On My Mind This Week (OMMTW)
~ New Year Edition: Week 1, January 2023 ~
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Giving your time away (see #4) can make you feel gratified. Maybe it will make you appreciate your discretionary time even more.
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Hard facts on homeownership from The Atlantic (paywall).
A reminder that, in many ways, homeownership is too often a liability and not an asset.
“According to a report by an economist at the National Association of Realtors looking at the housing market from 2011 to 2021, however, price appreciation accounts for roughly 86 percent of the wealth associated with owning a home. That means almost all of the gains come not from paying down a mortgage (money that you literally put into the home) but from rising price tags outside of any individual homeowner’s control.”
“This is a key, uncomfortable point: Home values, which purportedly built the middle class, are predicated not on sweat equity or hard work but on luck.”
“At the core of American housing policy is a secret hiding in plain sight: Homeownership works for some because it cannot work for all. If we want to make housing affordable for everyone, then it needs to be cheap and widely available. And if we want that housing to act as a wealth-building vehicle, home values have to increase significantly over time. How do we ensure that housing is both appreciating in value for homeowners but cheap enough for all would-be homeowners to buy in? We can’t.”
“Racial disparities in housing are well-known but worth stressing. In 2018, the Brookings Institute researchers Andre M. Perry, Jonathan Rothwell, and David Harshbarger compared homes in majority-Black neighborhoods with communities that have very few or no Black residents and found that even when controlling for “similar amenities” (school quality, access to businesses, crime), homes in majority-Black neighborhoods are worth 23 percent less, roughly $48,000 a home on average and $156 billion in cumulative losses.”
“Even when Black Americans do build wealth through homeownership, downturns in the economy wipe them out. According to the Economic Policy Institute, from 2005 to 2009, a time period covering the foreclosure crisis, Black households saw their median net worth fall by 53 percent, while white households saw just a 17 percent decline. And on the flip side, when the housing market is doing well, Black households tend to benefit less than white ones.”
“In 2018, writing for City Observatory, the author and housing expert Daniel Kay Hertz aptly described homeownership as a Ponzi scheme: “It is, in other words, a massive up-front transfer of wealth from younger people to older people, on the implicit promise that when those young people become old, there will be new young people willing to give them even more money. And of course, as prices rise, the only young people able to buy into this ponzi scheme are quite well-to-do themselves.””
“Fundamentally, the U.S. needs to shift away from understanding housing as an investment and toward treating it as consumption.”
The Outshot:
“Policy makers should completely abandon trying to preserve or improve property values and instead make their focus a housing market abundant with cheap and diverse housing types able to satisfy the needs of people at every income level and stage of life.”
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Clickbait:
In case you want to reminisce about popular memes of the 2022…
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Brief discussion involving a current theory of anxiety I’m stumbling across more and more (see: what’s talked about regarding childhood experiences and physiology) and a few ways to calm anxiety when your nervous system gets pushed into overdrive.
I’ve been following The Minimalists since the early days. If you like aspects of what you saw here, I recommend checking out their first documentary Minimalism. The follow-up on Netflix is good, too. Provides context for how they arrived at their positions. They have a podcast, also, though I can’t say I’ve listened to many of the episodes. I sometimes read the episodes notes via email newsletter where they share a few pull quotes and link to texts referenced in the episode.
Slight Disclaimer: I believe it’s good to get your ideas from a wide array of sources so I only take certain aspects of what The Minimalists share, in terms of values, to heart.
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[on] Mass Extinctions:
“The number of vertebrates that have gone extinct over the last 100 years should have taken 800 - 10,000 years.”
Visual aids included.
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> Not Financial Advice <
Quite a few companies that have good records are down substantially over the past year. When the next bull market returns, top companies will likely be among those that bounce back substantially.
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Another week and I’m still making time to reflect on ideas about the meanings of rituals and traditions and how they help us manage stress, anxiety, as well as grief and loss.
Shout-out to Hidden Brain & LifeKit for consistently providing thoughtful listens.
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“Real wisdom, does not merely cause us to know: it makes us “be” in a different way.”
- Pierre Hadot
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Innovation that seems… kinda obviously worth a shot? But what do I know… I not a rocket, er, plane scientist.
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Lotta books, articles, more articles, podcast interviews on the subject of psychedelics and, throwbacks to the idea of altered perceptions as a gateway into consciousness (which remains “the hard problem”). The current iterations of studies are looking increasingly promising. Not going to tell your average person to start running to try therapies that are still being honed. If a person is in crisis, well, there’s a reason people try experimental medications, elect for surgeries with low percentage success rates, and throw an arsenal of tools at problems when an NOS diagnosis is causing frustration, pain, and life quality limitations.
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Every layperson sentence begins: As Heidegger says…
Social media is crushing our opportunity for boredom and that is bad. Very bad.
We definitely love our bread and entertainment.
Certain communities never see to tire of the “Are you not entertained?” meme.
It’s annoying and boring to reference Nirvana’s ‘Smells like teen spirit’. But hey, we’re pro-boredom right here.
As Cobain said in a Rolling Stone interview (apparently), the lyrics “here we are now, entertain us”:
“That came from something I used to say every time I used to walk into a party to break the ice. A lot of times, when you’re standing around with people in a room, it’s really boring and uncomfortable. So it was “Well, here we are, entertain us. You invited us here.”
Good point, Kurt.
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When we’re not at a social event, sitting at home, being bored, we turn to the bright lights of social media. The endless scroll. The instant gratification of like like liking. Of heart heart hearting. We push the button and the slot machine spins.
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This is me taking a hard pass on advocating for so-called ‘Cluttercore’. Yeesh.
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I thought this article about The Cheesecake Factory was just going to be pure clickbait. Turns out, and I shouldn’t be surprised because Vox makes exceptionally good content, that it was a thoroughly enjoyable read.
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“I’m really anxious about sitting still right now. I’m sad and lonely, and I don’t want to think about it.”
Oof. Doesn’t this sound all too familiar? Read more.
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The state of old school camera sales after the digital cameras and smartphones took over.
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This is great. Looks like Aubrey Hirsch is going to have a terrific Substack.
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An ongoing “conspiracy” (ok, debate I suppose) about whether or not grapefruit is good for you or dangerous because it can have medication interactions. (note: The Atlantic, behind a paywall)
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Some goofiness from Cracked which tbh I did not know still existed in 2022.
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Jabs at terrible fashion trends.
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Suspiciously intriguing TikTok cleaning hacks.
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The key was to survive on “Other Condiments”…
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What interesting factoids have you come across recently?
What has been On *Your* Mind?
Please share your thoughts & reflections.