Recently, an otherwise calm, yoga-loving friend in Sydney confessed to having “a mortgage freak-out” after buying her first house: she went on an absolute bender out of sheer panic about the amount of debt to which she had committed herself: “For the first time ever I was still drinking at dawn – and then again the next day at midday . . .”

This past October, the median house price in Sydney hit $844,000. “Middle Melbourne” has a median house price of $727,000. Nationally, values rose 7.9% across all capital cities last year, and house prices now equate to 4.3 times annual income. In April 2014, RBA governor Glenn Stevens warned that “we need to be alert to the possibility that the past year of strong rises in dwelling prices leads people to assume that this is the norm”. It’s a message we’re deaf to. We are a nation bound by its belief in real estate. But what does it mean to believe in Australian real estate now, and how does it feel to those who are keeping the faith?

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James wrote “a paradise of inward tranquillity seems to be faith’s usual result”. After a year of dutiful Sabbaths spent inspecting insanely priced and mostly NQR places, another Sydney friend told me he was not a man at peace with himself. Forget transcendence: walking through hundreds of sellers’ doors, scouring real estate websites, securing bank loans, second-guessing agents’ tactics and negotiating blind auctions had made him “the guy you didn’t want to be” – the one unable to talk or think about anything else, even as he came to despise the only topic on which he was now capable of conversing: house prices.

So, are the agents, our priestly caste, to blame for the bloat? When criticised, the agents disavow their agency: it’s not us, it’s the market; we’re just trying to get the best possible price. Market ideology suggests a field in which rational actors make informed choices based on clear price signals. Yet this is at odds with the basic strategy of most real estate agents in Australia: lowball prospective customers by significantly underquoting a property’s price, then ramp up the hip pocket pain once an emotional connection has been made.

Underquoting is the great schism among Australian estate agents: there is one group that underquotes by up to 30% as a matter of procedure, and another that deems it unethical. This pricing ploy is a cause of psychological torment for many. A friend who just bought in Melbourne’s Brunswick told me that at the first auction they went to the house was listed at $600–650,000. The property went for $810,000. The place they eventually bought was listed at $570–620,000. They got it for $735,000.

Meanwhile, the youngish professional classes of Melbourne and Sydney push past suburban Preston and Campsie for the next bargain, a situation marred by the following problem: the good places aren’t reasonably priced; the reasonably priced places . . . well, they’re not very good. There are no bargains in Australian real estate, only those who believe they’ve got a bargain, or those who are just relieved they haven’t had “to pay their maximum”. A friend described the perversity of this situation: “We got a 2.5 bedroom place for $615K in Sydney’s ‘desirable’ inner west. So now I have more than a half-million-dollar mortgage. And yet, not two years after we purchased, an identical place next door sold for $100K more than we paid. So, yeah, we consider ourselves lucky to have bought when we did.”

Of course you could abstain from all this, but you’d have to rent. In which case, you become part of a structurally unfair system in which your rent, outrageously high in global relative terms, buys you few rights or protections. Meanwhile, you end up spending your labour in a way that, through negative gearing, perpetuates and entrenches inequality by allowing some rentier to amass capital while legally avoiding tax. This has no bearing on how caring and nice many landlords may be as individuals, not least of all because, in increasing numbers, the landlords are people’s parents. But in the case of anyone for whom equality and justice are basic values – and that’s still a lot of us, even when Gina Rinehart is a published poet – it’s an ethical double-bind.

Negative gearing is positively unfair; it’s designed that way. Our politicians are shit-scared of meddling with it. But when it’s the tidiest game in town, what would you do if you had the savings or access to capital? When there’s no way your kids can afford to buy? Especially if you can get a toehold on an inner-city place. Before it’s too late. Are these rational choices?

Lest we forget our privilege, my fellow guilty, sinful believers: ours is a country run by second-rate people who share its belief in real estate. But Tony Abbott’s Australia is still a lucky country for all that, isn’t it? Perhaps not if you’re one of the increasing number of homeless people living in its cities. And it’s not just the conspicuously vulnerable sleeping rough on the streets. The biggest increase in homelessness is invisible to most: young people couch surfing, living right at the margins, slotting into the spare space in other people’s homes.

But if the real estate market is a god, what is its essence? According to that embodiment of boomer wisdom Alan Kohler it’s finance capital. Contemporary Australian real estate is now dominated by investment, and investment is not about people, it’s about the endless sending of money in search of more money. In this game, a home is just a place to lay your chips, an onshore helipad for offshore people and accounts.

Regardless of whether we believe that we’re experiencing a property bubble, we hope and pray that we’re not. Whether or not we’re privileged enough to access capital to risk, we’re forced to take a position. Australian lives pulsate to the rhythms of real estate. It entangles us – for the rest of our lives – in something larger, stronger and more demanding than any living individual or group. So we pass our belief onto our kids; we give it to the unborn. We’re making its contradictions into the stuff of our common future, even as this future destroys our “common wealth” by entrenching inequality. Yet we hope – and must all keep hoping, even if we hate the hoping – that this mad god doesn’t turn on us and turf us all out.