Best Way to Get a House?

Lowbrow Answer: Buy it
(Imagine happy 50's music playing in your head while you read this first paragraph.) Look at you, all domestic. Is that a white picket fence you've got there? And a golden retriever? And here comes your wife and two sons with some lemonade. How wonderful. Are those your Toyota Priuses in the driveway? Smart thinking. You could drive to three months of soccer practice and still have half a tank! Ha, ha, ha. Isn't life grand? Way to go, Dad.

Hey, newsflash. Domestic life blows. Your golden retriever will get run over by some sleepy neighbor and your white picket fence will rot. The lemonade has too much sugar in it and your sons will grow up to play lacrosse, major in investment-banking at a state school, and date-rape freshman girls at frat parties. All you've done by buying a house is lock yourself into all of that for the next 20 mortgage-paying years. It's like chaining yourself to the Titanic. Way to go, Dad.


Middlebrow Answer: Rent it
Sweet, sweet freedom. At least you are only ever committed to this for a year. You don't like it after twelve months? Go somewhere else. Something breaks? Call the landlord. Imagine if all of life were this simple. You could date a new girl each year, move from country to country your whole life, and always have different friends. Basically you'd be James Bond. I'm sure he rents.

Of course, renting is like having sex with a prostitute; you get some satisfaction now, but it's pretty wasteful spending in the long run. A better use of funds might actually be to invest in a permanent mistress, if you understand my metaphor.


Highbrow Answer: Build it Yourself from Scratch
I know that Nivea Skin Cream ads will tell you differently, but having weathered carpenter's hands is money. And possessing the technical know-how to construct an entire house is pretty badass. It's like those math kids you knew in high school that could do the proof that shows that 1=1. Most of us just assume it, but they can actually do it.

To stay with the prostitute metaphor from above, building your own house is like paying a hooker to let you give her head. Why do it? Because you can, that's why. Sure, it's probably more fun and less work to just have sex with her, but fuck that. You're an intellectual. You derive pleasure from impressing other people, not from getting pleasure yourself.