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There are only so many homes, and it's often illegal to build new ones. Now your colleagues and friends are your competitors for the same homes.
There are only so many places in good schools, whether it be good public districts or private (fee-paying) schools. You now have to compete with your friends for places there.
The introduction of fake scarcities was needed when we discovered how to produce more wealth than we could possibly actually need (about 280k per person in the US, per recent NYtimes article). This way you still work to enrich capital owners instead of enjoying the fruits of your labour.
What you are saying might apply to the bay area, but it doesn't apply to almost anywhere else. No one is entitled to live in the most desirable places on earth.
You could live almost anywhere else and not have the same problems.
You're completely right though. I'd had enough and moved to a dirt cheap house in the middle of a field in the country. Not having a mortgage or rent does wonders for the ability to not check emails/Slack on weekends.
A good job by definition makes more money for the corporation than it does for the employee.
You’d think that the constraints of places like the Bay Area would cause corporations to employ people in other places.
Why is this not happening?
outside of work, the scale just makes this an irrelevant question. sure, maybe there are 10,000 apartment units I would like to live in and 20,000 people who also want them. my five good friends in the area don't really move the needle wrt how much I need to bid to actually get a nice apartment.
the incentive is there, but it's too weak to be worth paying attention to.
I suppose what I mean is "peers".
My point is very simple - if you have 10,000 people and 1,000 homes, you must compete with those 10,000 people. 10 of them might even be your friends, competing for that same home.
If we allowed building 9,000 more homes, you no longer have to compete just to get a roof over your head (though you may still do so to get a _nicer_ home) and you have the ability to tell your boss where to shove it when he asks you at 8:30 AM Monday why you didn't answer his Sunday night email.
But we don't allow building more homes, at least in California, where homebuilding has fallen far, far, FAR below population growth. If you aren't on Slack all the time, you'll miss out on promotions to your coworker (who, I concede, may not literally be your pal) who will then outbid you for the house you want.
Additionally, where you _are_ allowed to build housing tends to be a long ways from jobs (see: suburban sprawl) so you have the double whammy of work pressure to never really sign off, and a long commute.
I understand that I'm in competition with n other people to get a specific apartment, but I'm not likely to actually encounter any of these people unless it's in the waiting room at the leasing office.
I agree that I'm competing with people like me and my friends for housing, food, etc. I just don't see that as necessarily an impediment to helping, being kind to, and/or befriending strangers. it's an important issue, but orthogonal to what we are discussing here imo. maybe it affects your social interactions differently.
we're certainly not post-scarcity wrt NYC apartments.
If it's illegal to build new homes, that's certainly not a free market or "capitalism."