Why I pay over $5000 to live in a San Francisco 1-bedroom

A Plinko board of opportunities, choices, and consequences

I just moved into a 1-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, where I pay $5400 a month for about 700 square feet. This is insane.

It is not even remotely in the cards for most Americans. To be direct, we can only afford it for three reasons: 1) I live with my fiancee, so the cost to me is $2700 a month, 2) San Francisco salaries scale higher to match, and 3) we live more frugally than our friends and contemporaries.

So why would we choose to leave Columbus, Ohio, where we pay $2000 less and could literally live in a 6-bedroom home with a backyard, basement, and porch?

Because it feels so goddamn good to have complete control over my life.

There is no better feeling in the world than having firm control over your existence, and I would not hesitate to say that loss of control is a big reason why so many young people are doomers. There is substantial data to support this:

37% of Americans say their lives feel out of control, skewing heavily by age (Gen Z is 52% and Millenials are 42%).

The number of Americans who feel like their next 5 years will be high quality is 59.2%, which seems great, but it’s the lowest number since they started asking the question in 2008.

Control is when your reality is a reflection of your desires.

Wanting something and then making it happen, that’s control. Not having control detaches you from your own reality. You are no longer living your life, you’re just going through the motions of what’s forced on you. Linking choice to outcomes is what it means to exist. A bacteria with simple reactions - good signal, go towards; pain signal, go away from - is not thought to be living. It is reacting, having its motions dictated by the environment and never making a decision of its own. There is no personality without choice. No identity and individuality. No freedom.

Even by San Francisco standards, my rent is stupid. If you called me a chump, I would be hard-pressed to disagree. If you said I was being robbed, you would be right. Other 1-bedrooms in my area go for about $4600, which is a pretty nice car payment less than what I pay.

But when I look at that number, I see everything behind it. I see the trail of my life that led to this decision, this insane cost, and know that the Plinko board of all of those choices leading me here is a trail full of me. Every choice I made, I would either make again or completely understand why the previous version of me made it. So this is where I ended up.

Ours is so high because I want to live in walking distance to Golden Gate Park, have an easy biking path to work on the east side, and keep all of our dear animal companions, so this is what I pay. These aren’t big, luxurious asks, but they are MY asks, and they stack up. There are very few landlords in SF that let tenants have four animals, so beggars can’t be choosers here.

I made the choice to get a dog. I made the choice to date a girl with a dog and two cats. I made the choice to move to San Francisco. Thus, I have this situation where my circumstances have resulted in a very annoying situation. I could complain about high housing costs, or I could smile at how my cascade of choices landed me with a new puzzle to figure out, a new scene to let unfold in my life.

My area

Every past version of myself played a role in my current circumstance, and I am proud of every one of them for choosing the life they really wanted. A lot of the time, previous versions of me made Big Dumb Choices, but always made them with autonomy and usually the best choice with the information at hand, which was very often not the easiest choice. All in all, just trying shit, and doing that with a lot of effort and intention.

Do I have to pay this much? No, absolutely not. But do you know what feels worse than watching that money leave my account? Feeling like I’m settling. Understanding that in my one little life before the eternal darkness, I was not able to have the existence that I craved the most.

I can’t have it all, or I would have a seaside brick chalet. But I can ruthlessly pare down to the absolute most important things for my existence to be fulfilling and then optimize for those things at the cost of others. Then be immensely grateful that my struggles are a sign of my choices. My sacrifices are a direct reflection of my choices, and my choices are a direct reflection of being alive.

Struggles are going to come anyways, but I’ll be damned if they are going to be the struggles caused by other people’s actions. My choices, my consequences. I’ve grown to love my consequences as much as my rewards, because they are the result of leading my life with autonomy.

One interesting example is that I recently gained back the 10 pounds that I’d just lost. This happened specifically because I chose to throw all my things in my truck, move to San Francisco, live out of suitcases for two months, work 14 hours a day, sacrifice a lot of health stuff, and stress myself out from morning to evening to start my new life.

I didn’t know I was going to gain back the 10 pounds, but if somebody offered me the choice of staying where I was and staying skinnier or being where I’m at right now and being fatter, I would absolutely choose to be fatter every time. It’s my choice, my consequences, my journey. Since I built up this nature of trusting myself to go out and get exactly what I want out of life, I know that I’ll also just lose these 10 pounds again.

Soreness is the consequence of weightlifting. Compromise is the consequence of a committed partnership. Grief is the consequence of love. To appreciate one is to appreciate the other, and gratitude for both is a reflection of a life of choice.

Life starts to shift a lot for the better when you look at all of the consequences of your life as the results of your own choices and understand the one-player open world game that built your reality. There’s even a little affection for the consequences when you see them as a reflection of yourself. You also have the opportunity to be a different version of yourself to get different consequences, and have gratitude for the opportunity of existence.

Once you start to only point the finger at yourself, you gain a level of confidence that lets you start to change things. There’s a certain point in adulthood when you can no longer play the victim in any circumstance, where all roads lead back to a specific choice that you made. From that moment on, you start to own yourself, and your life fully becomes yours. Yes, it’s terrifying, but it’s also so freeing. At that point, you become affectionate toward everything, good and bad.

Your struggles are YOUR struggles. Your wins are YOUR wins. Your whole life is YOURS.

With love from me to you,

Deacon

Note: No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article.