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Comment by thenobsta | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't feel well elucidated, but I've been thinking about Goodhart's law in other area's of life -- e.g. Owning a home is cool and can enable some cool things. However, when home ownership becomes the goal, it's becomes easy to disregard a lot of life giving things in pursuit of owning a home.

This seems to pop up in a lot of areas and I find myself asking is X thing a thing I really desire or is it something that is a natural side effect of some other processes.

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For most people owning a home isn’t the goal, it’s to be able to adjust their living space how they see fit, have a stable place to raise children, remove the risk of landlords, etc

Isn’t that exactly the point? Some people set their goal as buying the house but forget to reevaluate how well they’re doing at their true goals - like do they really benefit from the extra rooms enough to be worth commuting taking away family time, or are they doing renovations often enough to say they’re actually taking advantage of that benefit?

This is a question of values. When home ownership is an implicit value of the culture one lives in, the reason to own a home is to own a home.

Once you start looking for these things that are done for their own sake (or really to gain respect in a community) you notice how pervasive they are and how different they can be for two people next to each other.

I recommend Gregory's Savage Money on the subject. My review here: https://entropicthoughts.com/book-review-savage-money

If you are smart and think alot you can do well renting and investing elsewhere.

You can also ask what is life about?

This is hard to do because the conclusion may need to break moulds, leading to family estrangement and losing friends.

I suspect people who end up having a TED talk in them are people who had the ability through courage or their inherited neural makeup to go it alone despite descenting voices. Or they were raised to be encouraged to do so.

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