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Pitfall

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Society | Modern Living | Homes

Why Is There So Much Shit in People’s Homes These Days?

What house hunting taught me about 21st-century humans

4 min readOct 25, 2026

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Image of a cluttered kitchen
(Photo by sangsang pic on Unsplash)

For the past six months, I’ve been looking for apartments to buy.

I’m 52 and have never owned a property. Most people I know find this weird and secretly pat themselves on the back for having got on the property ladder when they did.

Well done!

But they’re right to feel this way: they bought properties in the mid-90s, when prices in the UK were low. Then sat back for thirty years and watched their £50k house increase in value to £500k without doing anything more taxing than working a nine-to-five desk job.

Congratulations! You should have all been property speculators!

I never got on the housing ladder. In the 90s, I never had a permanent job, plus I moved around a lot. I guess you get what you deserve, which means that when I finally wanted to buy a place, I was faced with streets of overpriced properties.

I’ve always thought this unaffordability might bring prices down, you know, like with any other commodity.

But no. For some reason, the housing market seems immune to normal market forces. My theory is…

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