Please bro please buy some land with me bro
I have realized the errors of my ways(my thinking about co-buying land)
I still have this dream. I want to buy land with my friends and live on it.
With the events of the last few years, it seemed like a good idea to put this into motion.
I started looking into buying property.
I wasn’t very diligent. In 2019, I looked at a house outside of Pittsfield, MA, in a place called Lanesborough, that was being auctioned by HUD. I did a lot of Zillow’ing.
There was a 90-acre wetlands property near Amherst, MA that was $180k that looked beautiful, and a great place to buy and invite friends to come build on…
But the more I looked into it, the worse the idea seemed. Too many restrictions to build, only a small piece of the land was actually zoned to build residential. The local USDA office wasn’t super helpful either. Perhaps it was because during the pandemic, everyone was buying property in the country.
This year, I visited the Pioneer Valley once again (I lived in Easthampton, MA in 2020), to see some friends and to check out some land. I only saw one piece of forested property that trip, and I swear, the whole thing was on a steep gradient!
That’s a hillside, for you fans of plain English.
I was laid off from my well-paid tech job in June of this year, and with that, I stopped my property search.
I still have this dream though. I still want to buy land with my friends.
But my approach has changed.
Instead of getting another exhausting and pointless tech job where I am “managing a content pipeline”, I’d rather optimize for creating meaning in my life.
And that means doing the things that feed me, doing the inner work, and building and deepening relationships.
I want to build things, and I want to teach. I want to do these things without having to sacrifice my health.
I feel like I’ve written this type of post one hundred times already, but there must be some reason I’m still writing it.
I suppose I’m writing this particular post to admit to myself that I still have this dream, but I’m not willing to sacrifice, or maybe the better word is “over-leverage” myself.
Previously, I was willing to put up with a meaningless, demoralizing job because it paid well and it made buying land or a house an achievable goal.
And, you know, maybe buying land or a house never happens. There are plenty of timelines where neither of those things happen and I still lead a happy meaningful life.