Try Buying?

Have you seriously looked at ‘Real Estate’? At the concept of the ownership of physical property. Or rather, the trying to secure ownership of property. It’s ridiculous, damaging, and has probably caused more stress, loss of lives, grief, marriage break-ups, racial and spiritual division and anger than any other single enterprise of commercial endeavour. At a professional level, the selling of properties and business’s have resulted in the total devastation of communities, cultural destruction, fear, loathing and hate. You think I’m over exaggerating? Since man, as in mankind (not ‘a man’. Because let’s be honest, a lot of women are definitely responsible for a lot of grief, when ‘real estate’ is mentioned). So, since man first occupied a space, a patch of ground, someone else has valued it (and usually over-valued it). Someone else has then wanted it. Or, if not the land for building in itself, then what was under it, over it or planted in it. As far the development of nations, religions, and empires, land has usually been the basis for such actions carried out, as deemed necessary (by the victors) to acquire it. Genocide, war crimes, the destruction of cities and the massive creation of refugees, on the international level, are just some of the issues arising from the lust for property.

On a more modest level, the ownership of a personal patch of property in Western societies has been pushed into people’s psychs from an early age. The idea that you ‘need’ to own property to succeed (and by that of course they, the rich, mean you have been successful in ‘life’). Yet, despite the continual references in banks, institutions and the world of advertising to which we are constantly visually assaulted, it was something that strangely went against my unusual lifestyle, even as I grew older. Travelling from place to place, never gave me the ‘want’ to live in one place more than another. I have always been at home where ever I am. Of course I recognise, for most, it’s a question of personal security. For security later in life that is. When you can’t do much else, but sit in your house, have the odd trip away, until it is sold, and you have enough money to be put into the nursing home of your choice. Unless, unfortunately, you suffer Alzheimer’s, or some other form of dementia. Then it won’t necessarily be the nursing home of your choice will it?

But, for most, it is the race to obtain ‘a place of their own’. Then, once many have gone through the stress and worry of the banks, mortgages and lawyers, they then decide to do it again to get an ‘investment’ property. That’s where I come in these days. I rent. I’m glad some people want to go through the stress and fear and worry of getting a second property. However, from the moment they start down that track of gaining ‘a place of their own’, they do change. It becomes the ‘driving’ force of their daily, weekly, monthly and yearly consideration. The panic of the fluctuations in markets and the multiple variations of issues affecting their chosen location.

 (Continued tomorrow)