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Me Want More Square Footage!

Why following the urge to buy big might not make you happy

by Charles Montgomery
Homes | From the January/February 2008 issue of The Walrus

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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.

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3 comment(s)

MikeDecember 14, 2007 12:42 EST
Hello, interesting article. Your big house will not make you any happier than you are already.
My wife and I have been living happily in less than 500sqft condo for more than 2 years. Inner city Calgary

Now we are buying a house...600sqft! Moving up in the world.
Less IS more. Less is also much easier to clean and pay for! Less is also MUCH easier to sell when the time comes.


ShariDecember 14, 2007 20:30 EST
As someone who used to work coordinating home sharers with tenants, I'm concerned that the writer may be idealizing a future with strangers living in those rooms. There are a great many problems that arise when tenants fail to respect the boundaries the renter imposes on them and when the renter makes those boundaries unfairly restrictive. The more intertwined the renters and tenants are (e.g., sharing meals), the worse it can be. When you start running out of milk daily or having to wash other people's dishes or finding their personal items cluttering shared spaces, you get a hint of conflict to come. When your washing machine is broken or the plumbing gets backed up and you find that all the friendliness in the world won't translate into consideration and respect for your property, you'll be living in the real world of home sharing.


Paul KishimotoJanuary 14, 2008 22:26 EST
This article resonated very strongly with me and brought to mind John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society and Bernard Wright's A Short History of Progress.

Mr. Montgomery seems to appreciate Mr. Wright's observation that we are "twenty-first century software running on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago." Contrary to Mr. Morris' fourth point, there is no yearning for a return to man's behaviour in a state of nature, but instead a recognition that our biological imperatives are incompatible with the conditions of modern society.

The author also seems to appreciate Galbraith's key point that the situation of the affluent society is not that of the pre-industrial society in which it was necessary to reward the competitive instinct without question. Galbraith's broad economic conclusion was that mere growth as a measure of progress is naive; more specifically there is no longer any utility in converting accrued wealth to more and larger private cars, homes and possessions.

Mr. Montgomery is in in no way opposed to living within whichever means we may have. He merely—and correctly, in my opinion—observes that the traditional ways in which people enjoyed their salaries are yielding rapidly diminishing in today's typical large Western city. There are more rewarding things to do with one's money than compete with the Joneses.


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