A mortgage or your life’s work

I think a mortgage is anti-life. It’s become so commonplace and so necessary in this distorted new world, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s fundamentally anti-freedom in my book.

I prefer something cleaner: living in short-term stays across the world while honing talents and perception, and then buying (in cash) in a nice spot while retaining openness to serendipity.

As for the home … transform it into an integrated world that kindles your nature, and turn every day into a series of fun and immersive experiments ... where ... you continue building out your life’s work, following your heart.

The Two Games

Making money is easy, but making money while having fun is the code to be cracked.

A mortgage makes it considerably more difficult to crack this code.

By taking on a mortgage, one is guaranteed to have relatively large recurring costs that must paid And because of this obligation .. he or she would then required to play the Two Games.

The first game is the steady income game: get some regular cash coming in to pay the mortgage, because those bills are not stopping.

The second game is the stock market game. Those mortgage interest payments will, over the years/decades, have you paying way more than the actual value of your home.

So, do you have a business that can make use of your spare cash and produce an outsized return? If not, then the public markets (stocks/gold/crypto) it is; ride those drawdowns, and hope for the best.

Now there are some, though rare, who take on a mortgage and play these Two Games with flair. They either own a positive cashflow business, work a job they truly enjoy, and/or are master capital allocators. You may be one of those people, and if so, I take it that a mortgage has turned out to be harmless for you.

And in such a case, you may have cracked the code.

But a mortgage, by its very linear and leveraged nature, effectively forces the vast majority of people to play the Two Games in the most spirit-crushing ways possible.

The dead zone

Renting and rent seeking ... both ... are fundamentally false artifices. Nature isn't kind to either of them.

Renting, to me, is a dead zone. I am building nothing permanent, but I am also not free to move. I'm tethered to a lease, a city, a landlord. In fact, I think moving to a big/expensive city solely for the job market in which I am a blank-face applicant is a type of sophisticated poverty.

But maybe you are working for a company that truly values you, your dream job, and you are having the time of your life. Or maybe you are a master of leverage/investing. In that case ... you are the exception.

The tides of financialization

I always knew that if I can harness the internet and build via a laptop, I can live anywhere. And “anywhere” includes places where houses cost what they used to cost. Smaller towns, other countries, places not yet fully colonized by financialization.

Over the past several decades, housing became an “asset class”. Mortgage-backed securities, investment portfolios, speculative capital flows … the whole nine yards. This is financialization ... the financial motives, markets, and institutions gain increasing influence over every aspect of life.

Things that were once done have now become ... perpetually negotiated and managed. The consequence of this is that ordinary people get conscripted into playing the Two Games in a brutally painful way: doing unloved jobs and taking financial advise.

Your average Joe is forced to make a capital allocator out of himself just to tread water on his enormous interest payments … as if managing leverage and calculating whether to lock in a mortgage at 4% and invest the difference at 5% were his true calling.

Riddled with middlemen

Debt has to be the fakest thing we've created as a species. If animals and plants have managed to avoid it ... so can we. There are no abstractions in nature. The bee doesn’t have a concept of pollination. It drinks nectar, and pollination happens as a byproduct. The system is integrated at the level of direct action.

I like to say … the closer to nature, the fewer the problems.

Put differently, the further from nature ... the greater the abstraction.

A woman who lives close to the land ... plants, she harvests, she eats. She builds a shelter to live in. Her actions are connected directly to her outcomes, that is to say, there is nothing man-made in her way.

Suddenly, let the population to grow rapidly. Direct relationships become a rare commodity. But we don't care. Let's create abstractions to “manage” this: money abstracts value, contracts abstract trust, institutions abstract coordination, markets abstract exchange.

A village of 150 doesn’t need a banking system. A city of 10 million does, apparently (I still don’t buy it, but that’s for another time). The abstraction may start off innocent ... but over time ... it stops serving reality and starts serving itself.

Production started concentrating in factories, factories needed workers nearby, workers flooded into cities. Land near economic centres became scarce. Scarcity + financialization, among other things, create prices that bear no relationship to the actual utility of dwelling.

Industrial logic still largely remains to this day, and it treats humans as interchangeable units. You go where the jobs are. Sophisticated poverty.

This is the exact opposite of the life I want to live.

The false trade-offs between work and play, health and pleasure, security and freedom … these are all symptoms of living in the abstraction layer. A house owned outright is real ... but with a mortgage ... it’s riddled with middlemen.

The Move

To make a living from anywhere ... doing what you were made to do, fulfilling your destiny … this is the Move of every era—past, present, and future.

The kind of work with asymmetric returns that might ... fruit nothing for months or years. And then fruit enormously. The work that requires full dedication, deep focus, and the freedom to take risks because one's downside is covered. To become available to life, to pour everything into the unpredictable, creative, genuinely valuable work … work that often feels like play …. this is my standard.

Modern society has, in fact, not made this standard harder to attain, despite what people say. I always knew it's been there for the taking ... provided I move with a high level of clarity about myself and the mechanics of reality, both.