How Much is Enough?

My wife and I are researching homes. At one Web site, I learned a little about how square footage is calculated. Standardization around calculating square footage was a requirement for Fannie Mae, the government branch that grants, bundles, and sells mortgages.

Buyers and sellers also use price per square foot as a metric for comparing homes and their values. Measuring standards originated from an attempt to commodify housing markets--bundling mortages and selling them for profit. In short, standardization allows us to compare apples to apples.

I'm also reading a little about the Savings and Loan crisis. And also about the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis. (Both remind me of the Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. Steward played George Bailey, who ran the Bailey Building and Loan.)

I cannot possibly summarize all I've learned. And I know that what I learned in a few online articles cannot rival what specialists know about this domain of knowledge. Nonetheless, I do see a few patterns emerge.

We label symptoms as root causes while we ignore how the structure of the system itself contains the seeds of its own downfall. We lose local control and systems of checks and balances in exchange for efficiency, standardization, and profit. Only too late do we realize that, because too many took too much, there is nothing left to sustain the old system. We experience, again and again, a tragedy of the commons. Generally, I see the following patterns recur:

• I see a tendency toward growth--at any cost.
• I see organizational and systemic forces that pressure individuals, organizations, and governments toward furthering growth, again at any cost.
• I see the predictable and inevitable consequence of growth at any cost, in any system, as collapse.

These patterns don't seem strictly linked to housing markets. They seem more culturally broad, the desire for short-term gain at the expense of long-term health and sustainability. To me it looks as if these patterns permeate our culture.

These patterns beg a question about growth: How much is enough?

What do you do?

The question on my mind today: "What do you do?"

It's a polite way of asking, "So, how might I know how to stratify you in the socio-economic hierarchy?" And it's more polite than asking direct questions, such as:

• How much money do you earn?
• What kind of house do you live in?
• What type of car do you drive?
• How should we relate?
• How do you compare to me?
• How do I compare to you?

My friend Gabe tells me that in England, the question isn't what you do, but "Where are you from?" Evidently, in England, where you come from is of greater importance than what you do. Although the questions differ, their purpose is the same.

About the question, author Robert Fulghum writes, "Making a living and having a life are not the same thing....A job title doesn't even come close to answering the question, 'What do you do?'"

A friend passed me a quote from author Annie Dillard: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we live our lives."

I find myself less interested in talking about how I spend my time making a living, and more interested in talking about how I spend my days living a life.