Future Here Now: Owning = Risk
The Big Idea
This week, we’re looking at one of those new realities: in the Fusion Era (particularly the transition to that Fusion Era) that seems simple, but on closer look can get pretty uncomfortable:
Owning things may expose us to more risk that it’s worth.
If you want to maintain the ability to move where the jobs or quality of life are, or avoid getting burned by volatile markets, or simply deal with the fact that families are smaller and don’t live in one place, then the traditional encumbrances of houses and cars and stuff might act more like fetters than like assets.
That changes not only what kind of residence we seek, but our whole relationship to materials goods, including such age-old markers of adulthood as owning a home. And what does that mean for the enormous amount of houses, and furniture, and stuff, that we’ve accumulated over the Industrial Era?
What does capitalism look like in a post-stuff era?
Man, I want out of this house.
After 20+ years, two kids and a steady accumulation of books/office equipment/my husband’s hobbies/ things-that-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time-but-that-ended-15-minutes-later, there is Just.Too.Much.Stuff.
This isn’t a new problem - believe me, I cleaned out my mother’s house, and she was a proper Depression Baby packrat.
But the world in which my accumulating has happened has changed a lot since she formed her habits. In her generation (she would have been 90 this year), you stayed in the same house, in the same town, with the same people, for most of your adult life. If you moved in your golden years, it was as likely to be because you needed care as because you wanted a new place or a new environment. Maybe more than as likely.
The problems of Stuff is not just caused by having the blessing of more income and more savings than my parents did. It has everything to do with this moment of era transition, of the dawn of a Fusion Era that will differ profoundly from what most of us came up at least partly within.
In this emerging era, defined by VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) developments, and radical transformation of who and how we learn from and connect with, not to mention the giant climate and economic question marks we’re living under, being tied to a place, or to complex things we have to take care of, can feel less like an anchor, and more like a millstone. Moving to a place with better jobs, or more favorable political environment, or less flooding or wildfires, becomes much harder when we have Stuff to deal with. Especially immobile stuff.
We have treated home ownership as the marker of adulthood for a long time, as an aspiration, an indication that We’ve Made It. And while there have always been people who have opted out of that life choice, our public policy and our economic systems have long treated them as the exceptions to the rule.
But it looks like that rule is dying - in part because of the high housing costs so many communities are experiencing right now, to be sure. But also because owning, more that in a very long time, equals risk.
Risk, fundamentally, that I might not be able to Get Out.
If that is the case, how does that change us — not only land use and zoning, but wealth generation? Community identity and social capital? Governance? Ability to connect with and work with people who comes from different places, have different ideas and practices?