Zillow is My Drug of Choice Now

Go ahead. Try it. You should be willing to try anything once. All the mid-thirties millennials that got burned by the Global Financial Crisis are doing it. So go ahead. Set the search parameters to your wildest imagination and start browsing. You may not be content with your lifestyle. But on Zillow, you can fly through the lavish rooms of your wildest dreams.

Is it safe? Sure. What’s wrong with wondering about the price tag on some of those expensive homes you drive by on your way to work? Go ahead, dip your toes in and see how much they cost on Zillow. See what they look like inside. See how these people decorate their homes and ask yourself what changes you would make. You’re just having a little fun thinking about what you might achieve one day. No harm in that.

But what about that gated community you’ve never been in? What about those Miami Beach mansions, the celebrity mansions in the Hollywood Hills, equestrian ranches out in the mountains? Once you get a feel for browsing Zillow, just have one night of cutting loose. When you immerse yourself in seeing what kind of wealth is out there, you’re gonna have your socks blown off. Will you ever be able to afford one of these homes without winning the lottery? Of course not. You probably don’t even want to live in a home that would require staff to maintain. You just want to ogle at the absurdity of wealthy people’s lifestyles. Really, who would want to live in a 30,000-square-foot mega-mansion with 17 bathrooms? Not you.

The house you wish you could afford

After a while, the high of gawking at these estates might wear off. You start wanting to look at a real, ideal dream home—a place you know in the back of your mind you’ll probably never be able to afford. But one can dream, right? Go ahead. Dream about that five-bedroom house in a cozy, upscale neighborhood. Marble countertops. Walk-in closets. The amount of shoes one can fit in a house like this and still have room for clothes. The size of family gatherings that could be had in that dining room… It’s the kind of house you’d be living in right now if you had made all the right choices in life, going back to high school, if you didn’t care about partying or spending time with family. So you don’t totally resent yourself for not having this lifestyle. You just need to sink into Zillow’s pages and see how many of these homes are out there. Go ahead. You can quit browsing anytime.

Eventually all these homes are going to look the same. That’s when you’ll have to move on to the harder stuff—the kind of home you’ll actually be able to afford in five to ten years. It’s gonna be hard to swallow. But this is where the Zillow path leads. You’ll spend hours chasing a high, as you click through page after page of dilapidated homes that look like they haven’t been renovated in thirty years—homes that make you wonder if you’ll ever be better off than your parents, but, hey, that’s the Millennial condition. The search eventually pays off though. When you find that home…a home that somehow looks stunning at this price, a home you’d actually be able to afford (if you nearly double your salary), a home that can motivate you to start sacrificing more hours after five o’clock…for a few minutes it’s magnificent.

The house you can actually afford.

Sure, Zillow might eventually have an impact on the brain. Some side effects might include: regretting life choices, giving up hobbies that aren’t financially productive, sacrificing vacations, making unnecessarily lavish purchases off Amazon in order to regain a sense of control over the amount of luxury in one’s life. Zillow may not be for everyone. But for the kind of momentary escapism it can provide a career-burned man in his mid-thirties, it’s my drug of choice.