With the news that Everything Everywhere All At Once received a nomination for Best Picture (hooray!) and the prevalence of the Turbotax vs. H&R Block ad wars on TV (exhausting!), and it simply being the beginning of the new year with tax documents flooding your mailbox, taxes may be on your mind (ugh!). (But truly: Everything Everywhere All At Once is easily the greatest movie about doing your taxes ever.)
It makes sense that taxes are at the core of a movie that’s otherwise centered on questions of life and death. Because how’s that old saying go? Life, death, and taxes. The three constants, the three inevitabilities of life.
I’ll add a fourth: real estate.
Life, death, taxes, and real estate
Everyone, everywhere, always: we all must decide where we will live, or, to put it more plainly, where we will let our bodies rest. Life, death, taxes, and real estate. (And knowing some of you, it seems that real estate is even more inevitable than taxes!)
No matter your religion, politics, or family situation, you must decide where to keep all of your stuff and where to sleep at night. Republican or Democrat, immigrant or long-time citizen, communist or capitalist: we all need to figure out where on this rock floating through space we’ll spend our days. We each may have different ideals about how resources should be distributed, how people ought to spend their time, or what beliefs make the most sense of the chaos of our lives: regardless, we have to decide where to live. You may choose to buy, to rent, to stay with your folks, or to sleep outdoors, but however you slice it: real estate is inevitable.
And obviously, these choices have major consequences for money and resources. Where we choose to live is intimately tied with wealth, freedom, and the kinds of choices that are and will be available to us financially.
But there’s another reason the inevitability of real estate is a critical concern. As I’ve discussed previously, our surroundings form us, like trellises form vines. The places we occupy and dwell in point us towards certain choices and lifestyles and away from others. As Winston Churchill said: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” As inevitable as the financial concerns of real estate may be, equally inevitable are the lifestyle consequences that come with deciding on where we want to live.
Finances vs lifestyle
The vast majority of people that I know have given serious, extensive thought to the financial side of real estate. That’s fantastic! It’s a pivotal decision to decide to move out of your parents’ house and pay your own bills, it’s a momentous decision whether to rent or buy, it’s a major investment to buy, and on and on. Few questions are as tied to the health of our resources as choosing where to live.
But most people I know have not given careful consideration to the trellis side of real estate. Understanding how your environment forms you or what it points you towards is an unusual approach to real estate. Sure, we have a few elements of this conversation regularly: deciding on a school district, or choosing how close to live near friends or family, or even choices around layout or interior decoration. But the process of mapping and understanding the holistic lifestyle implications of our real estate decisions remains mostly ignored compared to the weight we place on finances.
And even if we ignore real estate as trellis, a trellis it remains. Even if we don’t pay attention to how our homes or environments shape our behaviors and habits in the world, our homes and environments still shape us! Just because we don’t see the power of the built environment in channeling our behaviors towards certain outcomes and away from others doesn’t mean that power isn’t there. It’s there. It’s persistent. And even if it’s passive or latent, it’s inevitable. You can choose to engage with it or not, but it will always remain.
I’ve dedicated my life and work towards helping people map and understand the power of the built environment — not just as a place to store or accumulate money and resources, but as a place that forms and points our lives at the level of habits and behaviors.
Niche
Perhaps you remember studying what a “niche” is in biology. For example, clown fish live in sea anemones (think Finding Nemo). In a “niche,” the capabilities of the organism and the properties of the environment are perfectly suited for each other.
So it is with humans! Think of your home and neighborhood as your niche. Within the ecology of the market, it may be a perfect fit for you financially or not — and realtors are fantastic guides in helping you evaluate that fit and finding a better “niche” given your finances (i.e. down- or up-sizing your home). But within the system of your lifestyle, maybe your home isn’t as good a fit of a niche as it could be. And sadly, it can be hard to find a realtor — or anyone, really — who is adept at synthesizing this conversation about real estate as trellis with questions about resources and finances.
My hope is to be a realtor that can help you deal with both. The question of how to pay for and sustain a home is obviously critical. But so too are the questions about how a home forms you and your life and the lives of your loved ones over the long haul. Maybe you can’t afford the home you’re in financially, and thus need to move. But maybe you can’t afford the lifestyle that your home niche affords you, and thus need to move. I believe that synchronizing these conversations together, at the moment of choosing where to live (during the real estate process), is a critical opportunity that none of us can afford to pass up.
A guide through the multiverse
So as you consider your next move, and as you consider the expansive dimensions of how your move will affect your finances and your lifestyle, let me be your guide. Not just in questions of finances and the real estate market, but equally in the holistic approach to how your new physical environment will shape and contour your lifestyle. Much like in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, each home you consider is like a different universe you could choose for or against. I can help you weigh those options, whatever they might be. I’ve developed and honed specialized tools and exercises that help my clients see and understand their lived ecologies of behavior as they relate to their homes. If you’re curious to learn more, subscribe! Reach out! Even if I’m not in your area or can’t be your agent, I’d love to chat. This conversation is just beginning.
Everyone, Everywhere, Always