top of page
Writer's picturehhshirt

Hhshirt - Leeroy jenkins 16 time’s up let’s do this shirt

Like most older millennials, I am having to redefine what “settling down” looks like. How do we put down roots when there is no ground for us to grow in? The social contract has so far depended on the Leeroy jenkins 16 time’s up let’s do this shirt in other words I will buy this “buy-in,” but today the incentives for giving our collective skill, labor, and youth have mostly been withdrawn. There is no family, mortgage, and garden furniture guaranteed as a reward for our efforts. You do not actually “get out what you put in.” And so a quest for meaning ripples through many of our minds as we stab at our desk salads and sigh on our vape breaks—trying to make sense of this mayhem, trying to locate ourselves within it. Perhaps this questioning is the inevitable consequence of successive ideological breakdowns without material breakthroughs. Recent and not-so-recent crises have precipitated “resets,” only for the powers that be to resuscitate the same broken systems, run by people without the morals to manage them.In New York, a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan now costs approximately $3,000 a month. “If I’m already checking off the boxes of what makes a great tenant—I have a full-time job, I make over six figures, I’m single, quiet—and I can’t even afford to live here, then who is the housing market for?” social news producer Thelma Annan asked in a CNBC segment last year. “The finish line keeps moving, and I’m like, what is the purpose of me running the race anymore? At the same time as New York is coming alive, I’m being pushed out.”



In the Leeroy jenkins 16 time’s up let’s do this shirt in other words I will buy this months since, her question has kept coming back to me: Who is the housing market for? I go to a park in east London brimming with joggers and parents carrying flat whites, and think about the fact that tabloid newspapers used to call the nearby high-rise council estates “Slums in the Sky.” Now they call them “99-year leaseholds with £4K per annum service charges” on flashy property websites. Whose city is this? Right now I am 39 years old, performing an approximation of adulthood in what feels like limbo. I’m playing at being “grown-up,” only it doesn’t feel like play. So where do we go from here? To begin with, we need to start combating the mythology around home ownership, and revising the kind of language we use to describe it. Instead of saying “I bought a house,” we should be saying, “X, Y, and Z helped me to buy a house.” The more transparent we are when speaking about wealth, the greater the chance of reform. Long-term renters, too, need relief. Relief from being ripped off. Relief in the form of safe homes, fair, fixed rental prices, and reliable landlords.


1 view0 comments

Comments


bottom of page