The Ghost of the Third Bedroom

The floorboards in this 114-year-old Victorian in Portland don't just creak; they groan with the weight of every hypothetical person I haven't met yet. I am standing in the middle of a room that smells faintly of lemon polish and the previous owner's regret, counting the paces from the window to the door. It is exactly 14 paces. I know this because Oscar S.K., a man who spends his daylight hours as an assembly line optimizer, cannot look at a space without calculating its throughput. But how do you calculate the throughput of a life that hasn't actually started? Brenda, the realtor, is humming something by a band I don't recognize, her heels clicking against the mahogany like a metronome for a song I don't want to dance to. She gestures toward the smallest of the 4 bedrooms with a flourish of her manicured hand. "And this room," she says, her voice dropping into that conspiratorial tone realtors use when they think they've found your soft underbelly, "has the most incredible morning light. It would be a perfect nursery one day."

I am 34 years old. I am single. I spent my morning matching all 44 of my socks into neat, identical pairs because the chaos of the world feels manageable if my ankles are symmetrically clothed. I am here to buy a house, a place to put my books and my singular coffee mug, and yet I am being asked to audition for the role of a suburban patriarch in a play that hasn't even been cast. We are standing in a container for a ghost. The nursery is for a child who doesn't exist, to be raised with a spouse I haven't met, funded by a career path that might veer into the woods by next Tuesday the 14th. Why am I trying to solve for X when I don't even know what the variable stands for?

The Myth of the 'Forever Home'

We are obsessed with the 'forever home' as if 'forever' is a static destination rather than a terrifyingly long sequence of 24-hour days. This cultural myth suggests that if you don't buy the house with the 4 bedrooms and the double vanity now, you are somehow failing at being an adult. You are staying in a state of perpetual adolescence, floating in the rental market like a piece of driftwood. So, we over-leverage ourselves. We take out 34-year mortgages on properties that are 104% larger than what we actually need today, because we are terrified of the inconvenience of moving later. We optimize for a peak capacity that we might reach for maybe 4 years of our entire lives, ignoring the 24 years leading up to it where we'll just be heating empty hallways and dusting rooms for the spirits of our unborn progeny. It's a massive waste of energy, both literal and emotional.

I once optimized an assembly line for a toy manufacturer that wanted to prepare for a 444% increase in demand that never came. They ended up with a facility that was so large the workers felt isolated, their productivity dropping because the scale of the room swallowed their sense of purpose. I am doing the exact same thing to my own heart.

The Waiting Room vs. The Cage

I tell Brenda the room is nice but maybe too big. She looks at me like I've just suggested we burn the place down for the insurance money. "You have to think about resale value, Oscar," she says. "A 4-bedroom house in this zip code is like gold. If you buy a 1-bedroom condo now, you'll just have to sell it in 4 years when you meet someone." There it is. The 'when.' Not 'if.' The assumption is that my current state-a man who enjoys his silence and his 14 different types of tea-is merely a waiting room. A transitional phase. But I like the waiting room. The waiting room has great magazines and no one is crying in it.

If I buy the house with the nursery, am I subconsciously signaling to the universe that I am ready for the noise, the clutter, the 4:04 AM wake-up calls? And if I don't meet that person, does the house become a monument to my loneliness, a hollow shell of 'what ifs' that I have to vacuum every Saturday?

By buying this Victorian, I am effectively reaching through time and handcuffing that future version of myself to a radiator. I am making decisions for a stranger. It's a form of temporal tyranny that we've normalized under the guise of 'smart investing.' As an optimizer, I know that if you prioritize the end product over the efficiency of the current flow, the whole system eventually grinds to a halt. You end up with a warehouse full of inventory that nobody wants to buy.

The Paralysis of Potential

There is a specific kind of paralysis that comes with this. It's the reason I've spent the last 4 months looking at 64 different properties and haven't made an offer on a single one. Every time I see a 'perfect family home,' I feel a sense of mourning for the life I actually have. I like my life. I like the fact that I can decide to drive 44 miles in any direction at midnight just because I saw a cool picture of a lighthouse. We are trading the ability to pivot for the ability to paint a wall 'eggshell white' without asking a landlord's permission. It's a high price to pay for a color that looks like boredom anyway.

I tried to explain this to my mother, who has lived in the same house for 44 years. She told me I was overthinking it. But I don't want to wait for my life to happen; I want it to be happening now. I need to run the numbers on my life the way I run them for a manufacturing plant-scenarios for growth, scenarios for contraction, scenarios where the market for 4-bedroom Victorians collapses because everyone finally realizes they don't want to live in a museum of their own potential.

I found myself using Ask ROB the other night, trying to simulate what happens if I buy the small place now and the big place never.

The Final Walk-Out

Brenda is looking at her watch. It's a gold thing that probably cost $1,444. "We have another showing at 4:00," she says, her patience finally fraying at the edges. "What do you think, Oscar? Can you see yourself here?"

I realize that the person I'm most afraid of disappointing isn't the wife I haven't met or the kids I haven't had. It's the man standing right here in his perfectly matched socks, who just wants to be allowed to change his mind.

"It's a great room," I say, backing toward the door. "But I think I'm looking for something with fewer ghosts."

She sighs, a sound that ends in a sharp 4-count exhale. We walk out of the house and the Portland air is cold and sharp. I feel a sudden, intense burst of gratitude for my car, which only has 4 seats and is currently parked 24 feet away. It is a machine designed for movement.

As I drive away, I pass 4 different houses with 'For Sale' signs in the yards, and for the first time in months, I don't feel the urge to stop. I don't need to see the kitchens or the nurseries or the master suites with the walk-in closets. I just need to get back to my apartment, where the space is exactly the size of my current life, and where the only person I have to answer to is the version of myself that is currently hungry for a sandwich. The future is a factory that hasn't been built yet, and I'm done trying to optimize the floor plan before the first brick is even laid. I have 44 socks at home, all matched and ready for whatever walk I decide to take tomorrow. And for now, that is more than enough architecture for me.