“Is the punk house a thing anymore?
You know, the house a bunch of kids live in, and it’s disgusting and doesn’t really work, and eventually it gets bulldozed, and like 5 people are upset about it, but by the time they’re 25, they’re like, “Eh, that was probably for the best”?
Punk house life is probably at the top of the list of things that sound great during a specific part of your life, but you age out of them pretty quickly.
In fact, I think most alternative living situations are this way:
Van Life: Seems great, definitely built on the premise that you could wake up and be in Yosemite tomorrow! Lots of great Instas where someone is working, back doors of the van open, and they’re sitting at a laptop in a beautiful setting. The problem comes in when you realize that you’ll still be working 40 hours per week, and doing so out of a van fucking sucks. I mean, it’s great to be somewhere else, to do some traveling, but a part of what makes traveling fun is that you’re usually not working while you’re traveling. For me, editing web pages or whatever is no more fun if I’m doing it in a van in a great location, and what I’d prefer is to do it in a house with a toilet that you press a lever and everything just goes away. Plus, it’s not all going to be Yosemites. You’ll be in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Idaho at some point, freezing your balls off, really thinking about your life choices.
Couch Surfing: It seems like movies love to show an itinerant lovable loser who’s crashing at someone’s house, but then realizes the dude has a family and can’t just party all the time, and the lovable loser’s presence is causing marital friction. I think for me, couch surfing sucks because it’s hypocritical: I don’t want to get a job and be a part of the system, man…but I DO want to have a place to live, so long as someone else is doing the work part, and I’m 100% okay with that person being my friend.
Communes: The problem is, eventually your kids grow up and realize how much of a sex thing this was.
Life on Mars: This I could be a sucker for. Remember that thing a few years ago where they were having weirdos send in videos to be part of a Mars colonization project? Whatever happened to that? I was tempted, I’ll be honest, but then I realized that the applicants were all either A) Former drama kids who would be SO annoying after a decade, or B) Old guys who had basically no life and figured they may as well commit a sort of suicide by going to Mars with no way of returning home. Seriously, there were A LOT of these in the videos. Which, don’t get me wrong, I will be that depressed old guy in a few years, once I can rightfully be called old, I’ve got nothing against them. But I think I’d prefer not to spend my life between those two groups. Plus, I was like, “There’s not one fucking dentist on this crew. Shouldn’t there be one dentist?””