People don’t move to new apartments frequently enough.
If your neighbors suck badly and you can’t influence them, or if you live in a place that’s badly maintained and the building management won’t do anything about it, you really should strongly consider moving.
You tell that to somebody, you’re likely to get to get one of the following arguments —
(1) That’d be too expensive (time, money, etc)! Possibly. I didn’t say the person should move, or should move immediately. Just said “strongly consider” — aka, run the math and search out options, see if you can be creative, consider doing a temporary solution like crashing with a friend or staying with your parents or finding some subsidized housing for a short period of time to bank cash and then get a better place. If your apartment is causing major lifestyle disruptions/headaches with any sort of frequently, I’m just saying you should strongly consider moving. I feel really strongly people should do this, because there’s been two or three times in my life that I moved too slowly, and I’d have been much better off taking a $1000-$3000 + dozens of hours of cost to move apartments, even if additionally a huge hassle even beyond those factors, because my life got hugely obviously better after moving. Just, at least, run an analysis of all the costs and research options and weigh it against expected value. I’m not saying you gotta do it, just you really ought to think about it.
(2) You don’t know what it’s like to be broke! Ah, the moral argument in favor of not even considering changing a bad situation. This argument is basically, “Don’t make me feel bad and don’t assert that I can have agency here.” This argument is kinda unfortunate, because “hey, dude/dudette, you should really consider moving given how much your living setup sucks and is getting you down” seems pretty reasonable and is usually a pretty friendly argument.
For the record, by the way, that second argument is false in my case — the nickname of one of my first apartments was “The House of Horrors.” Windows were partially broken in a ghetto Boston suburb. My bedroom got freezing cold in the winter. Lots of crime in the neighborhood, and regular rowdy behavior from patrons of local boozeries made getting a decent sleep on Friday and Saturday evenings a dice roll most weekends. (A dice roll I usually lost.) Kitchen was full of broken stuff, mold in the refrigerator, ceiling at times leaked water through a lighting fixture which umm, seemed dangerous.
One day I was sleeping in around 10AM and I woke up to hear a chainsaw from inside my own apartment. Like a horror movie — this was when the apartment got its nickname — and found out my landlord had decided to do something about the water-leaking-into-light-fixture problem and got a handy-man to chainsaw my ceiling but didn’t think to knock before letting himself in nor check my bedroom, just assuming I was out. So I woke up to a man with a chainsaw in my apartment chainsawing my kitchen ceiling. It wasn’t perhaps as dramatic as it sounds in text; nevertheless — somewhat unsettling.
So yeah, actually, I know what it’s like to be broke as fuck. Nevertheless — while amusing years later, I ought to have at least strongly considered moving sooner. It seems a bit irrational in retrospect to not strongly consider it sooner. Life got a lot better once I did.
Great post.
By the way, taken to its logical conclusion —
People don’t move to new apartments frequently enough.
If your neighbors suck badly and you can’t influence them, or if you live in a place that’s badly maintained and the building management won’t do anything about it, you really should strongly consider moving.
You tell that to somebody, you’re likely to get to get one of the following arguments —
(1) That’d be too expensive (time, money, etc)! Possibly. I didn’t say the person should move, or should move immediately. Just said “strongly consider” — aka, run the math and search out options, see if you can be creative, consider doing a temporary solution like crashing with a friend or staying with your parents or finding some subsidized housing for a short period of time to bank cash and then get a better place. If your apartment is causing major lifestyle disruptions/headaches with any sort of frequently, I’m just saying you should strongly consider moving. I feel really strongly people should do this, because there’s been two or three times in my life that I moved too slowly, and I’d have been much better off taking a $1000-$3000 + dozens of hours of cost to move apartments, even if additionally a huge hassle even beyond those factors, because my life got hugely obviously better after moving. Just, at least, run an analysis of all the costs and research options and weigh it against expected value. I’m not saying you gotta do it, just you really ought to think about it.
(2) You don’t know what it’s like to be broke! Ah, the moral argument in favor of not even considering changing a bad situation. This argument is basically, “Don’t make me feel bad and don’t assert that I can have agency here.” This argument is kinda unfortunate, because “hey, dude/dudette, you should really consider moving given how much your living setup sucks and is getting you down” seems pretty reasonable and is usually a pretty friendly argument.
For the record, by the way, that second argument is false in my case — the nickname of one of my first apartments was “The House of Horrors.” Windows were partially broken in a ghetto Boston suburb. My bedroom got freezing cold in the winter. Lots of crime in the neighborhood, and regular rowdy behavior from patrons of local boozeries made getting a decent sleep on Friday and Saturday evenings a dice roll most weekends. (A dice roll I usually lost.) Kitchen was full of broken stuff, mold in the refrigerator, ceiling at times leaked water through a lighting fixture which umm, seemed dangerous.
One day I was sleeping in around 10AM and I woke up to hear a chainsaw from inside my own apartment. Like a horror movie — this was when the apartment got its nickname — and found out my landlord had decided to do something about the water-leaking-into-light-fixture problem and got a handy-man to chainsaw my ceiling but didn’t think to knock before letting himself in nor check my bedroom, just assuming I was out. So I woke up to a man with a chainsaw in my apartment chainsawing my kitchen ceiling. It wasn’t perhaps as dramatic as it sounds in text; nevertheless — somewhat unsettling.
So yeah, actually, I know what it’s like to be broke as fuck. Nevertheless — while amusing years later, I ought to have at least strongly considered moving sooner. It seems a bit irrational in retrospect to not strongly consider it sooner. Life got a lot better once I did.