There’s nothing I love more than looking at backlit, digital screens. I’ve traveled the world, built stuff, loved and lost too many times to count, and I’ve found nothing compares to the thrill of seeing what new things I can learn or new connections I can make on my laptop or smartphone. You can have your majestic landscapes, your intimate looks and conversations, your song, dance, and sports, your warm embraces with family, friends, or lovers. Oh no, give me screens: give me likes and kudos and retweets, give me boundless scrolling of new information and entertainment, give me right swipes, product suggestions, video calls, or any of the delectable fruits one harvests from the fertile fields of the world wide web and I am a happy man.

What’s even more exciting than my personal screen-induced bliss is that the whole world is engaging in this amazing experience with me. Everywhere I look, people are enthralled by their screens, surely learning and connecting as I am. Though it’s not always outwardly apparent, I know these screens are bringing them the same bliss and sense of inner contentment they are for me.

And it’s only going to get better. The possibilities of artificial intelligence and augmented reality will bring all new, amazing ways to engage with screens. AI and AR will unbound the human experience of reality, which henceforth has been limited by our powers of reasoning, feeling, and sensing. Suffering, boredom, and all human problems are about to disappear. Surely some revelation is at hand!

I recently learned that two friends have terminal cancer. News like this underscores the preciousness and precariousness of life. My meditations on mortality bring to mind the Ben Franklin quote, “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.” When my final days come, God willing many years from now, I hope and pray I will have stared at digital screens as much as I could with the time I had.

“Don’t go left. Don’t go right. Go deeper.”

— Jim Wallis

Few people living in a failing empire realize it. Those living in the late stages of the Roman Empire likely didn’t realize that empire would one day be no more; they just noticed their Dinari bought them less bread than it used to and that aqueducts and roads weren’t being repaired as quickly as they once were. People are typically too preoccupied by near-term concerns — paying for their homes, ensuring food on the table, dealing with social conflict — to prepare for long-term threats, that is, until those threats become too big to ignore, when the store shelves run empty, the water taps and fuel supplies run dry, and the public’s protectionary forces like police and soldiers cease to protect the public. When these top-down imperial systems cease functioning, people must develop their own, bottom-up ones or perish.

Empire collapse is a historical constant. Every empire throughout history has collapsed: Mesopotamia, Assyria, Greece, Rome, Mongol, Ottoman, etc. The only empires that haven’t collapsed are the present-day ones. But if one were to believe those who suggest the average imperial lifespan is a mere 250 years, the American Empire is not long for this world. For its part, America is diligently filling out all of the required fields for imperial collapse: inflation (aka currency debasement), rampant domestic poverty, increasing wealth disparities, social chaos, impotent political leadership, and engagement in numerous unpopular, unwinnable wars in far off lands. Based on the rhetoric of current political and business leaders there’s no reason to believe that this collapse will be avoided. If anything, the status quo leaders (and would-be leaders) assure collapse.

In days of yore, empire collapse wasn’t necessarily a death-sentence for subjects of that empire. There was a limited amount of control imperial leaders could exert on their subjects due to the slowness of communication, travel, and resource distribution. Consider that it took several months for the English to realize American colonialists had formally seceded from the British empire, because that’s how long it took for messages to traverse the Atlantic Ocean.

With limited oversight and dependencies, olden imperial subjects more or less did their own thing: growing their own food, pumping their own water, making their own stuff, fighting their own local skirmishes with neighbors, and installing their own leadership structures. Sure, imperial forces could roll into town and steal food, exact taxes, conscript men into foreign conflicts, and overthrow local leaders — but they couldn’t do so easily, frequently, or quickly. So when the Assyrian, Roman, and Mongol Empires fell, their subjects basically went on living, albeit without as much access to the goods, infrastructure, and information the empire once provided.

When these erstwhile empires and their top-down systems of control collapsed, bottom-up systems emerged pretty rapidly, because, again, these systems were already in place. Food was already grown near homes. Water was already drawn from nearby wells, rivers, lakes, and springs. Preindustrial humans did not rely on imported petroleum, nor a global multimodal transportation network to deliver all of their resources — including manufactured goods, food, and water — from far off lands as they do today. Preindustrial humans also didn’t require an empire, nor social media influencers to tell them how to live. With fairly stationary populations — ones that were culturally and ethnically homogeneous — social order wasn’t dictated by governmental oversight and policing or by commercial-agenda-promoting fashion.

Modern telecommunications and transit changed everything, significantly increasing the ability of imperial leadership to control their subjects. These modern tools meant centralized imperial leadership could instantaneously deploy orders and resources to subjects and external foes. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, FDR didn’t have to wait most of a year — roughly the time a message takes to sail from Hawaii to Washington — to find out about it and declare war on Japan. The attack, declaration of war, and mustering of retaliatory forces more or less happened on one infamous day.

The accelerated movement of information, people, and goods enabled modern empires, most notably the American Empire, to create real dependencies and exert real control over their subjects. Today, when disaster strikes one corner of the empire, relief can quickly be brought in from another corner. When resources are scarce in one part of the empire, they can be brought in quickly from another, and vice versa. When a disagreeable nation stops supplying the empire important stuff like petroleum, the empire can quickly pool resources to wage war on that nation, topple or replace its leaders, or generally force compliance. When there’s social strife and division, the empire can quickly manipulate media to distract the public into subservience.

Subjects of the American Empire are entirely dependent on the empire for physical and social survival, which is why its collapse will be especially painful. Most modern Americans have no idea how to live without imperial direction and providence. They don’t know how to grow food, or often know how to even cook it. They don’t know where their water comes from, except a tap or a bottle. They take no part in manufacturing or procurement of goods: their stuff is often assembled by Asian hands, made of plastic from Middle Eastern petroleum and rare earth metals from Africa — all of which is shipped across oceans. Their food is grown in California or Mexico with water taken from Colorado and other exotic locales. The ostensibly unifying force of a coherent American culture has been largely replaced by divisive and constantly-shifting social media messaging that validates imperial corruption and violence. Family, elders, priests, and shamans have been mostly replaced by courts, police, celebrities, and mental health professionals.

I find the current presidential election frenzy in the US to be a bit, well, idiotic (American IQ is on the decline, so that tracks). It makes no sense to believe that the people who created and benefit from today’s most pressing problems — be it climate change, poverty, industrial warfare, sickness and disease, or the replacement of families and communities with government and commercial institutions — will fix those problems.

Why the World’s Biggest Problems Go Unsolved

Furthermore, both presidential candidates have held or been directly adjacent to the office in the last eight years — years they both spent enriching the already rich, tapping the non-rich for all they were worth, robbing the health of everyone, and generally promoting social, economic, and environmental annihilation. Trump didn’t bring jobs back to America, nor did he make the country great again (perhaps because his Eisenhauer-era-tinged “again” was always a chimera). The Biden-Harris administration went backwards on virtually every issue Democrats purport they care about: the environment, extreme poverty, public health, freedom of speech, etc. And they did nothing for the economy except issuing $11.6 trillion of debt that doused inflationary fires with gas. Speaking of gas, the Biden-Harris administration has the distinction of holding power when the country extracted more oil than it ever had before, even as it cheerleaded energy-security-motivated forever wars in Israel and Ukraine. Harris’ about face on fracking suggests nothing will change here, unless you count “getting much worse” as change.

I’m reading a book entitled, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. Author Dmitry Orlov lived through the collapse of the USSR. He lived in the USA for many years, only to eventually resettle in Russia. Orlov sees an American Empire collapse as very likely, but it will not be nearly as smooth of the Soviet collapse. Though the USSR was ostensibly an industrial empire, it was not a particularly efficiently run one. The State’s providence was always lacking, and early into the empire’s history, Soviet Russians realized they were on their own for many things. For example, Soviet Russians grew a large percent of their food in small gardens called “dachas”, and as recently as 2011, dachas were responsible for 40 percent of Russian food production. Most Americans can’t grow mold.

In a section about politics, Orlov sums up why I don’t care about imperial politics such as the US’s impending presidential election:

Why should essentially powerless people want to engage in a humiliating farce designed to demonstrate the legitimacy of those who wield the power? In Soviet-era Russia, intelligent people did their best to ignore the Communists: paying attention to them, whether through criticism or praise, would only serve to give them comfort and encouragement, making them feel as if they mattered. Why should Americans want to act any differently with regards to the Republicans or the Democrats?

In light of all of this, my recent focus is on thinking through the particulars of a post-collapse society: what will me and my kids eat? Where is our water coming from? Where will we protect ourselves from environmental and social threats? Who are the people we will want around? While I can’t afford a fancy prepper bunker and food cache, I would not take offense at being called a prepper — a term that seems infinitely better than unprepper, Democrat, or Republican.

Trump or Harris? The options might as well be cyanide or arsenic? It’s all poison. I say do as Candide did and mind your garden, ideally harvesting before the grocery stores run dry.

I’m not sure what it’s going to take for people to wake up and start preparing for new realities — be they climatic, physical-material, or social realities — but clearly writing and researching ain’t cutting it.

• Climate Risk and Real Estate: The Ticking Time Bond
• What Watching My Dad Die of Cancer Taught Me About Climate Change
• Top 5 Large American Cities That Will Be Destroyed By Climate Change
• Florida: So Long, and Thanks for All the Dead Fish

Thoughts On Israel, Part II

Minimalism: class, fetishes and the fate of the planet

How Modern America is Optimized for Loneliness, Misery, and Poor Health

In 12-step programs, the first step to recovery is admitting powerlessness over one’s addiction specifically and with living more generally. These admissions usually are made when addicted life becomes so intolerable that the addict becomes open to and willing to adopt new, healthy ways of living. This admission and its associated state is usually called hitting bottom. I hit bottom in 1999; that’s when I admitted to myself and others that I could never safely consume alcohol, evidenced in countless bar-rooms, jail cells, unsavory late-night situations, and rapidly failing health. I also had to admit I didn’t know how to live, or in 12-step speak, I had to admit my life was “unmanageable” — i.e. I couldn’t handle the myriad tasks and processes needed to live a happy, healthy existence with my outgoing existential operating system. Paradoxically, this admission of powerlessness and existential incompetence was a huge relief, as it seems to be the case with many I’ve met who were in a similar position. The energy I previously spent propping up the lies and egoistic attachment to my miserable life was freed up for healthier, wiser pursuits. This first step provided the gateway for the other eleven that address the misery in more detail.

Hitting bottom — the point at which the addict realizes he or she can’t go on using — is similar to the thermodynamic principle of maximum entropy, aka MaxEnt. At a certain point, every energetic system — be it a substance-addicted human, a civilization, or a galaxy — reaches a point where it becomes too complex (entropic) to go on. When a system reaches that point, it begins its unstoppable path towards collapse, decay, and death. MaxEnt is the top of the wave, just before that wave folds over and crashes.

Treated as an energetic system, our modern, industrialized civilization is in the middle of a MaxEnt event. Reliable modeling for this peak and its subsequent collapse have been known since at least 1972, when the Club of Rome modeled out a precipitous collapse of population, food production, and more. So far, the model is proving to be lethally accurate. Despite this situation, mainstream and even not-so-mainstream media narratives purport that with the right technology, the right president, the right policies, the right interest rate, the right widget — that with these things, we will can achieve a harmonious relationship between humans and the planet. This is like telling an alcoholic who usually drinks whiskey that his alcoholism will work itself out if he only drinks beer (hint: it won’t).

Life for most modern Americans is akin to an addict in their last days of addiction, characterized by complexity, decay, and destruction. It’s a wave in mid-collapse. Modern Americans — and their foreign imitators — are told to keep surfing this collapsing wave, spending their stressed-out, tired lives working so they can afford to buy their bliss. What they’re really doing is maximizing investor profits, shopping for stuff they don’t need and investing in hollow, materialistic lifestyles, all while burying themselves in education, transportation, housing, and medical care debt. In this harried, delusional universe, connecting with and investing in family, community, health, and nature become afterthoughts.

This modern world’s values are unlike historical ones, which were mainly concerned with strengthening connections to one’s family, tribe, community, and god(s). This modern world’s structure is also unlike historical ones, the latter being geographically constrained and inclusive of housing, schools, churches, sweat lodges, and other amenities that strengthen social connection. Historical societies were also located in places with fresh water, arable land, and bearable climates — all handy things for, you know, staying alive.

How Modern America is Optimized for Loneliness, Misery, and Poor Health

Modern America flips historical norms. Family and community bonds have been replaced by algorithmic, digitally-delivered solipsism that promote fealty to corporations and political parties. Centralized community structures have been replaced by individuated homes that act as centers of their own universe, degrading community connections and amplifying societal solipsism. Amenity structures like shops and places of worship— ones that could promote social cohesion — are in dispersed locations within an hour’s drive of one’s home. Small, community-owned and run businesses near housing are replaced by multinational-corporation-owned office parks and malls far from housing. Settlements are placed indiscriminately since air conditioning and imported water can make environmentally hostile locations viable for human habitation.

Apocalypse Soon

It’s unbelievable anyone believes this anti-human, anti-planet, anti-Life system can continue much longer, much less want it to. For its part, the planet has been tossing floods, wildfires, heat-waves, droughts, and disease at this lifestyle and its structures, hoping to excise all of it like an infected wart, but America gonna America.

The thing about waves is that they can be forestalled and buffered, but never eliminated. Collapse is a matter of when, not if. There’s no going back to the mythological “again” Trump trumpets, nor to the Halcyon days of Clinton-era neoliberal economics Harris indirectly promises. The epochal wave of modern, industrial society is crashing. And if my experience of getting sober is any guide, that’s the best possible scenario, for it’s only on the other side of collapse that new, healthy, resilient systems can emerge.

This is an revised version of a post originally published at https://deepfriedlander.substack.com.

The state of our physical and mental health primarily flows from what we consume, whether that consumed thing is a gallon or petroleum, a potato chip, or a news headline. When we look and feel like crap, it’s probably related to consuming crappy foods and living a crappy, unhealthy lifestyle. If our minds are confused and agitated, it’s probably because we are consuming and living by toxic, false beliefs. Garbage in, garbage out.

In May, I wrote my most popular Medium piece to date, entitled, “How Modern America is Optimized for Loneliness, Misery, and Poor Health.” In the ensuing months, I’ve been pondering the relationship of that piece’s thesis and the prevalence of mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, ADHD, and substance addiction. I keep concluding that if our societal structures are set up to isolate, placate, and distract, how can one not suffer from some sort of mental illness? Taking this logic a step further, I wonder if many of these conditions aren’t illnesses at all, but healthy-normal responses to toxic environments, lifestyles, and belief systems. It’d be surprising if a person who spends over eight hours a day looking at their phone — flitting between different FOMO-inducing apps, web pages, newsfeeds, texts, etc. — didn’t display the symptoms of anxiety or ADHD. Drink poison, get sick. This is not to dismiss the role of genetics, but it is to question the direction of causality between environmental forces and genetic predispositions — that the former’s causes can trigger and exacerbate the latter’s effects.

Since I covered toxic environments, and because there are many who cover toxic lifestyles and foods more expertly than me, I thought I’d write about toxic ideas and belief systems, ones that seem to be held by the majority of modern humans nowadays, making them unhappy, ignorant, and existentially impotent. Here’s a list of ten toxic ideas and beliefs that should be purged from our collective ontological diets ASAP:

1. That Big Business/Government/Media/Pharma/Tech will solve the problems they created. These entities and their beneficiaries, which increasingly work as a unified phalanx, are causing most of the world’s biggest problems — anthropogenic climate change, pollution, wealth inequality, a global “housing crisis,” homelessness, obesity/hunger/malnutrition, industrial warfare, etc. It’s a fallacy — one propped up daily by Big Media — that these institutions and their functionaries will undo or reduce these problems. There’s no logic in this reasoning, especially when these entities have so much to gain from problem perpetuation.
2. That technology will save the day. Many will bemoan the impact of Big Tech (Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple), but retain their faith in Technology like cryptocurrency, blockchain, renewables, EVs, etc. What this faith misses is how technological panaceas are intrinsically connected to the continuance of the large scale and centralized power systems maintaining electrical grid and supply chain stability. This is why most techno-proponents are already part of the power-wielding hegemony. Their stated agenda to empower the little guy and equitably distribute power belies their real motivation of wresting control of the energy, monetary, and communication systems currently controlled by the Old Guard (i.e. their parents).
3. That individual action can’t affect positive [or negative] change. Big Business/Government/Media/Pharma/Tech keeps the masses powerless by convincing them that their problems need top-down support to be remedied. Yet, per point number one, these big entities are the ones screwing things up. Consider this: Big Business can’t exist without lots of individual workers doing its bidding. Big Government can’t exist without faithful constituents. Big Media can’t exist without uncritical, uninformed readers and viewers. Big Pharma can’t exist without individuals who won’t take responsibility for their mental and physical health (see point five). Big Tech can’t exist without novelty and convenience-obsessed individuals giving their time, money, and allegiance to technology. Don’t believe the hype. You, the individual, have the power.
4. That most wars are about more than energy/resource security. Why does the media generate so much moral outrage and support for wars in places with strategic value for oil and gas extraction, yet is indifferent to conflicts in regions without? It’s because oil, gas, and the economic engines these liquids fuel are the reason for wars. Morality is a convenient excuse (see my final point for more about morality).
5. That wealth is more important than health. Health is wealth is an axiom whose truth most only discover when their health disappears and it’s too late to get it back. No, on a functional level, the average modern human takes little heed of being and staying healthy, evidenced by (among other things) the fact that 74 and 42 percent of the total US population is overweight and obese, respectively, per the CDC. Despite their abysmal health, the average American spends a paltry 18 minutes a day exercising and 34 minutes socializing, both cornerstones of good physical and mental health. Nonetheless, this same American puts in his or her eight hour workday (all stats per BLS) and eight plus hours of screen time. This lopsided time allocation is a reflection of lopsided values…and, to be fair, corresponding economic conditions that promote non-stop toil for economic gain and survival.
6. That more is intrinsically a good thing. Look at a hillside covered with ticky-tacky suburban homes or at a Lagos or Delhi slum teeming with hungry people or at a landfill overflowing with the detritus of our industrial, disposable lifestyles. Take a big whiff off the tailpipe from a 5,000 pound F150, America’s best selling automobile. These are the ugly consequences of a global obsession with more, no matter what Steven Pinker says.
7. That real change happens without personal sacrifice. There’s a widespread delusion that a new, sustainable world is possible when today’s dirty, industrial systems are replaced by clean (i.e. less dirty), industrial systems. Instead of driving internal combustion engines, we drive EVs; instead of using petroleum-based single-use packaging, we use compostable packaging; and so forth. This delusion is readily adopted because it requires no sacrifice or alteration of existing lifestyles. This focus on supply completely misses the thing causing all of the problems: unsustainable demand — often for stuff and conveniences that serve no purpose towards, or directly undermine, human and planetary flourishing (big trucks, big homes, an endless supply of electronics, etc.). Until people start understanding what they actually need, not perceived or marketed needs, and consuming accordingly, until they know and experience “enoughness,” nothing will be enough.
8. That “casual sex” exists. Perhaps the only thing less casual than sex is death. Sexual intercourse, while undoubtedly pleasurable, is an evolutionary and biological act for perpetuating the species. To hold sex and sexuality principally as tools for getting attention or a recreational act or a tool for selling stuff obscures sex’s actual seriousness and sanctity. It’s messing with a lot of our heads.
9. That pleasure and happiness are the same thing. The other points on this list obliquely point to this junk idea, but it bears further clarification. A Buddhist teacher once told me that if something was a real source of happiness, the more we did that thing, the happier we would become. He then applied this filter to the things humans often turn to to feel better — things like sex, drugs, booze, junk food, fast cars, purchasing shiny, new stuff, etc. He then asked if we become happier the more we do these things? Do more drugs, sex, and ice cream lead to Nirvana? Of course not. Once the initial pleasure wears off, ice cream, drugs, sex, shopping, and other transitory pleasures are likely to make us feel worse. He contrasted this to virtues loving, kindness, generosity, and patience — all of which tend to increase our sense of happiness the more we do them. The problem is that Big Business can’t sell virtue, but it can sell drugs and other stuff.
10. That the material and ephemeral are more important than the spiritual and enduring. I was raised in a spiritual vacuum by an avowed atheist dad and a church-hating former nun mom. As such, my early aims in life, if one can call them that, were about becoming like the men I saw on TV: professionally accomplished, physically attractive, and sexually promiscuous. Like many, I was taken off this hackneyed path when my individual resources proved unsuccessful, bordering on fatal, for living a happy and healthy life (yes, drugs and alcohol were involved). In the wake of ruin, I discovered a power and order greater than myself, one I call God. I’ve met more people than most, and it’s my abundant personal and observational experience that people who live at peace with themselves and the world have and maintain a connection to a higher source, whether they call that source God, Christ, Allah, Buddha, the Tao, Truth, or Nature. To be connected to this power is to be aligned with an internal and enduring order, logic, and purpose — one that often exists in spite of external disorder, absurdity, and meaninglessness. The connection to the eternal, which was once a widespread value in preindustrial times, has been replaced by the pursuit of the sellable and ephemeral — fame, looks, wealth, acquisitiveness. Today, God and saints have been replaced by the false idols of markets and businesspeople, of politics and politicians, of celebrity, of technology, and most of all, of personal glory. This premium placed on the material and ephemeral over the spiritual and enduring is not working individually, and it certainly isn’t working on a collective level.

A few years ago, I ran across a piece by a venture capitalist on the topic of climate technology. The piece’s cover image (above) showed a woman outside her single-family home, her electric SUV being charged under a photovoltaic canopy while wind turbines provided additional power. The woman stands triumphantly in front of her home, phone in hand, watching a package being delivered by a drone. This slick, sanitized, cartoonish vision of the future is probably what Marc Andreesen had in mind when he wrote the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” In this techno-optimist future, everything is new and shiny, people have everything they need, and everything is better, faster, and more sustainable than everything is now. Mining for the petroleum, cobalt, lithium, copper, silicon, and the other natural resources needed to make this future possible are presumably handled by nanobots. Waste streams from manufacturing and product disposal -old and discarded PV panels, wind turbines, data servers, smartphones, etc. -are also managed by nanobots. In fact, all of the future world’s hardest, currently-unsolved problems will be solved by nanobots, because there are no limits on what uninvented, fantasy technology can do. Needless to say, a nanobot-less future doesn’t fit with the techno-optimist’s vision. Without nanobots, the future will likely continue relying on the slave labor, overflowing landfills, and lethal levels of emissions that built today’s industrial-technological hellscape. It’s tough to be optimistic about these things.

The only people who could possibly buy this VC’s vision of the future are those who are blind to, or are shielded from the vast harm already inflicted by technology. They don’t see Chinese and Indian factory workers making subsistence wages, living and toiling in abysmal conditions manufacturing the tech. They don’t see the harms technology has exacted on the collective interpersonal and cognitive capabilities of humankind. They don’t see that everything humans manufacture gets old, breaks, is discarded, and must go somewhere -be it in a landfill, an ocean, or vaporized in the air. They can’t or won’t see these things because to do so would undermine their delusional visions of the future and, by extension, the value of their current work intended to create this future.

In November 2009, I was featured on the cover of the New York Times’ real estate section. The piece, entitled “ The Decline and Fall of the Bachelor Pad,’’ was about bachelors living in unorthodox housing arrangements as a response to the 2008 financial crisis. I was living in a Brooklyn Heights townhouse in which everything was in various states of disrepair and decay. Rather than apologize for my dilapidated home, I attempted to find meaning in it. From the Times’:

For Mr. Friedlander, his surroundings are an exercise in mastering a sort of Zen, “and not identifying with my apartment,” he explained, “being able to find peaceful existence no matter what kind of living situation.”

In contrast to popular notions about the nature of success, I was trying to promote a version of success that stood independent from acquiring a big house, fast car, lots of gadgets, etc. I had the sense that as the earth’s climate destabilizes and natural resources become more scarce and supply chains break down and economic and political structures collapse, basing success on the acquisition of new and shiny stuff would be increasingly difficult and futile. Much like the Japanese art of kintsugi, I wanted to promote an appreciation and aesthetic for the state of brokenness.

A couple years after the Times’ piece, I started working at the micro-apartment startup LifeEdited. In my role, the future of housing (and living) became my official area of focus. We designed and developed several prototype apartments, including my home, meant to demonstrate how design and technology could add a ton of function to relatively small spaces. LifeEdited’s millionaire CEO was a techno-booster, and unlike my busted Brooklyn apartment from the Times’, the LifeEdited prototype apartments were slick, new, and gadget filled. Our first apartment, dubbed LE1, was a complicated, white jewel box design that was near impossible to keep clean and rightly lambasted in another Times’ piece entitled “ Selling the Pared Down Life.’

I left LifeEdited in 2016 after realizing our fussy little apartments would never be a scalable housing solution. I started my own consultancy with a focus on the future of housing, mainly helping startups and developers with innovative housing solutions get their products and projects to market. I also worked with a couple of the world’s largest corporations in helping them grasp the future and how to be ready for it. In late 2018, one of these corporations hired me to write a white paper on the future of housing. But my research did not point to a future that looked anything like the VC’s idealized version. My research portended a future dominated by scorching temperatures, elevated seas, drenched coasts, droughted deserts, and tanked economies. In this broken, dirty, hot, wet, sick, and uncomfortable future, billions of migrants wander the world scrounging for leftover food, water, and materials. This is a future where survival, not convenience or technological optimization, will be the highest priority. In other words, the future of human civilization is a broken mess that resembles Mad Max far more than The Jetsons.

Originally published at https://deepfriedlander.substack.com.

• Adaptive reuse is usually more ecological than new construction. During an average building’s lifecycle, a quarter of its carbon footprint is embodied in the materials used for construction. Extending the life of existing buildings through adaptive reuse also extends the life of its materials, lowering embodied carbon over new buildings with all new materials.
• Adaptive reuse is usually more aesthetic than new construction, since it is often applied to older buildings whose scale and quality tends to be superior to the generic buildings that characterize most contemporary architecture. Pritzker Prize winning architect Lacaton & Vassal’s work is a beautiful demonstration of this.
• Adaptive reuse is usually more interesting than new construction, since it takes a creative lens to overlay new uses on old structures.

For these reasons and more, I should be excited about the adaptive reuse programs being initiated in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. These initiatives are focused on converting office buildings into housing, ostensibly to relieve housing shortages and give new life to the dead and dying buildings that are making so many downtowns into real estate cemeteries.

I should be excited about this, but I am not…not fully, at least. Let me explain why.

The Problem with Real Estate Monocultures

The shophouse was a once-common architectural form found across the globe, and especially in southeast Asia. As its name suggests, shophouses combined a shop and house in one structure. A shophouse is an architectural form that acknowledges the relation of housing and workspaces. Historically, vocations required more than a desk and wifi signal to perform; most required dedicated workspaces to perform. And because people historically lacked modern public transit or cars, those workspaces had to be close to (or in a) home.

How Modern America is Optimized for Loneliness, Misery, and Poor Health

In the late 19th century, public transit and automobiles started decoupling homes from workspaces. One could live in Brooklyn and get to work in Manhattan on the subway. One could live in Naperville and get to work in downtown Chicago driving a car on freeways, or occasionally reverse commute from downtown to suburb. As transit technology and infrastructure grew, housing and workspaces became so decoupled that many regions imposed single-use zoning that prohibited commercial activity in residential areas and vice versa. The net effect of this distancing of home, work, and amenities is an isolated population that spends an inordinate amount of time getting around in their cars. By 2019, the average round-trip commute in the U.S. was 55 minutes per the Census. And though commute times may have shrunk during the lockdown for the ~27 percent of the workforce that works in hybrid or remote situations, there’s new research suggesting that hybrid work is increasing the number of ‘super commuters’ who spend an average of five hours on their daily commutes. Of course, there are still millions who cannot work remotely and commute to work via public transit or, more often, in their polluting, costly, dangerous, stress-inducing automobiles. Technologically primitive, mobility-deficient, shophouse-dwellers walked downstairs to get to work.

By the end of the twentieth century, the U.S. morphed into a land of bifurcated residential and commercial real estate. Downtown office workers either commuted from nearby apartment buildings or came in from suburbs via cars or commuter rail. Suburban offices and other workspaces were in distinct districts from suburban housing. Workers accepted this circuitous, expensive, inconvenient, stressful, anti-social, and dangerous arrangement until the lockdown. Suddenly, office workers were liberated from their desks, commutes, chatty coworkers, and $30 lunches at TGIFridays. All remote workers needed was a computer, a strong wifi connection, and a somewhat quiet space to work — anywhere in the world, in fact. Many companies jumped on the hybrid and remote bandwagon, eager to be liberated from costly, long-term commercial leases.

But the office liberation had costs, the most obvious being scores of empty, or near empty office buildings. The absence of workers moving to and from work made — and is making — many once-busy downtowns into lifeless real estate graveyards.

It wasn’t just the missing office workers that created funereal downtowns. Office buildings employ property managers and other downstream service workers: restaurant and cafe workers, business attire purveyors, etc. These jobs are either gone or imperiled.

'Zombie Offices' Spell Trouble for Some Banks

Making matters worse, these ‘zombie’ office buildings have operating costs — mortgage payments, utilities, taxes, etc. — that continue whether they’re occupied or not. Without revenue from lessees, building owners cannot pay for those costs. Many experts rightfully see a mass default event on commercial real estate loans as the thing that finally pushes the world economy into the abyss (NB: many commercial loans are held by foreign entities, hence the global impact).

Turning disused offices into housing won’t address the main thing killing downtowns, which is the flight of jobs the offices were initially built for. Without an active churn of people traveling from home to work to shops — the things that make living in cities appealing — downtowns will remain lifeless and insolvent.

Affordable housing shortages aren’t caused by a lack of housing

Excitement about office to residential conversions is fueled by the notion that what’s making cities unaffordable is a lack of housing supply to meet demand. Increase supply, satisfy demand, and everyone will be happy and housed. As I outlined in a previous piece, this notion is specious at best and completely misses what ‘affordable’ means.

FFS, Stop Saying There’s a Housing Shortage in America

Affordability is when something’s price is attainable relative to available budget. Housing affordability is generally regarded as housing costs that are less than 30 percent of household income. For example, a person making $1 million a year can spend anything less than $300,000 on housing and have housing affordability. Affordability is always a relative figure based on a ratio of income to expenses.

Backing up a minute, it’s important to distinguish the terms ‘affordable housing’ and ‘housing affordability’; the former term has become synonymous with government regulated, subsidized housing, while the latter indicates affordable market conditions. Subsidized housing doesn’t affect housing affordability at scale; it provides a handful of folks an affordable home, as long as they keep their incomes low. Moreover, affordable housing is almost invariably connected to handouts to developers — ones they use to subsidize construction of unaffordable housing.

Adding more housing through office to residential conversions or other means won’t increase incomes, so it won’t lead to housing affordability. There will just be more housing that few will be able to afford. On the plus side, these conversions will likely create a windfall for empty office building owners and the developers managing the conversions.

There’s more than one way to convert an office building

There are ways to bring life back to big cities and their lagging real estate, but first there needs to be a reality check about the past, present, and future of work, technology, and civilization.

Looking towards the past, cities like NYC forged their greatness through what they produced, whether that was trade, manufacturing, design, art, food, or something else. Cities like NYC lost their greatness when they became consumer outposts, reduced to being places for global elites to shop, eat, and take in a derivative Broadway show.

Looking at the present, workers and real estate stakeholders need to realize there’s no going back to the idyllic days of $150,000 a year salaried assistant editor jobs, two martini lunches, and 10 year floor-through office leases at premium prices. Many of the high paying professions that were once the downtown’s economic and cultural lifeblood — finance, law, design, media, etc. — are being replaced by technology, and AI in particular. Adding more housing won’t bring cities back to life because these professions and the revenue the produce — revenue needed to pay rent — are going extinct.

Cities need to be completely re-imagined.

Looking towards the future, the best chance cities have for adapting to new economic, social, and environmental conditions is bringing back the spirit and function of the shophouse. People need places to live and work and these places should be very close to one another — perhaps in the same building. If today’s adaptive reuse programs included converting office buildings to accommodate housing, flex-office space, manufacturing and warehouse spaces, industrial kitchens, agriculture, or whatever crazy idea tenants can dream up, I would be very excited for the future of cities and humanity. This kind or real estate exists. A couple stateside examples include The Arcade Providence, in Rhode Island and is Makerhood in Newark, New Jersey. Both make use of historic structures and combine housing and workspaces — retail, light manufacturing, food production, and agriculture — all in one development.

But alas, most adaptive reuse programs I’ve run across are stuck in the single-use real estate paradigm, usually converting single-use office buildings into single-use residential buildings. This path undermines what makes successful cities successful, namely a distributed and compacted mix of residential, commercial, and recreational spaces, where everything one needs is easily accessed, where movement between these spaces creates a dynamic, active, and social civic life. This path can and should be taken, but it won’t until minds, real estate, and Capital Markets become open to new possibilities.

If you’re sitting on dormant real estate and need help finding new uses for it, I’m around to help. Drop me a line.

America’s ubiquitous use of single use zoning is at the root of some of the biggest economic, environmental, and social issues of the day. This type of planning forces people into costly, carbon-spewing cars that promote sedentary lifestyles. This zoning puts housing in one place, work in another, and recreation in yet another, keeping people distant from their friends and workplaces, driving the loneliness epidemic. Yet anyone who’s spent time outside the US, Canada, and Australia — basically, the only countries that have this type of zoning — can attest that single use zoning is not the only way to configure towns and cities. Cities can be planned for people to live near one another, bypassing driving and isolation, and promoting social connectivity. They can have vibrant street life with shops and other amenities within walking distance. These cities can even be in America. In fact, they once were.

First published in 2014, The University of Oklahoma’s “60 Years of Urban Change” is a startling reminder that America wasn’t always the land of sprawling, indistinguishable suburbs. The ‘before’ images show the type of population density many urbanists today long for. The ‘after’ images show the cities bisected by massive highways and covered with surface parking lots. The project shows what many large American cities looked like before and after their transformation — or deformation — by mid-20th century urban renewal initiatives.

Urban renewal was a movement that swept the US and several global cities from the 1940s to 1960s. The movement tracked with the general movement from cities to suburbs — a movement that has more or less continued to this day. For the most part, urban renewal leveled many older, smaller urban buildings to make way for larger buildings and highways, shifting cities from being people centric to car centric. But as the U of O’s aerial pictures testify, most American cities were dense, easily traversed by foot or public transit, and they were filled with “fine grained architecture,” not just cookie-cutter highrises. Particularly surprising was the former density of cities like Houston and Atlanta, which today are paragons of car-centricity and sprawl. The pictures are a stark reminder that a lot of stuff that is now bad was once good. I’d argue this stuff can be made good again.

Check out the full set of images and notes at U of O’s website.

A version of this piece was originally published at https://deepfriedlander.substack.com.

I mean, well I guess it’s ultimately a question of what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students. Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill even they disagree with you? If the answer is no, then you should allow basic — I mean it’s crazy to say because we are on an Ivy League campus but this is like basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for.

Johanna King-Slutzky, Columbia PhD Candidate and Pro-Palestinian protester.

Like so many, I was horrified last week to learn that Columbia University is starving its student protesters, refusing to give them the meal service they — or, more likely, their parents — paid for. Worse still, the school is apparently withholding beverages and water, since protester Johanna King-Slutzky suggested that the students could die of dehydration if the school didn’t get them a glass of water or something. Like the protesters, I feel compelled to leverage my privilege and in any way I can. And because I’m a Columbia grad, I’m likely better at helping than other helpers.

• On Israel, Columbia University, New York City, and Complexity
• Thoughts On Israel, Part I

Being over a thousand miles away, I can best help these starving, dehydrated protesters by pointing them to safe spaces where they can replenish themselves calorically, hydrationally, and spiritually.

Full disclosure, I haven’t lived near Columbia since 2007, but a quick internet search reveals several of my secret caches of food and fluids remain. Below are places where the protesters might find the sustenance to continue living and toppling the patriarchy through their support of the fiercely anti-patriarchal Palestinian people.

Absolute Bagels

Don’t let the fact that this bagel joint is owned and operated by a Thai family fool you, these are the best bagels in the city, and possibly the world. AB makes H&H taste like Wonder Bread. Their bagels are somehow perpetually coming out of the oven, with a perfectly crusty exterior and steaming, soft interior. My personal favorite were their everything bagels, which have a healthy amount of rock salt to bring the other flavors out. And before you ask, know they offer a host of Tofutti smears, since I’m confident most protesters are vegans. At $1 a bagel, there’s little economic reason for Columbia’s Freedom Protesters to starve. Bring your protest signs, but don’t bother bringing a credit card because AB is cash only! AB on Yelp.

Koronet Pizza

Koronet Pizza is not good pizza, but its location between 110th and 111th on Broadway is close enough to Columbia’s campus for a starving protesters to crawl to, and each of their monstrous, flavorless $4.50 slices can save the lives of several starving protesters. Koronet’s website.

Taqueria y Fonda

TyF should probably be consumed after protesting since their delicious, homemade, cheese-covered Mexican dishes aren’t light. Try the quesos funditos or alambres. You won’t regret it…well, you may regret it a little the next day. Also, the place is small, so you may want to go without a gaggle of other protesters. TyF website.

Tom’s Restaurant

Protesters can express their fandom of Barnard alum Suzanne Vega and/or pretend they’re Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer at this venerable — if gastronomically unremarkable — diner at the corner of Broadway and 112th street. Tom’s Restaurant on Yelp.

Halal Cart

If the protesters really want to show their solidarity with the Palestinians — and possibly interact with real Palestinians — nothing shrieks intifada like a heaping pile of lamb over rice (extra white sauce, of course) from one of the city’s ubiquitous Halal carts. There are usually carts near the Broadway and 116th campus entrance and subway station. I think there is a cart or two on Amsterdam below the overpass between Columbia and SIPA as well. Hooda Halal (pictured, near Columbia) on Yelp.

Related Reading

Human Rights Watch: “Gaza: Israel’s Imposed Starvation Deadly for Children”

PBS: “The UN says there’s ‘full-blown famine’ in northern Gaza”

CBS News: “Nearly a quarter of U.S. adults sometimes don’t get enough to eat”

While aphorisms like “choosing experiences, health, and happiness over stuff” are commonplace today, this was 15 years ago — a time when many still clung to ideas of success inseparable from the acquisition of degrees, jobs, homes, spouses, kids, cars, and lots and lots of stuff. I declared in global media that I was committed to being happy, first and foremost, and that I saw my happiness stemming from living an experience-packed life I loved, not from an obligation-driven existence in a home packed with stuff.

I wasn’t describing a new type of housing. I was describing a new way of living.

My pursuit of happiness found a professional complement at LifeEdited, where we attempted to bring housing to market that correlated with the happiness over stuff philosophy. This meant homes that were smaller and easier to maintain than conventional ones, that were centrally located and near one’s community, and that were affordable.

Data-Driven Architecture

LifeEdited got a lot of media attention for our minimalist philosophizing and tricked-out prototype homes (including mine), but we never brought to market the awesome, efficient, affordable micro-apartments we promised — the consequence of a Playa-preoccupied CEO and a doggedly change-averse real estate industry.

The LifeEdited team, me included, were more or less techies with little real estate experience. But the real estate market collapse and resulting recession seemed like an ideal time for a nimble team of techies to disrupt how real estate was designed, built, and operated. We quickly learned our tech credentials and founder’s relatively meager tech money (relative to real estate money) were no match for the architectural, regulatory, and financing inertia of the real estate industry.

One of the biggest problems was the bank bailout. Instead of confronting the real estate industry’s failings — using too much debt to build too many poorly designed, built, and planned homes for people with too little money — the bank bailout rewarded them. Wealthy developers and investors scooped up scores of foreclosed homes at deep discounts and put them back on the market as ATM-like rentals. This windfall from a collapse gave little motivation to invest in new asset types like micro-apartments, new construction methods like modular, or new operating models like coliving, even when those things were much better product-market fits for present and future conditions than status quo offerings. Poorly designed, built, and planned real estate was delivering great returns, albeit with gobs of federal support. Why mess with a bad thing?

How Modern America is Optimized for Loneliness, Misery, and Poor Health

Proptech’s Rise and Fall

I left LifeEdited in mid-2016 to consult, working mainly with real estate startups and developers with practical plans for bringing their products to market. Among others, my clients included modular construction startups and developers, transforming furniture companies, and corporate innovation arms doing deep dives on the future of housing.

Not long after I started consulting, I attended the first MIPIM PropTech Summit. This was probably the first time I heard the term proptech, which stands for property technology. I was excited. After five years as an under-appreciated, under-funded first mover, the venture-backed cavalry had arrived. The real estate industry seemed poised for a revolution — one that promised an era when real estate was held to the same level of design, manufacturing, and operational sophistication as the tech sector.

For all of my excitement at the summit, with the exception of a handful of coliving, coworking, and modular and prefab startups, few proptech startups were product or property focused, i.e. designing, building, and operating new types of real estate assets for the novel ways people live and for the novel conditions confronting real estate markets. Most proptech startups were building software to improve financing, sales, project management, and operational efficiency for conventional real estate assets with conventional users/tenants. In other words, they were focused on improving real estate processes, not products. The process efficiencies were designed to squeeze as much money out of real estate as possible, often with the homes scooped up during the recession. These efficiencies could be realized without changing how that real estate was designed, planned, built, and used.

[NB: For simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to the two types of proptech startups as property and software startups instead of product and process startups. I’m also lumping real estate operators with builders in the property category, since the former category usually has to alter properties for their models to work.]

From 2016–2019, proptech funding flowed freely, but again, primarily to software startups. Even in these early days, many property startups like LifeEdited, modular startup Kasita, Acre Homes, and others were failing. I wrote about why this was in Promodo a couple years ago:

While many of the initial real estate product innovation startups tanked, process innovation startups thrived. OpenDoor, Zillow, Zumper, and others brought appropriate levels of process efficiency to the real estate industry, removing many of the arcane, analog ways assets were traditionally transacted. These startups delivered improved returns without costly design, regulatory, or financing changes. As these platforms became more established, real estate product design moved even further away from innovation and towards standardized commodity value. The speed with which these platforms can provide deal flow is why every U.S. city and greenfield lot is being blanketed with single-family housing tracts, five-over-twos, and other as-of-right, asset-grade real estate.

These first failures were followed by many, many more in the coming years: Katerra, Social Construct, Veev, Knotel, Spacious, Ollie, Starcity, Zeus Living, and of course WeWork.

In response to these property startup failures, most VCs turned their attention exclusively to proptech software startups, which promised scalability at the speed of the internet. Property startups, on the other hand, basically didn’t scale financially, since every product delivered required more building materials, fabrication equipment, labor, permits, employees, etc. These expenses prevented any potential for hockey stick growth, so most VCs lost interest in investing in property startups altogether.

• Small Minds, Big Checks: Softbank, Y-Combinator, and the Attempted Murder of Real Estate Innovation
• Why WeWork Failed

Ironically, one of the few exceptions to the above was WeWork. Yes, WeWork’s asset-light approach promised scalability akin to software, but WeWork was definitely a property startup that designed, built out, and operated actual real estate assets. And to its credit, WeWork did build for 21st century lifestyles — ones where the lines between professional and personal lives became blurry (full disclosure: I loved the ill-fated WeLive). Sadly, WeWork did all these things on top of a pile of carelessly-issued venture debt, overstated market demand, and founder malfeasance.

But it wasn’t just product/property startups that failed. In time, many software startups folded or proved underperformers as well. The problem was that software-based process-efficiency gains were being negated by investor demands on returns. The obsession to squeeze every cent from properties left little money on the table for startups whose revenue depended on transaction commissions or savings on small efficiency gains, even when those gains were spread across big projects and portfolios.

There was a later spike in proptech investing in 2020 and 2021, when VCs converted hastily-issued stimulus funds into hastily-made venture investments. Proptech founder David Eisenberg said this to Bisnow about this late-stage proptech investing, “It was a frenzy, you know. You had a zero-interest-rate environment, which was causing people to go further out on the risk curve.” But the dearth of successes from both pre-and-post lockdown investments, coupled with rising interest rates in early 2022 sent proptech investing off a cliff, where it remains today.

Then there were the countless startups focused on optimizing for a moribund asset class, i.e. offices. The lockdown brought into relief what unhappy, unhealthy, unproductive places most offices are, and no one except office landlords wants to go back to them. As if the situation couldn’t get worse, vacancy is bound to increase as AI eviscerates the white collar jobs offices were made for.

Even though they were meant to bring real estate into the 21st century, most proptech startups and their products were built around 20th-century market assumptions: of rigid asset classes, of workers continuing to sacrifice their lives, families, and passions for a paycheck, of stressful, polluting commutes to suburban office parks and downtown office highrises, of unironically wearing keycard lanyards, of lunches at TGI Fridays or Pret a Manger, of access to unlimited debt and natural resources, of stable climates and stationary coastlines.

The constants are changing. Runaway debt and inflation, an ever-increasing cost of living, demographic and geographic shifts, cryto, AI, failing public health, depleted natural resources, and climate change already has — and will continue to — upend how and where humans live. The venture world should have been investing in proptech startups and founders intrepid enough to meet these forces head on. Instead, most proptech investments have gone to startups and founders throwing superficial tech layers on anachronistic real estate supporting anachronistic lifestyles and bygone market conditions.

Why I Care

My interest in proptech startups and investing is borne of frustration trying to raise for a couple property-based startups I developed — ones with world class ideas and talent, ones that meet the market conditions of today and as far into tomorrow as I can see.

I’ve spent the last few years explaining to VCs why things like climate adaptation, market-rate affordability, and supporting human connection and health are important — and potentially lucrative — things to invest in, even when these things may require as many designers and carpenters as coders to carry out. For my efforts, most VCs told me, “this is a great idea, but we’re only investing in software [or web3, AI, etc.].”

Perhaps my pitches and interminable trail of treatises for alternative approaches are futile. Like many, I blame my dad for my failures. A serial tech entrepreneur turned climate tech investor and activist, my dad led me to believe I could positively impact people and the planet through technology, rigorous reasoning, and the courage to say “this can be done better.” If he were still here, I’d probably scold him for making me such a hopeless idealist, then I’d seek his counsel on how realize my ambitions.

If you’re an investor or real estate stakeholder who shares my futile idealism, I’d love to chat. Perhaps, together we can start the real estate revolution that should have started years ago.