Everything feels borrowed
chronic rentership, diminishing optimism, and observations from recent convos
It’s been a reflective last few weeks for me and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to own something. Not just a house or a car, but your future, your choices, your life.
Because everywhere I look, it feels like ownership is slipping away.
The era of renting everything
A good number of people I know rent their apartments. Even the ones making six figures. Cars are leased, phones are financed on upgrade plans, furniture is rented from startups marketing “flexible living,” software is subscription-based, and gym memberships auto-renew whether you show up or not. Everything comes monthly now and nothing feels permanent anymore.
At some point, renting stops being a preference and starts feeling like a condition. A default. An inevitability to living.
Older generations love to say it’s just that we don’t want to settle down. But it’s not that simple. When everything in your life can be taken away or made more expensive overnight, committing feels….kind of naive.
Corporate landlords and the ownership lockout
It’s really not just individual choices driving this shift. If you look at the data (and around you), you’ll see corporate landlords are buying up entire neighborhoods, outbidding families with all-cash offers. Classic PE’s like Blackstone and conglomerates like Invitation Homes are singlehandedly reshaping a crucial part of the “American Dream” and changing how we see single-family homes. For young American’s and immigrants, homeownership is viewed as one of the pinnacles of life; for Blackstone and others, single-family homes are viewed as nothing but consistent cashflow streams.
It all feels like there’s an intentional narrative being built: you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy. Except it’s not the World Economic Forum selling it this time. It’s corporate landlords whose entire biz model depends on people never crossing the threshold into ownership.
When ownership is off-limits, chronic rentership becomes the unfortunate default.
Birth rates as an optimism barometer
Part of that American Dream I mentioned above involves starting a family and having kids, which fewer and fewer people are doing these days. Recent data shows that people in their 20s and 30s now plan to have fewer children than a decade ago..dropping below replacement levels. Even in Norway, where the government subsidizes daycare and gives a year of paid leave, fertility rates just hit record lows.
I’m 27 and most of my married friends are beginning the family planning process. But a good amount aren’t and I’ve asked them about why. Some say it’s financial – “childcare costs more than my rent” or climate related…they say “I can’t bring a kid into a dying world.” But honestly underneath all the reasons, there’s a quiet theme nobody says out-loud: the future feels too unstable to plan for.
Because if ownership grounds people in place and purpose, something to build a life around, and you feel like you own nothing, how do you build anything at all?
The vanishing promise of work?
Work used to be that anchor. A steady job with benefits, a clearly defined career ladder, and a pension at the end (well, not for many millennials). But this notion of security has shifted entirely as the headlines are flooded on what feels like a daily basis about mass layoffs across the board. Some will say these layoffs are a result of the overhiring done during the pandemic & ZIRP era. But most will attribute it to AI & it’s growing mentions in public company earnings reports. Every company is talking about it, few are actually implementing it (yet), but we all know its coming. Ford’s CEO says AI could wipe out half of all white-collar jobs. Anthropic predicts 50% of entry-level office work could vanish within five years. There are even doom & gloomier headlines but you get the picture.
When your job feels rented…like a placeholder until automation catches up, it changes how you approach work. Your mindset shifts and you begin to optimize for optionality, not mastery. You stack skills instead of building careers and you mentally prepare exit ramps because permanence feels very naive.
Final thoughts
My thoughts above are not sweeping conclusions, but rather just things I’m seeing – in conversations with friends, peers, founders, and mentors. People trying to navigate a world that feels very different from the one their parents came up in.
But here’s what I keep coming back to:
When a generation feels like it owns nothing, what incentive is left to build? Ownership to me ties your fate to what you build more than having just skin in the game. When you take that away, you risk taking away the drive that builds families, companies, and entire societies.
We can’t afford to let that happen. Because once people stop believing the future belongs to them, the future stops getting built. Truthfully, I don’t know where this all leads. But if there’s one thing I’ve seen in my friends, community, and peers, it’s resilience.
We may not own the world handed to us, but we’re stubborn enough to shape the one coming next.