His new book emphasized the imperatives of presence and developing community ties, but Stulberg didn’t have the time to act on these principles, as he felt that he had to work constantly to keep up with the high cost of living in Oakland.
There is now an element of unavoidability to the rat race, because powerful people have constrained the possible ways of living for their own benefit:
1) Zoning laws are designed to prop up the scarcity of SFH's so that incumbent owners can profit from the growth in RE prices. However, price growth becomes a compounding problem and requires more and more labor from the people who live in an area to afford ever-scarcer housing. Thus in entire states, there is no way off the treadmill of paying an artificially inflated price for housing, other than homelessness. How many years of labor does it take to buy a $500k house? Oh yea, small cabins are against the law because we want to keep up appearances.
2) Car-centric city layouts deprive people of the opportunity to spend less on transportation by walking, biking, or riding busses/trains, and lock us into spending several thousands of dollars per year going from point to point amid the sprawl.
3) Suburban houses feature lawns that require dozens of hours of labor per year, just to not become a problem. Their asphalt roofing lasts only 20-25 years, as opposed to the tiles used elsewhere in the world that last the lifetime of the structure.
4) Public education is funded at the hyper-local level, so unless one wants to send one's kid to an underfunded school with concentrated poverty, one must spend more money to buy a home in a "good" district.
5) The U.S. healthcare system is organized for the benefit of insurance companies and pharmaceutical / medical device companies. Insurance companies build monopolies or duopolies regarding access to care. Pharma companies build monopolies with patents that last decades. Both have lobbyists who funnel money to whichever politicians support their system. The result is anything related to healthcare in the U.S. costs a multiple of what it costs in other countries with systems organized for other priorities. This is why veterinary care is so much cheaper than healthcare.
Thoreau did not face these realities. He lived in a world without modern conveniences or markets, but also a less-efficient economy where he could still choose to opt out of the ways other people were living. There are a diminishing number of places in the U.S. where one can both earn a basic living and also avoid paying decades of one's life for high-maintenance housing, go without a car, enjoy good schools, and perhaps hire a concierge physician for a few hundred bucks a year. Despite this being what lots of people
say they want, off we go each day living our lives in a way that supports the elements of the world we don't like. Every HCOL area home purchase, every takeout meal, every drive in the car, every lawn mowing, and every copay reinforces the exploitive systems we despise.