For a while, every place I moved to was slightly larger than the last. This is culturally what we're directed to: have a guest room. Build a man cave. Two ovens in your kitchen, why not? An office with a library. A room for the piano. There's always a way to put that money into stuff.

My first house was modest. About 700sqft semi-detached, built in 1905 as housing for mill workers, in the Philly exurbs. Good bones but a total gut job. The appeal was mostly that I could walk to the train station in three minutes. Cute backyard, but barely one parking spot per house.

Next place we got was 1300sqft (not including the full basement) - three bedrooms! My wife and I each had a space. Two car driveway a mile from city hall in what's barely north Philadelphia. Mid-1990s construction, weirdly suburban - I think it had more of a lawn than we had in the exurbs. So much room for stuff! Especially in the basement with its ceilings!

By a quirk, we came across a building in the historic district. It needed a ton of work, but the price was too good to pass up. We had been renting our first house out, but the tenant had broke her lease, so we moved back to the exurbs, sold our Philly house, and bought this weird property... 16'x100' venue space on the first floor, with a 16'x30' apartment on the second floor. We added a third floor (approx 1200sqft, single bedroom), rent out the second floor as an airbnb, and will be making the first floor a venue again.

Moving from 1300sqft back down to 700sqft, then up to 1200sqft (but with no basement) was a master course in space optimization and mindfulness about consumerism. When I see these McMansions, I think: that's a lot of air to heat & cool. Those are a lot of rooms to fill with junk. That's a lot to dust and vacuum. And let's not even talk about design and architectural choices, or how everything interesting is a fifteen minute drive - at least.

I didn't think I'd have a custom home built in my 30s, let alone adaptive reuse of what turned out to be an 18th century building, but I feel like I accidentally stumbled out of a consumerism trap and into a kind of Goldilocks zone. When someone from NYC visits, they think our place is huge. When someone from central PA visits, they think it's kind of cramped. McMansions baffle me. There are so many more interesting things you can do with money, and so many more interesting places you can live - but I get how it's hard to break the spell of "get a bigger house, buy more stuff." And I'm not saying I made a better choice... I also think about how much money I spent to live in the spacial equivalent of a trailer home.

As much as I couldn't go back to the suburbs, suburban people often have trouble adapting to this kind of space. We had Airbnb guests a couple of years ago, who were gifted a weekend stay by their daughter. On the first night, they used Ubereats to order McDonalds, stayed inside and watched TV. In the morning, they told us they were checking out early, and that it was no fault of ours. I don't know if I can properly express to you how absurd it is to order McDonalds in a town with world class food options, or to stay inside watching TV in one of the most walkable, historic, and street-level active cities in the country. But hey, "Country Mouse & Town Mouse" is a fable that's at least 2000 years old. To each their own, I suppose.