Back in 8th and 9th grade, I wanted to be an architect. I wanted to be an architect because I wanted to design and build houses. The irony! There had been some times as a kid when my parents were looking for another house, so our family would visit a few houses here and there and it was always so much fun imaging what could be done with the spaces, which room would be used for what. The possibilities were endless. I was also fascinated by large and beautiful houses, and I remember a few on hilltops in Manitou Springs that really captured my imagination. I even liked the big box houses across a main street near where we lived because I imagined using some of the rooms for Lego cities.
These days, of course, my attitude toward large houses is very different. Houses come with a lot of responsibility, and the larger the house, the greater the responsibility. It may seem magical as a kid, but as an adult, there’s nothing magical about spending thousands of dollars just to keep things up and running.
I just watched an urban exploring video that featured a “time capsule” 1980s mansion. It was very clean and yes, very 80s. It reminded me of the strong impression I had of the 80s back in the 90s. The house was huge and lavish and kinda cool, but I guess there had been some suspicions of illegality with the original owner’s “line of business”, and somebody had been partially maintaining the property since.
Big, expensive, stylish. Like in those coffee table books of hyper-stylized, modern houses. I always felt a sense of power from those, like, wouldn’t it be cool to have the sort of money to craft your life space in such and such a way? Wouldn’t life be richer and more vibrant? Of course, whole economies have been spent just updating interiors, which always change. As Thoreau might say, decrying the ways of the old while slavishly worshiping the new, oblivious to how to the new will become the old, for the cycle to repeat itself and the landfills to grow a few meters.
I’m reminded of a mansion owned by someone at a previous church. The owner had sold his business for $60 million, tithed 10%, and bought the mansion as a fixer-upper. It was lavish beyond anything I’d ever stepped inside before, but I guess when you have $54 million to play with, you can spare a few million for a house like that. Still, I can’t imaging the upkeep. It WAS cool, though.
I also think of how people tend to marry within their “class”. You grow up with certain expectations and carry those forward in life. A good friend of mine has been in a long term relationship with a woman who grew up wealthy. He could have lived by much simpler means, but she was the influence that led them to buy a larger house than he really cared for. I also knew a girl from one of my churches who grew up in a very wealthy family, a very large house, whose mom, despite their whole family being Christians, thought life was all about shopping until her husband, my friend’s dad, was laid off in the wake of the recession. Despite this, and unsurprisingly, my friend married a guy with a promising business career, and no doubt the money to afford that lifestyle. Even a girl I really liked in high school went into a lucrative field and married a guy who did the same, and they bought a nice big house just like the one she grew up in.
Turns out religion has less influence on some of your values than perhaps your upbringing does. I guess we all just develop this idea of what “proper living” is and rarely stray from this.
…and for some reason, one of the very first things people do when they have money is buy rather large houses. I never understood that. It’s like buying a BMW just because you’re making $60k/year. Just because you can afford it (sort of), doesn’t mean you should.
Or it’s like…each additional room in a house, so I’ve read, is an extra $70k. People often want an extra room as a guest bedroom, but then they only use that guest bedroom once or twice a year. You could just as easily spend a few thousand dollars each year to put family/friends up in a nice hotel. It would take 35 years (in theory) to make up the difference this way. Not that guest bedrooms don’t have their convenience, it’s just they rarely see any use, and I think that often gets overlooked.
But it’s no disrespect to the beauty of the houses, I should mention that. I would only ask if it’s worth 30 years of your life, not one of which is guaranteed you. You have to pick and chose your dreams wisely.