Oh, sit down and let me spell it out for you. Back in my day, people had something called aspiration—it was a real thing! You wanted a house? You busted your ass, saved up, and got a mortgage. And yeah, maybe you had to worry about some psycho lurking in your hedge maze like it was a Yuppie Nightmare horror flick, but at least you had a hedge maze! These days, the closest thing to home ownership most people get is customizing their Animal Crossing island or praying their landlord doesn’t hit them with another “market adjustment” before payday.
Owning a house used to be the norm. Now? It’s a pipe dream wrapped in a lottery ticket, deep-fried in student debt, and served with a side of 25% APR. Can’t afford a home? No problem, just become an influencer! Start a podcast! Sell your soul for brand deals and pray to the algorithm gods that you don’t get shadowbanned before you can afford groceries. Or better yet, dump your last $20 into digital loot boxes because who needs a savings account when you might score a legendary skin for your pixelated anime sword?
Seriously, gambling is no longer a vice; it’s an economic survival strategy. Can’t pay rent? Try your luck on crypto, stocks, or the “Will my DoorDash side hustle cover rent this month?” roulette wheel. Hell, buy another NFT of a cartoon monkey smoking a cigar—that’ll totally hold its value better than an actual house. Maybe next week, an Elon tweet will bless you with tendies and a down payment!
You know what the real horror genre is now? Not “yuppie nightmares.” Nah. It’s the eternal roommate era. Y’all aren’t worried about losing the American Dream—you’ve never even been invited to the party. We had movies where suburbanites freaked out about psycho killers; you have TikToks of people discovering their Craigslist landlord has been living in the walls. You aren’t being terrorized in your McMansion—you’re splitting a 500-square-foot studio with three strangers and a pet snake named “security deposit.”
And before you say, “Well, it’s because boomers ruined the economy!”—I get it. The system is rigged. But holy hell, you don’t have to double-down on the grift! Maybe if we stopped tossing cash into microtransactions, gacha pulls, and “mystery boxes” that never contain anything except regret, we’d actually have some damn capital again. What if, instead of feeding the dopamine slot machine, you put money into, I don’t know, literally anything that exists in the real world? Maybe—just maybe—we could make homeownership a thing again instead of treating it like some kind of mythological relic, right up there with pensions and job security.
Because that’s the true horror: yuppie nightmares can’t exist anymore, because there’s nothing left to lose. There’s no house, no equity, no good job with benefits—just the endless grind, the hustle, the desperate hope that the next gig, the next post, the next jackpot will be the one that saves you.
And if that’s the world you’ve got to live in, well—at least buy some damn land before the metaverse tries to sell it back to you in installments.
