It turns out that searching for a house is not nearly as cool as that TV show “House Hunters” makes it out to be. If it’s really true that independently wealthy people just can’t find anything that makes them happy, I’d like to recommend following me around for a while, looking at house after house that’s either priced like a lost Van Gogh, or can’t contain my sprawling brood–twins are the Gift from God that also happens to wreck your financial planning, but you can never figure out which one to blame, so you have to just love both of them.
But that’s not really the bad part. The truly bad part about buying a new home, when you’re not independently wealthy, is that you have to wade through endless houses, each with weird fatal flaws and strange compromises. In contrast to this, the independently wealthy have the ability to live in a state of near constant wonder and enchantment.
Take this eleven million dollar home in Lake Oswego, for instance.
The nice thing about being able to buy a home that’s worth more than the operating budget for the city of Detroit is that you get to be thrilled and delighted, without any of that unseemly disappointment and compromise. Prefer a master bath large enough to let you play slap and giggle tackle football with the trophy wife? Check. Personally, I would find it impossible not to fill this bathtub with gasoline and fly a radio controlled airplane into it, just to see what would happen, but then I say that about every bathtub I see.
His and Hers separate wings are the new dual-vanities.
Whereas everyone I know who’s currently house hunting is primarily concerned with finding good schools for their kids, anyone capable of owning this home could take the obvious further step of just starting a school somewhere within the home.
In fact, I’m pretty sure this home already includes one of those heavily upholstered and woodgrained schools for foppy English mutant children who’re a little frightened and unsure of their laser beam eyes and metallic skin.
In fact, why are there so many tripods in this home? That, in and of itself, seems highly suspicious, and further evidence that the truly wealthy have no idea what they’re supposed to buy.
What, no tripod in the bathroom?
But imagine how happy you’d be to be able to buy a house that had at least the basic stuff you were looking for? You know, like solid schools, a roof that won’t need replaced in the next few years, and a bathroom that doesn’t look like it was used for cooking meth. To find something like that–something that just covered the basics–would probably make the average person much happier than an $11-million home could ever make someone who can afford it.
That’s why I’m starting the Christopher S. Currie Foundation for Meaning in Wealth, an organization designed to help match wealthy but unhappy people with people who can show them how to appreciate stuff. And maybe build a go cart track in the atrium. That would be so rad.
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