Existential Crisis in Journal of life stuff

I am having something of an existential crisis. See, in Dec 2019 I was going to move out of MA, move somewhere cheaper to live, and find happiness. Then the work that our good friend Dr. Fauci paid for to get done in Wuhan, known as ‘gain-of-function’ research (AKA: Making bioweapons) leaked out of the lab and became the global pandemic we all know. But Facui was likable when Trump was not, so any investigation into where this global pandemic came from was labeled as ‘racist!’ and that was that. And Fauci? He’s a saint, who lied to an entire nation ‘for their own good’. Bitch, read a goddamn history book and cite me exactly one time, in an authoritarian regime, where the leader lied to his people for their own good? This is Soviet Russia shit. Go re-watch the HBO Chernobyl series. Go read about Chernobyl history. Leaders who lie to their people deserve nothing but condemnation and exile.

So yea, Fauci’s work leaked. The Chinese covered it up, everyone started working from home, and suddenly, the houses that were totally fair and reasonable to pay $250,000 for now sell for between $300,000 and $450,000. For the exact same house that was, last year, literally half the price. I want to scream and shout and pound my fists, but that’s of no use.

What’s worse, HOAs are becoming the norm for millions of home owners, because ‘it’s no longer profitable to build houses without them’. Well, that’s a fucking lie. It’s plenty profitable, they just want control. Credit where it’s due, HOA properties do, almost universally, look nicer than properties without. But one small problem: I don’t want to get a $200 fine for not mowing my grass during the daylight hours of a weekday. I don’t want to ask for permission to install solar panels. I don’t want to get told I can’t dig a big hole in my back yard. I want to own something and actually have that mean a goddamn thing.

I’ve been told a lot of lies during my life. The biggest one is that renting is throwing away your money. I’ve moved so many times that renting has made great financial sense. Right now, to get a mortgage for what I’m paying in rent, the best I could do is a $250,000 house. In 2019 that would have been a nice house, around 2000sqft, maybe a pool, 1/4-1/2 acre yard, and in a neighborhood with no HOA. Now? The only way to get a $250k house is to buy new construction, with an HOA, and that house will be, at most, 1400sqft. And the yard will be the size of a postage stamp.

I don’t want to live in the middle of nowhere. I grew up in a totally normal suburb. There was no HOA. You pay your property taxes and poof that’s it. Keep paying those, and your house is yours. Sure, if you don’t mow your grass for 3 weeks the city might come fine you, but that’s it. Ugly shrubs? No problem. Dead trees? No problem. Haven’t power washed the brick in 30 years? Not an issue! Want to plant a garden of corn in your back yard? Go for it! Want to dig a big hole and experiment with flywheel energy stores? Go for it!

People don’t know what it means to own something because the people with money are returning us to the serfdom of the dark ages. We allowed ourselves to believe in a consumption economy after the great depression. No, wait, you might have missed what I just said. Let me back up.

The great depression. What caused it? Buying stocks on credit without having the money to cover those debts if they got called. Basically, buying stocks on margin and being over-leveraged. So the stock market crashed because there was a loss of faith in this system. The country stayed in a depression for decades after this because all but the uber rich had lost almost everything. The only people who did ok were the people who actually owned something. Land. But not land for a house, land they could lease out and make money with. If you just own land, you have a debt, not a source of income. If you own land that someone else NEEDS to use, then you can get someone else to pay your property tax for you AND charge them a fee for the privilege! :galaxybrain.jpg:
One of the papers that got published during this time said that in order to prevent another economic collapse, we needed to transition to a consumption based economy, where the primary driver of the economy was continuous production and consumption. Sound familiar? New car models every year, new cell phones every year, yearly upgrade cycles for everything.

That’s untenable. That’s not how the world works. And it’s starting to bite us in the ass. Who wins when everything is consumed? The producers? You’d think so, and if that was the case, China would win. While it looks like China is winning…at what cost?

No, the people who win are the people who own things other people need to survive. People who own land for farming, people who own water for drinking. Bill Gates owns more farmland than anyone else. And despite his ‘philanthropy’, he’s actually more wealthy now than when he started ‘giving away his money’. Wasn’t his stated plan to give away all his money to charity work? Oh, well, that’s going well for him I guess! Fucking lies!

Look, I have no problem with people being wealthy. There’s a HUGE gulf between someone who is working a minimum wage job trying to scrape by on $18,500 a year, and someone who lives in a $1 million home and has 6 luxury cars (roughly $5-10 million in overall assets). But what I’m saying is that the ULTRA achievers, the Bill Gates, Bezos, Musks, Rothschilds, Buffetts, etc of the world need to have this $10 million mark as the upper bound of how far they can go. Why? Because the delta between the lowest person and the highest needs to have a cap at some point. When you can have $10 million and no more, it ensures everyone can get a slice of the pie, and no small number of fatasses can gobble everything up.

History is rife with stories and examples of extreme greed destroying people. But we don’t read history books anymore. I have so much knowledge and so much anger, but I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to fix the problem. I don’t know how to change a culture. I don’t know how to defeat a machine that is literally designed to sell lies as truth.

All I want is to buy a home and own something. To live near people, but have them be unable to tell me what I can and cannot do on my little piece of the pie. I’m not an asshole. I’m not out to make them miserable. I just want freedom. I want control over something reasonable.

But I can’t have that because of such extreme levels of greed.

What kills me is that since age 15 I had setup my life to provide for a wife and family. But the wife and family never came because I never learned how to be likable. Fine, at least I can own a home. Only to learn that you never own the home, you always rent it from the government (property taxes). And then, the final insult…now, you can’t even do that. You have to rent the home from the government and your neighbors. I just want to go cry in a corner and give up. Is there a single fucking thing I learned as a child that is true? The answer is, of course, yes. But not about the high level strategies for going through life.

If I could just go back to Nov 1, 2016 I could fix so many things in my life. I didn’t listen to the voice inside that said “don’t renew that lease” and…so much bullshit happened because of it. Fucking hell.