Modern Maturity

The rent-or-buy debate is typically limited to financial questions. Will my mortgage payments exceed my current rent? Should I wait for interest rates to drop a little further?

Recent years have demonstrated that there are no longer dependable answers to these money questions -- and that maybe they weren’t the right ones to begin with. So we’ve shunted them aside to examine what we consider to be the more significant points of the debate: Does every man still need his kingdom, even if that kingdom’s value plummets from month to month? And how will a 25-year debate limit future opportunities?

In the rent-or-buy debate, as with most big life decisions, a single, concrete answer is elusive. The most important thing you can do is make sure you’ve asked yourself the right questions. 

"Maturity" is a word bandied about by concerned parents, mightier-than-thou acquaintances and insurance brokers. It used to be that it represented something -- a point in one's life when a man could kick off the blithe flip-flops of his youth and slip on the polished dress shoes of abstemious adulthood. The thing about maturity in the past was that even the most immature of men could fake it. This is because we used to have landmarks that indicated when a man reached adulthood. From killing a lion to taking a wife, there were well-defined events in a man's life that made it easy to slap a label on the new, mature adult, even in spite of the fact that he was still a self-absorbed asshole or didn't know how to do his own laundry. But maturity these days is hard to fake.

More recently our best signifier for adulthood was the purchase of property. Out of school? Got a job? Next step in life? Buy a house. Congratulations, you are now an adult.

"You ain’t no kind of man if you ain’t got land"

This is still largely true, from a fiscal perspective. Land ownership is part of a good diversified portfolio. But as an indication of coming of age? Hardly.

The reason that a mortgage was an indication of maturity in the past was that it represented a financial burden that a man, as an adult, would be working to pay off, likely as a cog in the industrial behemoth that was postwar America. His burden was a social responsibility that, explicitly recognized as such or not, indicated that he was now a contributing member of society. Accordingly, he was bestowed the full honors that come with such toil in the form of societal inclusion as an adult.

Today, owning a house can be an indication of financial maturity, but the privilege of ownership has been extended to anyone and everyone, stripping away the implications of past decades. The mortgage crisis is the single most obvious example of this. Look what happened when men up to their eyeballs in student debt and enthusiastically employed part-time at The Sizzler were offered bafflingly huge loans to own an outsize 2,500-square-foot mini-mansions. Indeed, one of the most immature, one of the most sophomoric moves a man can make make these days is committing to an untenable mortgage just because the loans are available.

So the old standby measurement of adulthood -- home ownership -- is dead and buried. It's gone and it's not coming back, unless America reverts to a production economy again (which won't be happening anytime soon).

And it's a lamentable fact, because as far as shorthands for maturity go, home ownership was surprisingly handy. It was based on the fact that a mature adult has something to give back to society in the form of economic stability.

It’s so much more complicated to come up with a maturity assessment these days. We have a service-based economy now. And although quantifying contribution to society was a feature of a production economy and not of maturity, it is hard to count an extra hour of client service in the ledger of the mighty American economy at large. Next Page >>

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