Me Want More Square Footage!

We live in a basement suite, my guy and I. At five foot two, he isn’t bothered by the low ceiling, while I am mercifully developing calluses on my forehead from collisions with door frames and low-hanging lights. Now that we’ve squeezed the futon into the storage nook, it’s almost like having a bedroom. If we keep the floor clear of books (mine), hiking gear (ours), and dirty laundry (his), we cope just fine.

Still, we suspect we could be happier. In fact, we’re betting on it. Along with our friend Keri, we’re shovelling a quarter of a million dollars into the renovation of an old house a few blocks away. By the time you read this, we should be enjoying 2,600 square feet of floor space, nine-foot ceilings, reconditioned fir floors, and not one but two living rooms.

Like most people, we’re guided by the instinctive sense that a bigger nest is a happier nest. Though we know maxing out our ecological footprint might involve picking up some bad carbon karma, we feel somewhere deep in our guts that we need this house in order to be happy.

Unfortunately, it has recently been revealed that our guts may be fooling us. The psychological matrix that fuels our desire for more square footage also ensures that we will be thoroughly unsatisfied once we settle into our new place. This bad news comes from a growing army of economists, psychologists, and evolutionary biologists obsessed with happiness. The field offers plenty of insight into how our cities and our emotional lives shape each other, as well as a rudimentary map of the minefield laid around the walls of the happy house.

To my chagrin, I didn’t discover any of this until I had already signed my first mortgage.

My education began with an obscure treatise written by a pair of University of Chicago economists. Luis Rayo and his Nobel Prize–winning colleague, Gary S. Becker, poured evolutionary theory into an algorithm that could be used to prove, among other things, that the big-home urge is woven right into our genes, a hand-me-down from our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

Imagine the caveman on a good day: He and his pals have managed to whack a deer and drag its bloodied carcass back to the clan. He feels terrific. Now he’s faced with a couple of options. He can sit around and bask in his success, or, compelled by the idea of what he might catch next, he can head out on the hunt once again. The hunter-gatherer who is oriented to dissatisfaction, who compulsively looks ahead in order to kill more game than he did yesterday, or more than the Joneses in the cave next door caught today, is more likely to pass on his genes.

This is part of the reason we’ve come to assess material success in relative terms. Like eyes, which perceive colour and luminosity relative to surrounding objects, the brain constantly adjusts its idea of what it needs to be happy. We compare what we have now to what other people have, and what we might possibly get next, and then we recalibrate our measure of happiness. In Rayo and Becker’s model, happiness is less an ideal state than a tool our genes use to get us working harder and grasping for more stuff, whether we enjoy the struggle or not.

This shifting happiness function served our ancestors well. But it has been less useful in the age of affluence. Most of us don’t need to worry about freezing or starving to death. Yet our happiness barometer continues to compare our living rooms and countertops and backyard barbecues with a constantly modified ideal. “We are victims of that evolutionary hunting strategy,” Rayo explained when I called him to discuss my real estate challenge. “There’s a difference between what’s natural and what’s good.”

This conundrum is particularly urgent in Vancouver, the country’s most expensive real estate market. The average price of a detached house on the city’s affluent west side has hit $726,000. People seeking big homes have to chase that dream right out to the edge of suburbia. But life in the sprawlscape punishes them in ways that rarely make it into the home-buying calculus.