Peer Pressure

There is an article in the Times today about men who wish they had not bought suburban houses. Some wish they were back in the urban bustle, some hate the maintenance chores, and one regrets having so much space:

Looking back, Mr. Greenburg questions why he thought he would want to own such a spacious, high-maintenance home. He grew up with five siblings and enjoyed the noise and hubbub. Yet the home he bought feels silent — so much so that he sometimes doles out rooms to luckless acquaintances who need a place to crash.

Some have sold out and moved back to urban apartments, but others can't because their mortgages are under water.

There is a broader point here beyond whining men who don't know what they want. Every society holds out a model of what it means to live a normal adult life, and most people feel pressure to do what everyone else is doing. Part of "the American dream" is to own a big, pretty house. So people buy the biggest, prettiest house they can afford, in the "nicest" neighborhood. I have always suspected, and the Times story confirms, that for a lot of people this is a mistake. For someone like me who loves to garden, a yard is something of a necessity, but for most people it is not and for many it becomes nothing but a distracting burden. Household maintenance is another tedious burden, or else an unending financial drain.

The path our society lays out for the middle class -- college, career, marriage, house, children, dog -- works for many but not for all, and I think it is sad that so many fall into it without wanting it. All the new happiness research makes plain that happiness has very little to do with getting things or achieving things. (Owning a big house does nothing to make people happy.) Happiness comes from making connections with other people, doing things you love, and finding some sort of meaning and purpose. So the men whining to the Times about what a drag their house is are speaking out against a model of life that is false for them.

Of course, these men were all free to live in some other way, and some of them have gone back to urban apartments. My idealistic voice says the answer is to encourage people to live how they want, expectations be damned. But of course this only adds to the myriad other anxieties faced by young adults in our world. Making your own path is hard; even choosing among two or three competing paths can be a misery of stress, compared to having your course through life nicely laid out for you by your society. And the absence of expectations about life's course makes it even harder to form a strong marriage, which is hard enough even when you both accept the same model of the lives you expect to lead. How are 25-year-olds supposed to sort all this out?

As best they can, I suppose.