You Own Stuff, Stuff Owns You, Housing Edition.

I live with my wife in a 37 square meter beachfront studio with a 12 square meter balcony. Benefits: perpetual togetherness and fall out of bed and onto the beach.

Here's the maritime version of your real estate arms race story:

When I stayed in a hoteliere friend's villa in St. Barth's in 2003, there was a 40 meter motoryacht offshore. Then one day a 50 meter yacht showed up. The guy with the 40 meter moved to the other side of the island. He couldn't stand being the second biggest boat in the bay. In addition to being a hole in the water to pour money into, they were both floating hedonic treadmills, illustrating this:

"The human appetite for superiority is without limit."--John Adams.

Though a former investor in residential real estate, I've never owned the real estate I've lived in. The money made investing in it had one overriding purpose: to buy my way out of involuntary contact with idiots. (https://medium.com/p/6f4ecbc5e2fe/edit).

This oneupsmanship game is like the computerized nuclear war in the 1983 movie War Games: "the only way to win is not to play."

The only way to avoid misaligning appetites with financial capacity is to not expand the former.