MikeDecember 14, 2007 15:42 EST

Hello, interesting article. Your big house will not make you any happier than you are already.
My wife and I have been living happily in less than 500sqft condo for more than 2 years. Inner city Calgary

Now we are buying a house...600sqft! Moving up in the world.
Less IS more. Less is also much easier to clean and pay for! Less is also MUCH easier to sell when the time comes.

ShariDecember 14, 2007 23:30 EST

As someone who used to work coordinating home sharers with tenants, I'm concerned that the writer may be idealizing a future with strangers living in those rooms. There are a great many problems that arise when tenants fail to respect the boundaries the renter imposes on them and when the renter makes those boundaries unfairly restrictive. The more intertwined the renters and tenants are (e.g., sharing meals), the worse it can be. When you start running out of milk daily or having to wash other people's dishes or finding their personal items cluttering shared spaces, you get a hint of conflict to come. When your washing machine is broken or the plumbing gets backed up and you find that all the friendliness in the world won't translate into consideration and respect for your property, you'll be living in the real world of home sharing.

Paul KishimotoJanuary 15, 2008 01:26 EST

This article resonated very strongly with me and brought to mind John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society and Bernard Wright's A Short History of Progress.

Mr. Montgomery seems to appreciate Mr. Wright's observation that we are "twenty-first century software running on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago." Contrary to Mr. Morris' fourth point, there is no yearning for a return to man's behaviour in a state of nature, but instead a recognition that our biological imperatives are incompatible with the conditions of modern society.

The author also seems to appreciate Galbraith's key point that the situation of the affluent society is not that of the pre-industrial society in which it was necessary to reward the competitive instinct without question. Galbraith's broad economic conclusion was that mere growth as a measure of progress is naive; more specifically there is no longer any utility in converting accrued wealth to more and larger private cars, homes and possessions.

Mr. Montgomery is in in no way opposed to living within whichever means we may have. He merely—and correctly, in my opinion—observes that the traditional ways in which people enjoyed their salaries are yielding rapidly diminishing in today's typical large Western city. There are more rewarding things to do with one's money than compete with the Joneses.

KathyNovember 01, 2010 12:19 EST

Fantastic article - kind of fits with the idea I read somewhere else that being sad makes you more attentive to detail. I've lived with roomies for over ten years now in Vancouver, and have found that without student debt (the payoff of sharing and cutting costs long-term), I'm much happier than before when I was more worried about having my own apartment and doing things the hard way that showed I'd made it and was 'doing things at the right time'.

As far as the true nature of house sharing goes, a proper amount of effort put into selling the reality of your space and interviewing your meal sharing prospects goes a long, long, long way to minimizing the occasional pains of mismatch. Proper matches yield valuable insights, fun, social connections, and some of the advantages of travel and mentorship relations without ever needing to leave home. Of course there are also the odd trolls who pop up, but on the balance they have been less than 10%, and rarely as risky as one might fear.

There is much more to compatibility and comfort in life than meets the eye. Which also seems to be the point of this article.

AlfredoSeptember 06, 2011 14:08 EST

Functional linguists comfortable talking about the co-evolution of the brain, society and language would likely agree with the writer here. As would linguistic relativists, such as Whorf, who say that the structure of language has a determining (though not completely so) relationship with mind and culture (note 'structure', not just the vocabulary - an important point that gets at not just representation but also the logical relations between concepts).

Consider this. You want to know the size of somebody's house. What do you ask them? Not "What is the size of your house", which treats size as a neutral semantic element, but instead, "How big is your house", which of course makes largeness a 'natural' and apparently neutral semantic resource in at least many English-speaking cultures.

ref: Halliday, Michael (1990) New ways of meaning: the challenge to applied linguistics. Reprinted in Fill and Mühlhäusler (2001) The ecolinguistics reader. London: Continuum.pp175–202