by doesntgolf

If there’s a lesson to be learned from my decade and a half of treading water, it’s to resist the pull of material things. I don’t mean that we should all renounce our possessions and become ascetics—I like smartphones and cool sneakers and going to the movies. I mean that it’s worth questioning our assumptions about what it means to be grown up, and about how we measure success. In the nearly two decades since I left home, I have lived in $400 ghetto apartments and a $325K three-bedroom house in the suburbs, and I am certain that the house and the suburbs made me no happier than the apartments and the city. I have driven a fresh-off-the-assembly-line Scion and an aged truck with no radio, no power steering, and no automatic anything, and the new car made me no happier than the old (except for the power steering; parallel parking without power steering is hard work). I’ve been lucky to find work I loved during most of my adult life, and I’m lucky to have two wonderful, healthy children. Those things have consistently made me happy, and I realize now, I could have had them without a lot of the debt and stress and suburban ennui.