I recently saw a quote online that said: The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear. As always, the concept started tumbling around in my head. As I started to explore its meaning, the first thing that came to my mind is my attitude toward home ownership and how the system works. For me, my house and financial obligations keep me constantly compliant to the system through fear.
What could I possibly be in fear of as a home owner? How about the fear of having someone else own the roof over my head for more than a third of my life. Or the fear of what might happen if I lost my job and started missing payments. Maybe I fear unstable housing markets and high real estate prices that were artificially driven up by the wealthy using houses as trading stocks. Or perhaps I fear further economic downturn devaluing my property even more, making every payment made hard-earned money lost to the ether.
There are a lot of things to fear as a home owner and as a homeowner with a mortgage, fear is the driving force behind every day’s actions. I’m not saying that we should have little or nothing to motivate us to contribute to a system; I’m saying that the system of home ownership in this country has fallen into a state of exorbitant expense that keeps anyone under the age of 60 and without exorbitant income or wealth in a constant state of fear. Fear is the motivator when you owe a life debt to a mortgage company.
You can choose not to buy the next iPad and you’ll be fine. You can likely make due if you don’t buy a new car every 2-5 years. But with shelter as one of the fundamental necessities of survival as a modern human, it seems odd that we have allowed shelter and the way we purchase shelter to be dominated and dictated by wealthy banks and a system that now has the average American working to pay these exorbitant bills with fear as our motivator.
I realized that fear was the motivator when I thought about why I haven’t changed jobs in 8 years: I fear the instability it could bring to my sensitive economic system. I fear the prospect of losing my house over the possibility of unemployment. It has caused me to spend my irreplaceable 20′s having to play the safe card with every decision and take no risk for the potential to better myself, because the price of failing would be far too costly.
So many people live with these thoughts on a daily basis, but it seems that few recognize what it is at its core — a subconscious compliance to a system based on fear as a motivator. The fear in the system is a function of debt. When someone else owns the roof over your head, you have to work and work and work to pay off the debt. And it’s not that working for something is a bad thing, it’s that you’re likely paying a 200% or more markup on your debt (e.g., mortgage interest), making the loan almost impossible to pay off for the average earner. I don’t find that to be an equitable or reasonable way to live.
