House != Apartment

Sometimes it seems to me that humanity voluntarily moved into enormous cages. Everyone is drawn to cities. They buy apartments. Take out twenty-year mortgages. Celebrate twenty square meters somewhere on the twenty-third floor. And then sincerely consider this the pinnacle of civilization.

Want to know how free you really are?

Turn off the electricity.

In a few hours there’ll be no water. In a day it’ll get cold. The elevator becomes a useless shaft. The sewage stops working. Nearby stores quickly empty out. And it turns out your “property” only exists as long as dozens of utility services keep running somewhere far away.

An apartment is dependency wrapped in a pretty package.

A house is a completely different story.

Your own land. Your own workshop. Your own garden. You can build a garage, a sauna, a greenhouse. Get a generator, a well, solar panels. You can walk out barefoot onto the grass in the morning, instead of into a smoke-filled stairwell. You can grill meat every evening without worrying that the neighbors below will call the fire department.

In the city, they sell you square meters.

In the countryside, you get space.

In the city, kids know where the nearest shopping mall is.

In the countryside, they know how rain smells, how apples grow, and why you can see the Milky Way at night.

The funniest thing is that technology has finally stopped requiring us to live in a metropolis. Internet exists almost everywhere. You can work remotely. You can order goods online. A car has long been ordinary transport, not a luxury.

It turns out to be a strange thing.

We continue living as if it’s the 19th century and the only way to earn money is to commute to the city center every day.

I’m somehow sure that in twenty years, people will look at mass living in concrete boxes the same way we look at communal apartments of the last century.

The city is needed for work.

A house is needed for life.

And those are two very different things.