The Most Successful Social Engineering Project of the Modern Era

It’s Not Social Media; It’s Home Ownership

Have you ever thought deeply about the social script of buying a property?

Why do we feel compelled to cordon off a patch of earth, to build a pretty box and call it our own? What makes most people see buying a house as the logical step toward security, wealth, even respect?

I’m not a contrarian, but I can’t play the game. It’s not that I wouldn’t like my own place; I just can’t bear the thought of locking myself into a contract where I pay over the odds for a supposed asset that feels more like a liability than an investment.

I see so many friends and family living in all manner of manors, locked into a kind of slavery in pursuit of winning the game.

Culturally, it is psychological shorthand for responsibility, security, adulthood, and success. You are not a real adult until you are on the property ladder, fixing your gate and painting your front door.

You become anchored in place, moored beside your neighbours in a sea of calm dependence. A steady income ensures the mortgage is paid, the banks get rich, and you miss the opportunity to sail off into the sunset.

In the twentieth century, governments deliberately promoted private home ownership as a tool of social control, economic policy, and political stability. It became a moral and social ideal that kept people in line. Not many homeowners dare strike or protest when living paycheque to paycheque, and so they conform to the status quo.

Through tax breaks, subsidies, and cheap mortgages, states effectively used debt as a mechanism of social order. The result was financial dependence that could last a lifetime.

In the West, the dream of home ownership was mythologised by governments as personal freedom. And indeed, many became wealthy, the lucky ones turning into landlords and living rent free. A double win.

I understand the longing to plant roots, to feel safe, to have something solid in a world that feels slippery. The need for belonging is real; it has simply been cunningly monetised. A house promises stability, but that promise now comes with a chain attached.

Fast forward to this century, and it is a different story. Retirement ages rise, interest rates climb, and house prices outpace wages. People are getting poorer, mistaking inflated values for real wealth. Owners compare the figure on their contract with the current valuation and think they have nailed it, forgetting that living costs have soared and that the new roof they so urgently needed was never included.

For my parents’ generation, a mortgage was a ladder. For mine, it feels more like a leash. They played a fairer game: low interest rates, rising wages, and houses that cost three times a salary instead of ten. The dream still made sense then; now it just makes debt. Like all those subscriptions that were once free, we pretend that is simply the price of modernity, as though we have not been quietly hoodwinked.

The obvious argument, of course, is that paying rent is just giving away money that could go toward ownership. But rent is often half that of a mortgage. If you put thirty years of those savings aside, you might sing a different tune: freedom from the bank, freedom from the boss, and investments that grow faster than a house whose value merely tracks inflation.

Of course, ownership has its virtues. There is comfort in knowing your walls are your own, that no landlord can tell you to leave. But that comfort comes at a cost few calculate honestly.

I am not saying renting is the answer. I am simply curious why so many see it as failure, while telling me they cannot afford to travel, that they hate their job but cannot risk losing it, that they are locked into this supposed asset until they are too old to do anything. Assets do not cost money; liabilities do.

In some countries, state-built housing still underpins stability. Elsewhere, ownership is the only defence against predatory rents. Yet across most economies, the psychology is the same: tie security to debt, and people will protect the system that binds them.

All the risk has been transferred from the state to the citizen, and we willingly sign up for it because it is the done thing. The game that made winners of the 1980s is now setting up generations to fail, and to grow old poor.

Maybe freedom is not owning the ground beneath us, but moving lightly across it, knowing when to stay and when to go. A life unanchored might not look like success, but it might finally feel like it.

Perhaps the greatest illusion of ownership is that it ever made us free.

But what will I do when I am too old to work and you have paid off your mortgage? I will be using my assets to fund the old people’s home, just like you, I guess.