Thoreau Provides a Great Housing Bubble Gut Check

“When the [owner] has got his house, he may not be the richer for it, but poorer for it, and it be the house that got him.”  Thoreau

After several hours wallowing in real estate blogs I decided to redirect my energies toward something positive: enjoying my apartment.  I brewed up a cup of French press coffee, which feels like a luxury since I cut back from my standard morning cup, and headed out to the balcony to read in the afternoon sun.  I rested my feet on my patio table in my pjs, plopped on my hat and settled in to read Thoreau’s writing on Shelter.

Shelter is an interesting word.  Thoreau draws a sharp contrast between shelter, which implies a fundamental human need, and a home, which he recognizes activates all sorts of other wants and emotions. Thoreau’s incredibly specific terminology is at its core a fundamental critique of society’s obsession with housing: shelter, he forcefully reminds us, is about keeping the elements at bay, and providing covering at night.  This is pretty radical thinking that is nowhere in evidence on the MLS (or in shelter magazines, a genre that modernly obliterates Thoreau’s careful distinction between wants and needs as it celebrates home décor and the very extravagances Thoreau sought to pare away).

While it may not be practical to look to Thoreau for literal real estate advice, reading him provides a great gut check exercise when you are in need of some perspective.  Besides, can’t you just imagine telling your agent you are looking for “Preferably four walls, a roof, and something that forces me to exchange as little of the thing called life for it?”  Challenging yourself to question needs and wants may allow you to approach your real estate search in a way that lets you better see potential in houses others take a pass on:  do you really need a living room, and a family room, and a dining room, or will a living space with an open flow and a shared dining room work for the way you actually live?  How much space do you really need, and are you buying the square footage for living or for storing stuff?

Rereading Thoreau has given me the clarity to see the insanity of our current local market, and to really feel committed that a much smaller place may work for us.

Don’t get me wrong--I don’t think that everyone needs to live in a small cabin in the woods (and for the record, neither did Thoreau who was very clear that his experiment was less about building a sustainable, alternative model of living than in provoking people to examine their economic lives).  I also understand that the frustration of continually having to scale back your dreams out of financial necessity can reach a breaking point when it runs up against that old thing called human dignity.  But the idea of periodically revisiting your wants and needs is a valuable one, and Thoreau provides a great sounding board even if the man did write his book in the 1840s.

Where to Live

"I'm rich according to the number of things I can do without" -Thoreau


Lately, I have been thinking a lot about where and how to live.  When my husband and I first left LA for Ventura, we were shocked by how much further our housing dollar stretched.  For less than we were paying in LA we could rent by the beach, with a huge balcony and a million dollar view of the ocean.  Fast forward several years and real estate prices and rents have both shot up.  Compared to Santa Barbara and LA, the City of Ventura now seems suprisingly unaffordable.  The fundamentals have shifted, and the math doesn't really make sense. 
So I've been thinking a lot about our options: 

• Stay renting where we are

• Move ten minutes outside of town to a more rural area (but increase my commute and necessitate two cars)

• Move to a cheaper, smaller town like Santa Paula

• Buy a 700 Sq Ft home here in Downtown Ventura

I'm seriously considering all of these options.  The one that seems most interesting at the moment is the small 700 sq ft house with no parking and second bedroom small enough it can only fit a twin bed. 

Hear me out:  a small house might actually work for us since it would let us live in a walkable community, which is really important to us. We like being in the downtown area, and a small house means lower expenses, less stuff, and more freedom to live intentionally.  It's also a five minute walk to the beach.

It would likely mean giving the dining room table back to my parents (it was my grandmother's) to store in their garage, but truthfully it is a piece of furniture on which we store mail.  We eat on our ottomon anyway.

The only reason it really makes sense for us is the location, and the fact that if we are honest withourselves about how we use our home, it could be perfect. 

The house continues to be available becuase we may be the only people insane enough to carefully question what we need versus what we want. 

What Not to Wear--Debt

What’s in Vogue—Saving Money

Women’s magazines are a guilty pleasure. Sure, I had the requisite subscription to seventeen as a tween. I read cosmo through college until I confirmed my sneaking suspicion that the magazine simply recycled its stories every two years and I had finished reading any remaining original content.   Still, while I showed up at the hair dressers packing my laptop and my work reading, I never had any intention of cracking open that book.  Instead, I would sit there for a half hour developing my color and my knowledge of trashy celebrity gossip, sex tips, and fashion advice.  And what overpriced fashion advice it is.

Yet for the past twelve months I have been a Vogue reader, courtesy of a miss-mailed subscription that the mailman insists of delivering to the wrong box.  So despite the fact that I haven’t invited any magazine other than Wired into my home for years, I’ve spent more time than I have since high school consuming perfumed ads, counting the number of pages of advertising I must flip through to find a table of contents, and wondering enviously how Plum Sykes manages to make enough money to pay for her expensive boot habit.

As someone who scores most of her finds at the local thrift store (theory camelhair and cashmere turtleneck!) or Nordstrom’s rack (Edlman and DJ Pliner boots!), even the prices in Lucky magazine seem ludicrous.  Vogue is a veritable shit show of how the other half lives.  I can’t really lose myself in the pages of a magazine whose ads remind me of CNN: where products and services I will never purchase (Really, Boeing?) are advertised.

Sometimes as I flip through I fantasize about what I would actually want.  If I made one splurge purchase what would come home with me?   But then that price tag and its requisite dollar signs dangle before me.  Which do you covet more?  Sky high killer heels or those sky high killer bills?   One of them definitely makes my debt look fat. Much like Domino (the best magazine ever) folded because its readers simply copied the magazine’s killer looks for less (which happens when you have a readership of DIY divas), I read Vogue not for product advice but the styling.  And so I tear out the occasional picture or ad, and let it inspire me as I go shopping in my own closet.  Because I can definitely afford that.

On Solitude and Technology

What does modern solitude look like?  In an era of the buzzing cell phone does refraining from picking it up when it rings count?  Or do you need to unplug completely?

Sometimes technology can make our lives simpler: I like my dishwasher.   But how do we avoid being the tools of our tools? 

On Solitude

Being able to spend time alone deep in thought or even doing nothing is important to many philosophical traditions.  Zen monks take vows of silence and Descartes called his philosophical works the meditations. Leo Babauta chronicles a number of great thinkers from Albert Einstein to Mozart who sang the praises of solitude.

So often, solitude is also equated with nature. As a college student enamored of both Thoreau's Walden Pond and my ability to live in a walkable urban setting, I thought a lot about what solitude looks like in a modern world.  All major transcendental traditions encompass the back to nature ethic, but it has always seemed too simplistic to equate rural living with solitude and simplification.  Thoreau never intended his time on Walden Pond as a permanant solution, nor did he believe everyone needed to move to a cabin:  his two years were intended to serve as an experiment in pealing away the needs of life to its essence.  What is simple about having to drive thirty minutes by car, or having to use a septic system?

Can you find urban solitude and quiet if it means being able to use the simplest mode of transportation possible, walking, to secure your needs?  Some people claim they don't mind their commute because that is their alone time to listen to music or just relax.  I never feel alone when I drive: I am thinking about other cars and anticipating what is going on around me.  Walking is the only mode of transportation that let's me really be alone and lost in my thought.

On Walden Pwned

In 1854 Henry David Thoreau published On Walden Pond, a reflection on living deliberatively.  His experiment sought to reveal the essentials of life, and his meditation on this exercise is one of the most provacative books in American history.  It is also one of the only modern treatises on modern industrial worklife, as explored in this phenomenal article, Thoreau's Alternative Economics, by Professor Brian Walker.

Thoreau's voice is perhaps even more relevant today in the face of stagnant wages and a world accelerated by technology, where the trappings and complexities of modern work and home life present increasing challenge to American Society and human happiness.  Thoreau wrote before the automobile, fax machines, smart phones, television, and the internet.  Yet much of what he says about man becoming the tools of his tools can be fruitfully applied to these discussions.

Thoreau never intended his time on Walden Pond as a permanant solution, nor did he believe everyone needed to move to a cabin:  his two years were intended to serve as an experiment in pealing away the needs of life to its essence.  Instead, he hoped to provide a model by which we could seperate wants and needs, and question the role of seemingly ingrained practices and habits in order to live a life of intention.

This blog examines the modern world through the lens of Thoreau's experiment, and seeks to realize his goal of the intentional life.  I use Pwned, a gaming term that is a corruption of the word "owned:" To pwn someone or something is to dominate it.   Walden Pond is an idea more than it is a physical place:  Walden Pwned pays homage to Thoreau's experiment, and refers to one's ability to live an intentional life while navigating the challenges of modern technology and society.  On Walden Pwned is a collection of my writings and reflections on what it means to live the good life.