This post has been burning a hole in my drafts since October 2019. It is a meandering exploration of thought on current situation and the possible responses to it. I’ve updated it to include references to the current pandemic, along with some framing. I’m not sure I currently agree with everything I wrote in 2019, but it is roughly on the right track.
(edit July 2021: this post was taken down and edited again.)
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A few people I know have sought alternative living arrangements in the California Bay Area, due to a series of observations (keyword “rent”) they made on the ethics of living in such a high-cost region. I found these observations compelling, and wanted to figure out what I should do about these observations, myself.
The Observations:
- a majority of the money one makes ends up going to the state via landlords, in addition to the taxes you pay on your income, yourself. (Landlords pay taxes on income from rental properties.)
- it’s politically difficult to build new housing in the Bay, which increases rent, due to the high demand.
- most people are underestimating the amount of money which goes to the state at every stage in the supply chain, meaning they underestimate how much every purchase is taxed.
- the state funds a number of stomach-turning endeavours, like bombing villages in middle-eastern countries, and subsidizing the dairy industry.
- therefore, through our purchases and through renting, we fund the bombing of villages in middle eastern countries, as well as other atrocities.
- the cost of rent, food, etc. in the Bay are exceptionally high, so more money ends up going to those actors.
- moving there encourages others to do the same, worsening the problem.
Aside from those observations, there’s been growing concern over the last fifty years that we are approaching the limit to our growth on this planet. Cities and towns may have difficulty down the road paying back the loans they took out to pay for the upkeep of those roads and septic systems. Our economy is designed for continual growth, but growth isn’t a guarantee, nor is it necessarily something we should aim for, given that this growth is dependent on the slaughter of billions, slave labour, and the destruction of our ecosystem.
Cities and towns are all banking on that growth. But if it doesn’t come through, what happens to the roads? What if the water main gets a leak, or high levels of heavy minerals? I’m not eager for my continued livelihood to be placed at the mercy of dysfunctional bureaucrats; I’d prefer a place with a more pioneering spirit.
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For every problem, there’s an OODA loop, and in every OODA loop, the most important step is the second one: orientation. One takes their new information, and synthesizes it with their existing models of the world. This creates context for any decision to exist inside. A sentence alone carries little meaning. A sentence within a paragraph is grounded; it has roots.
Many people blind themselves to context, possibly because they would feel their decisions are unethical, given context. The realization that we live in a world surrounded by people willing to blithely go on as usual every day, even while children are being used to mine lithium for your phone is almost incomprehensible. It violates our sense of self. And since ignoring the ever-increasing pile of skulls we’re standing on personally benefits us, there’s little incentive to notice the skulls. Few are willing to look at their base motives, so the social dynamic being presented here is unsurprisingly endemic among those attached to having the social identity of “a good person.”
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Ziz & Gwen’s observations made sense, given what I already knew, but I found the housing alternative they presented to be unsuitable for me at the time, though I investigated the option (edit: I’ve since changed my mind and think a slackmobile is doable). In particular, it was suggested to me that I might buy and live in a van in the Bay area.
Living in an RV isn’t outside the overton window in a region so desperate for housing. I’ve heard of Google employees doing it, too. But in 2019, I didn’t even drive, and the idea of piloting something as large as a van on those busy streets made my hands sweat. (Moreover I was struggling with depression, and lacked the energy or will to essentially design an entire house from scratch, even if it is a van-sized house.) Their models contains more factors than merely considering how to reduce the amount of money going to fund things like bombings, which may be why their solution space is so constrained. In particular, they mentioned being concerned with civilizational decay, the rise of fascism, and speak to the need for people to be mobile in the face of those risks. They also (I assume) desire access to the Bay area network. Ostensibly, if a group were living in vans, it may be possible to get that group to all move at once to a better location, making the activation energy lower for such a move.
As it stands, I don’t recommend living in the Bay.
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Culture is the water we swim in, and culture is the place I’ll begin with regards to the Bay. A lot of people I talk to want to move there, and aside from mentioning the cost disease, taxation, and beautiful weather, I always end up circling back to the culture. I’ve observed the Bay area, part of Europe, and the East Coast of the United States. The differences in mannerisms and culture between these places is jarring, and I’ve found that different cultures have an out-sized impact on a person’s well-being. Think back to the last time you were on a crowded street, and imagine the faces of the passersby. How do they seem to you? How’s the cashier? Where do people work? What’s the culture? Does it mesh well with how you engage with the world?
For myself, the Bay culture did provide me a substrate on which to meet like-minded people. I made friends I could talk to about metaphysics and other ideas there, something I previously found to be difficult. However, the culture fit was bad. I grew up in a culture vaguely reminiscent of borderer culture: loud, blunt, and rough-and-tumble. When I first started going to social events in the Bay, I became quickly discouraged, because every time I opened my mouth, someone would give me a funny look. I’d quickly identified it as a cultural mis-match and adapted, but it felt stifling.
I may be biased, but I also think the indirect nature of communication style in the Bay is unhealthy. Roommates don’t want to speak to one another, not even to coordinate on simple things like who gets to take out the trash. Everything is said through subtle implication and the use of positive & negative valence.
Many people there work in the tech sector, which means money, but most of that money goes to the aforementioned landlords. You can make a lot of money on paper, and still struggle. There are barely any kids on the sidewalk. Few people look content. There are a few co-ops, but you can’t walk a block without seeing large chain store (Peet’s coffee, Starbucks, Lucky, McDonalds, etc.) The people working there are miserable. Their jobs are miserable. They walk down the street in a rush, head down, faces twisted in pained grimaces. No one wants to make eye contact.
Personally, I spent two years living and visiting among the different shared housing arrangements in the bay, and found them to be worryingly bad, outside of a couple outliers. In one, there was a black mold issue in the bathroom that the 6 or 8 people living there were unable to fix, because they were all too depressed. Out of all those people only two or three were working and paying rent. The rest were too sick. I’d hazard a guess that the mold and piled up bags of trash weren’t helping.
If this were the first house like that I’d seen out there, I’d dismiss it, but practically every home I visited was more of the same: cramped quarters, multiple people to a room, kitchens covered in trash (far worse than anything I’d seen in any frat house,) with a few people paying rent, but the majority too sick to regularly manage it. The situation is enough of a pressure cooker that it encourages petty abuse and worrying power dynamics, like, you know, how everyone knows a friend in tech who’s supporting 2–5 young queers who are too poor and sick to make rent.
I’ve watched peoples’ mental health decline, first slowly, and then all in a rush. People are burning through their life’s savings for “the opportunity,” but inevitably end up running out of money and either going back home, or living off of a friend’s charity. Then the friendship falls through, and they’re in a worse position, in progressively shittier housing, until they’re on the streets or living out of their car. If they have a car.
When queers with PTSD from living with abusive families and cultures move to the Bay, they’re hoping to find a supportive and nurturing environment so they can heal. They don’t get that, there. There’s no real support because the people they’re depending on for help are just as fucked up as they are. And they don’t realize there’s anything wrong with this, because it’s better than the place they left behind.
On the discords, tech bros are trying to figure out the right microdose of LSD to make them more productive at work. They’re switching between modafinil, nicotine, adderall, and ritalin just to get through the week. And again, I’d dismiss it as a couple outliers, except almost everyone I knew working at a tech job was doing this. It’s like we’re reliving the fucking Wolf of Wall Street. They think that if they find just the right set of meds, they’ll be able to ascend to the ranks of the wealthy. Be “the next Elon Musk.” They’re fooling themselves. That’s not how you “become Elon Musk,” that’s how you end up addicted to coke. The only people who aren’t doing this are those with enough money and slack to buy their way out of it.
This place is a factory farm for people.
That’s what I see, personally, but what’s the mass perception? That the Bay exists in a dream-time, the whale-fall. There’s a whirl of parties one can find on almost any night. It’s glitter & glam, and bespoke second-hand kimonos thrifted from some shop I don’t remember. Big dreamers, standing on a carcass, promising nirvana. A never ending springtime of progress. Fuck the system. Become the system. Take over the world! The flora and fauna speak of a land that never properly freezes, their waxy leaves say there are long dry spells. Stay out all night, forget your jacket. You’ll be fine. The buildings are disconnected from their purpose, built fast to be bulldozed in twenty years. What was built ten years ago already looks old. Dissociated from its environment.
It’s Neverland, the land of the eternal child. If you scooter to Oakland to a party, and your scooter dies on the trip back at 3AM, you can call an uber. If you don’t want to go out and buy groceries, you can have an instacart shopper pick them up for you. There’s an entire underclass of people who are willing to do almost any menial task you need doing, and you don’t even have to interact with them, to get them to do it. Completely depersonalized labour. You don’t need to coordinate, you just need cash.
But this Neverland was only ever a child’s daydream, built on the bones of billions. The whale-fall is revealed as fool’s gold. Moving away doesn’t preclude visiting, and there’s intellectual life elsewhere, as well.
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Which circles back to, what do I know, and how do these things relate?
How do I relate to money? to housing? What is a house, to me? What is a home? What is the space of work I’m willing to do, to maintain a home? Do I know what that realistically looks like? Who should I talk to, to find out more? How does any of this relate to my short and medium term goals? What do I think about the current state of things? What do I think about what can be done? Where am I most likely to be mistaken? What could go wrong?
How can I optimize for reducing the amount of my time-converted-to-dollars going to people who are doing terrible things?
All of these are the kinds of questions a person should start asking themselves, before they commit to working in a moral maze, and so find themselves lost.
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There’s an entire industry pushing personal responsibility as the answer to climate change. All you have to do to save the polar bears, they say, is to stop using plastic bags and recycle. This is nonsense. Something like 71% of emissions come from less than 100 companies. If everyone stopped using plastic bags, that’d be helpful, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the impact of Suncor. (Also, it’s not just about the polar bears.)
In this light, agonizing over recursive taxation seems farcical. Still, that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. Every little bit counts.
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Becoming independent from the state entirely is basically impossible, unless you decide to become a hermit in the woods, living rough. Reducing ties? Difficult, but not beyond reach.
In theory, a person could grow their own food, own their own land (and therefore only pay property taxes & for the upkeep of the property,) or squat on unused/unmonitored land (and therefore accept the increased risk of state or individual retaliation should you be found) and trade in goods with their neighbours. In fact, such arrangements exist in rural communities in the US, to this day.
There are regions with few big box stores, and many locally-owned shops. There are CSAs that accept work or trade for food, if you’re able and willing to do it. If supply lines are disrupted due to, say, a pandemic, small communities with local farms that use regenerative practices will be, for the most part, fine. Without getting too deep in the weeds, here, monoculture farming is so expensive in part because one needs to buy fertilizer, pesticides, and large pieces of farm equipment. It’s only “efficient” because the costs are being pushed out of sight.
The difficulty with squatting, though, aside from the risk of running into state enforcement, is that some of the benefits of living on land are forfeit from the start. Long-term planning on that land is out, and one will quickly run into storage issues if they’re living in an RV. (There’s nothing stopping them, however, from burying emergency caches between routes in unassuming locations.)
If one buys cheap land in certain rural areas where an RV plus a few acres can cost under a seventy grand, that seems like a promising option. Land and an RV creates the tantalizing possibility of having near-term freedom from having to interact with a poisonous economic system, while maintaining enough mobility that one can scram if their town develops an angry infestation of militants brainwashed into believing queers are the reason civilization is decaying. Cheap land means fewer sunk costs and less resistance to the idea that you may one day have to abandon it, though there are places less likely than others to see that kind of upheaval, so that needs to be factored in, as well.
Owning also has the benefit that you can store (and thus justify buying) in bulk, which is seriously underestimated as a cost saving (and therefore recursive-tax avoidance) tool. It also saves you time because you’re then able to bulk freeze food, so cooking large batches of soup and other dishes becomes easier, thus freeing more time to engage in other pursuits.
However this doesn’t get into the ethical considerations of buying into the system this way.
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This article is not meant to make a decision for anyone. Every person’s needs and abilities are different. It’s instead meant as a glimpse into the thought process of orientation, and as a bouncing board for people to use to get ideas. I link to a number of books and resources to get you started.
Becoming aware of the broader situation, and asking yourself what you value and how your lifestyle is serving those values is the first step. More and more we must consider that life can’t go on as it is, and the way we’re living is built on the backs of the suffering and enslavement of others. And such a system is bound to fail eventually on a finite world, so one must start considering creative solutions, especially since those with power have no intention of coming to save us.
