Have you ever noticed that everyone everywhere is being priced out of their country by foreigners with more money?

I move to your country for a better quality of life. You move to mine for the same. And it just goes on and on like this in an endless loop. I get priced out of my place, you get priced out of yours. I wish I could leave. You wish you could come. Nobody is happy. Everybody is blaming the other person. But what about the actual people who are to blame?

Who’s protesting the government and requiring them to put rent caps in place? Or to change the rules of entry for those with money? To stop selling citizenship and houses and land to the highest bidder?

Nobody. 

Because they’re busy protesting their fellow middle- or struggling-class citizens who are also just trying to make ends meet. They have no problem with immigration if Mr. Düsseldorf is bringing his millions with him. It’s only a problem when it’s the guy making your sandwich at the shop who can barely make his rent payments—just like you. 

It is so exhausting living in this world sometimes. 

We all suffer the same struggle in different ways and still fail to see ourselves in each other. We are the majority yet over and over, everywhere in the world, we let the minority control us and bring us to our knees. We accept that rent is higher than salaries and have quietly moved in with our parents or into shared flats as grown adults who once upon a time could have our own space and privacy and dignity. We’ve quietly accepted that we’ve had to work harder and harder each year just to maintain the basic necessities—and that we’re all one sickness/disease not covered by insurance away from being homeless. 

It’s hard to not be cyclical. 

As I look around it feels like the only way to not be exploited is to exploit. There’s no longer a middle path. If you want to be a person with money, you have to be unethical. I can’t accept a dignified job in this society and think that it will be enough to cover my living expenses. I have to also have 5 side hustles, 3 training classes on “how-to”, and an online shop for good measure. 

The age of the ‘digital nomad’ turned travel influencer has imploded on itself. No longer is it possible to find cheap places with charm that still have a culture to show and a people who welcome you with open arms. Now everyone is angry at tourists, digital nomads have to make astronomical amounts of money in order to qualify as such, and cities have become empty of residents and full of well-decorated Airbnbs that aren’t suitable for long-term living. Landlords would rather rent out their flats for 3 months out of the year for a seriously inflated price than to price it so that residents or locals can stay long enough to make it a home. They don’t even want long-term tenants. And they are allowed, by their local government, to own 5, 6, 7 properties around town that see a revolving door of people who don’t contribute much to the economy while everyone else is priced out and on the street protesting against—you guessed it—the also-exploited tourists. 

It’s like an infinity sign of finger-pointing at the people who, as usual, are neither the source of the problem or the ones who can offer a solution. Sure tourists and immigrants and everybody else who we love to hate can stop coming to ‘your’ country, but then guess what? Your government and your local millionaires will still find a way to exploit you. It will still be their decision what to charge for rent, supported by your government’s policies, and it will still be them coming out as the winner in the end. In all likelihood, it’s probably one of your friends or family members or neighbours or someone you look up to who is making all the money from this design and yet you don’t chastise them for owning too many properties. Instead, you wish to be them in secret and in public you scream at the people who they take advantage of. Tricky place to be in when you want to be the same as what you claim to hate, isn’t it?

You should redirect your anger at the right person. 

Take a look in the mirror. You let it happen. We all did. 

We voted, or didn’t, and we sit by and watch as everything around us burns to ash. Because we “don’t get involved in politics.”

Politics, that has its hand in your plate and your bank account. Politics that continues to make your life more difficult day after day. Politics, which you can’t opt out of no matter how much you think you keep your head down. Politics watches you struggle to sleep at night and then raises the cost of living in the morning. Politics tells you when to jump and you don’t even ask how high. You just jump.

You who watches new age colonialism from your $1500 phone screen and thinks it’s just upgrading a place that needed it. You who screams ‘eat the rich’ when it’s convenient while spending $500 on a concert ticket for someone who beats women in his spare time or who screams victim in white woman syndrome while taking private jets around like they’re bicycles and making billions off her terribly difficult love life. We yell at the [few] protesters to get out of our way! because we’re in a mad hurry to go sit behind a desk for 9 hours so we can complain at happy hour that we hate our jobs or go home and sit on the sofa and lose brain cells watching idiots be themselves on Netflix while eating a plate of chemicals and microplastics.

We watch war and genocide and exploitation with the same expressions that we watch our families and our lives pass by. We’re not even complacent anymore. We’re just completely dead inside. 

And the world keeps spinning.