Desire once seemed to like a simple thing to grasp and connect with. The longer I live, the more I discover how unfathomably complex desire and our relationship to it is. I’ll give you an example: dating websites. Over a decade ago, I worked for a large dating website as a systems and network administrator. It exists no longer, but at its peak it had hundreds of thousands of daily active users.

Asheville, North Carolina, epitomizes the dysfunction of the market for housing in America, accelerated and exacerbated by mass early retirement and shifts to telecommuting that emerged from the COVID pandemic. Through the two years of America’s response to the pandemic, knowledge workers in more expensive locales - New York, Chicago, San Francisco, etc. - took advantage of the newfound ability to work remotely, leaning on their cost-of-living-adjusted wages and accrued home equity, to move to smaller, lower cost-of-living, higher quality-of-life cities.