Always on the Market
Everyone has a pandemic hobby. I know this to be true because no one can shut up about it. I call my best friend only to find that she’s now sold her soul to the meathead gods at a high-intensity boxing gym. My boyfriend is becoming a cat guy. Even my grandmother is thriving: honing her bridge skills to take out the stiff competition in her Sunday school group.
My quarantine hobby, on the other hand, is a bit less impressive, in that it involves…. real estate?
I know. It’s bad. I feel your judgment, but let me explain.
In the last few years, real estate has become progressively client-centric, taking out that pesky middleman, the real estate agent, and replacing him with comprehensive listing websites. With bright interfaces and quirky names like “Zillow” and “Trulia,” these sites have turned the house-hunting experience into an addictive treasure hunt. Users can customize their searches in any way they choose with endless filters. There’s even the option to search by key phrases like “32-seat Movie Theater” and “Poolside Cabana” to assuage the ubiquitous rich pricks.
I discovered these sites on a whim, browsing around one day to combat my quarantine-induced wanderlust. Of course, by diving into listings, I failed to take into account my obsessive personality, immutable anxiety, and general tendency to shape unrealistic narratives that reach decades into the future. If my calculations are correct, by 2031 I will have landed a sponsorship with REI, hiked Mount Kilimanjaro in record time, and befriended Bear Grilles, with whom there will definitely be unresolved sexual tension.
Shockingly, as a 20-year-old film student with a coffee problem, I’m not looking to buy a home anytime soon. But my future self is, and she is equally obsessive. Sometimes, she’s 35, fresh off a promotion at a major book publishing house and looking to invest in upstate New York before prices go totally off the walls. More often, she’s a successful TV writer who, with her indie musician husband, is debating between the valley and Glendale to raise kids. Occasionally, she’s a travel writer scouting out a scenic Seattle condo, but that’s only if the entertainment world has left her out to dry. She’s still recovering from that, obviously, and needs proximity to a good therapist in Seattle.
The avenues are vast, alluring, addicting. I’m often embarrassed to check the time and find that I’ve spent half an hour scrolling through Upper West Side apartments when I should have gone to bed. Spotting a new listing that wasn’t there the day before elicits the same embarrassing thrill as an Instagram like or new Twitter follower, but with high-resolution photos of marble countertops and estimated mortgage payments.
As if I wasn’t already ashamed enough to be the kind of person who opens people’s Instagram stories five seconds after they’re posted, I now face the mortification of my deep emotional investment in million-dollar townhomes I will never, ever set foot in. I mean, a million dollars? It’s like the realtors think I went to private school.
On the one hand, I can’t deny the endless amusement of looking at beautiful homes on the internet. Daydreaming of the prosperity and comfort that may one day await me has rid me of my pandemic blues on so many occasions that I think Zillow should be medically prescribed.
However, I can’t deny the anxiety and frustration that surround my real estate research. The whole thing is a ruse: a game used to convince myself I have control at a time when I have close to none. I’m young, on the mere fringes of adulthood, trying to forge a career during a time of global disruption. I’m walking through life like a ’60s hitchhiker who, before inevitably joining a cult, decides to traverse the open road and “see what’s out there, man.”
It doesn’t help that my generation has spent our adolescence learning of the ruinous housing market we’ve inherited: a dystopic land of absurd down payments and sleek renovations around every corner. I don’t feel pessimistic wondering if I’ll ever be able to buy a home; I just feel pragmatic. For every grandiose mansion I virtually tour, there’s a split-level suburban house I convince myself would be in my price range. If future me works her way up to a senior position at her mid-size company, she’ll manage the mortgage just fine, right? RIGHT?
The home listings I mindlessly click through have sent my sapling synapses into unregulated panic mode without me even realizing it. Every possible future must be accounted for. Nothing is ever, ever predictable. If a pandemic can strip away the plans of millions of people worldwide, how dare I assume I won’t go to grad school?
It only took me ten months and hundreds of saved homes on Trulia to realize just how deeply the pandemic has affected me. Beyond my present loneliness, fear, and anger is a pervasive uncertainty. The typical anxieties of young adulthood have been compounded by something so much larger, something so wholly outside of my control that all I can do is hold my breath as the old guard kindles fires it should be extinguishing.
Despite its triviality, house hunting has given me a sense of agency in a time when I’ve felt less than ever. The future terrifies me, but at least I can pretend to have a grasp on it by looking into terraced yards.
On the other hand, I know that this mindset is not sustainable. As badly as I want to continue mulling over possibilities until they all meld together, I’m trying to instead live in the moment. I don’t want to be one of Allen Ginsberg’s “best minds of my generation”…you know, the ones “destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, and naked.” However, as my headspace currently stands, I’d say I’m on a Ginsbergian fast track.
So, here’s to 2021: the year I already hate (which I say every year but this time for totally valid reasons). May I finally say goodbye to that one Martha’s Vineyard colonial with the beautiful wrap-around porch. May I finally bid adieu to the rural Washington cabin with the neighborly bears. May I finally embrace the novelty of unpredictability and search through silver linings instead of Silver Lake.
Holyn Thigpen is a writer and wannabe filmmaker based in Atlanta. Her work has appeared in places such as Slackjaw, WABE Atlanta, Bright Lights Film Journal, and The Black Sheep. She enjoys googling Nicolas Cage, watching foreign films that make her feel smart, and crafting horrible iced lattes.
