apartment

money, time, and creative freedom

Konstantin Gorbatov, 1941

I’ve lived in the same neighborhood almost continuously for the past nine years. As you can imagine, I love it here, but I’m also eager for a change of scenery and a bit more space. A garden or terrace would be nice. So I started looking for apartments. Buying made more sense than renting. The problem: everything I want to buy costs more than I want to spend.

I tried to justify it: I’m paying a premium for location, right? Being close to the beating heart of this city is a luxury I don’t want to give up. Late night trains, however hellishly delayed, are important because I want access to the best art and music, restaurants and bars. But if that’s the case, then I’m basically paying a boatload of money in order to spend even more money—and in exchange for what? Fun? Certainly not spiritual transformation.

Buy low, sell high. The old investment adage falls flat when applied to New York real estate. Nothing here is cheap. You buy high and hope to avoid a loss. But it’s not just the financial cost of buying an apartment that scares me. It’s what the loss of that money represents: an enormous amount of time—time that I’ve saved up for writing.

I have no plans to leave my day job, but I like knowing that I can quit and write full time for a few years while maintaining my current lifestyle. All those years saved up in the bank, years I’ve worked hard for, would vanish if I were to buy a new apartment. It would mean bondage to a corporate job and the pressure to make more and more and more so that I can pay off a mortgage. All for a private garden when I can keep living on the edge of a public park overlooking the Hudson? “The capitalist,” writes Lewis Hyde, is “a person whose instinct is to remove property from circulation.” 

My problem: I want a bohemian lifestyle with bourgeois pleasures. I want creative freedom and nice things. I want a stimulating social life, time to write, and a child. Life is basically a series of negotiations between conflicting desires, and I’m hell-bent to make the impossible happen. My friend Maia, who has been nomadic in Europe for a couple of years, writes about a similar dilemma between wanting spontaneous travel and an apartment to store her stuff (I’m obsessed with her essay!).

Time is money, and money is also time. People are happiest when they can spend the bulk of their time on what really matters to them: personal projects, hobbies, relationships, travel, whatever it may be. I’m unhappiest when I’m engaged in activities that seem pointless, when I’m doing something because I feel like I have to and not because I want to. For a creative person, the most important thing money can buy beyond necessities is leisure time.

Not having money is time consuming. There are hours spent at laundromats, hours at bus stops, hours at free clinics, hours at thrift stores, hours on the phone with the bank or the credit card company or the phone company over some fee, some little change, some mistake.

Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

When I allow myself to let go of the fantasy of owning an apartment with a private garden, when I pull myself out of the dispiriting rabbit hole of Streeteasy, when I return to my quiet neighborhood while the sun is setting over the Hudson, the sky a flaming orange-pink, I think about how lucky I am to inhabit a little corner of this island. Every gain comes with a loss. It’s a matter of deciding which losses you can accept. I can give up the waterfront views, the captivating summer blooms that force me to slow down on my morning runs, the abundant Doordash options that come with living on the narrow, southern tip of Manhattan where almost everything south of 34th street is within delivery range.

But I can’t give up the time and freedom to write.

Buying a house is the American dream! It’s putting down roots! It’s investing in something that can appreciate in value! Capitalism has given us so many goods to pine after. We chase them without assessing their true value and cost to us as individuals. Next to the corporate ladder is the domestic ladder whose rungs include getting married, buying a home, starting a family. Each one of these comes with an enormous opportunity cost that I suspect we’re afraid to scrutinize. I’m not saying these institutions should be abolished, but we shouldn’t assume their benefits to be net positive. It’s worth asking, “what’s the real value and what’s the real cost to me?” Depending on how you want to spend your time, you may have a different answer than your neighbor.