house and discovered that buying a house requires trade-offs. Neighborhood, schools, accessibility to transit/jobs, home size, number of cabinets in kitchen and grew very depressed. They felt that the housing market in the large metropolitan area where they had jobs was unduly stratified financially, and that they were priced out of getting what they wanted. Wanted being the sort of term that could be defined in about a thousand different ways and which they tried to define for each other on an almost daily basis and found it frustrating because even after all these years of evolution human beings are still trapped insider their own heads. And this struck them as sad because the very things they said they espoused turned out to be much more complex in reality. And they discovered that no matter what you say you want reality is still waiting to kick you in the ass and show you how wrong you were about yourself. And being wrong about yourself is a pretty hard thing to deal with.

And secretly, at least one of them wished that they were sitting around a fire amongst friends, trading stories of this great woolly mammoth they had taken down in the middle of the day, blissfully unaware that they were wiping the species off the planet. And when they were done talking and laughing they'd retire to a cheap little bit of rock that they could call their own.