{"id":1298,"date":"2015-05-16T15:05:01","date_gmt":"2015-05-16T09:35:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/?p=1298"},"modified":"2015-05-16T15:05:01","modified_gmt":"2015-05-16T09:35:01","slug":"real-estate-and-travel-fetishes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/2015\/05\/16\/real-estate-and-travel-fetishes\/","title":{"rendered":"Real Estate and Travel Fetishes"},"content":{"rendered":"

A long time ago, somebody\u00a0on Twitter shared an article\u00a0(possibly on medium) about how, instead of looking forward to your next vacation and a life full of travel, you should\u00a0make your career and life so fulfilling that you never wonder where your next vacation is going to be. Unfortunately, I forgot to bookmark it, and can no longer find the link, but I am certainly\u00a0one of those people whom the article was chiding. Sadly, despite all my cool product development projects at work, I still get more excited by the prospect of travel.<\/p>\n

In my defence, it is easier to share the excitement of travel with friends, family, and loved ones, than it is to share the excitement of developing a flame-retardant conveyor belt.<\/p>\n

But, looking at my Facebook news feed, I certainly get the feeling that the scolding in that missing article had a point. There are so many\u00a0people who seem to give off the impression that all that their life is missing is a vacation to somewhere cool and undiscovered.<\/p>\n

That’s Facebook.\u00a0And then there’s advertising on FM radio in Delhi.<\/p>\n

Delhi radio\u00a0is chock full of advertisements about\u00a0buying apartments (and also commercial real estate sometimes). And the vast majority of these\u00a0advertisements\u00a0feature emotionally maudlin husbands or wives or children crying (or as Jagadguru used to say, crying up and down) about how miserable their lives\u00a0are, and how\u00a0the new real estate development can magically solve all this misery.<\/p>\n

I find the radio advertisements far more awful than my Facebook feed, though that could be because of two sorts of bias:<\/p>\n

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  1. Cringing at what my friends say on Facebook would be awkward because they are my friends<\/li>\n
  2. I share the hankering after travel but\u00a0don’t see the point of buying real estate, to the extent that I roll my eyes at people who do (especially in India). This is probably the result of reading all those internet pop science articles about how experiences make us happier than things<\/a>. (For an enjoyable\u00a0pop science\u00a0book<\/em> that takes it a step further, I recommend Geoffrey Miller’s\u00a0Spent<\/em><\/a>, of which I really ought to write more in another post.)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    But even with this bias and the previous excuse, I have to admit that both the hankering after travel and the hankering\u00a0to own\u00a0real estate are\u00a0a\u00a0sort of cargo cult which imbue either vacations or houses\u00a0with magical powers. To wit:<\/p>\n