We’re moving. Again.

We’ve moved five times in the eight years we’ve been together. This will be the sixth. We’ve moved from small houses to big houses and then back to small again. We’ve moved a few miles and we’ve moved a few hundred miles. We’ve lived in good neighborhoods and bad. We’ve paid rent and we’ve paid a mortgage. Every moment of it, we paid. We worked and we paid. We usually have enough, but sometimes we don’t. Those times are hard.

Almost every working family runs into those situations at some point. The economy tanks as it does repeatedly to the detriment of everyone who works for a living. Someone loses a job. Someone gets sick. All the while, there are countless pressures to accumulate stuff and show off how much stuff you have and constantly think about how you’re going to afford more stuff. And there are endless schemes through which we are separated from the products of our labor, even the meager wages we are effectively forced to accept for our work: insurance, loans, credit cards, “savings” funds, rent, a thousand different fees, and a million different ways to make you pay (and have to work) even more. This is by design. Existence in this society, even a seemingly modest middle class existence, is tenuous. To live, most of us must work for someone else. To profit, those we work for must, as a whole, pay us as little as they can. For most of us, this leaves us no choice but to work ever harder to make other people, who already buy lives of endless leisure for themselves, ever richer. Whether it is through the low wages we are paid, or through the high prices we must pay for the things they tell us we need, or both, it’s how almost all of us must live. The accepted alternative that only a few may actually take is to turn on your fellow workers and find some way to make some of them work for you. Making that sociopathic transition is what passes for “success” in this, the so-called “free-est” society in history. The accepted order is a dichotomy between exploiter and exploited. Those are the two roles we get to choose from. But there is a third way that isn’t advertised – a way that both lessens the degree to which we are exploited and requires much less exploitation of others than the alternative. Its not illegal (yet) and requires a major (positive) shift in values and lifestyle to get back to the whole point of having a civilization in the first place – living for each other. So, as a first step in that direction, we’re moving again.

But its different this time.

We are selling or donating almost everything we own and moving into a space that is about a third the size of our current living room. This new home will be built on top of a modified 20′ flatbed utility trailer. We are building it ourselves. It will have all the basics: kitchen, sleeping areas, shower, toilet, heat, even air conditioning, internet, and a TV for streaming movies, etc. Its not roughing it, but all of that will be crammed into about 160 square feet. For a time, we will need to pay a small amount of rent to have a place to park it, but that will be temporary as the savings will allow us to purchase our own land outright within a reasonably short period of time. We will also be able to pay off all of our debt (mostly student loan and medical debt) within a couple of years and very quickly make preparations for the future, whatever that looks like.

So, what actually sold us on this idea? I mean, after all that, it still kind of sounds crazy, right? I won’t presume to speak for both of us, but obviously the political views I’ve expressed here have influenced my side of the thinking. I’m not an optimist when it comes to the future of capitalism and I’m a believer in the concept of building a new world within the shell of the old. We can’t rely on a system that only knows expansion, exploitation, and greed when those very things are killing the system and our humanity in the process. But there are more immediate pragmatic reasons for this decision. We looked around at all the useless crap we’ve accumulated, considered all the hours we’ve worked to acquire all that crap, and recognized the crap we were putting up with in our working lives in order to get…more crap. We’ve talked about doing something like this for years, but it never went beyond idle fantasy: some day, some day, some day. Then one day a couple of months ago, I got a call from my wife. She said, “Let’s do this.” I knew from the tone of her voice that she was serious this time. And I was serious when I said, “OK, let’s do this.”

So we’re doing it. We have building plans in hand. My wife sold her car yesterday. Today we bought the truck that will pull our house. Today I also sent off the check to pay for the trailer that the house will be built on. We pick it up in two weeks. After that, it’s down to finding ways to pay for materials and time to learn and put it all together. We’re hoping to be ready to move in sometime in the spring or summer of next year. Part of the plan is to document our progress here.

For more on the type of home were building and tiny homes in general, visit http://www.tinyhomebuilders.com. We are not affiliated with them, so please don’t assume my (admittedly unconventional) views reflect theirs in any way. That would be dumb. Don’t be dumb.