A dispatch on watching your own outgoings quietly rearrange themselves until rent isn’t a line item anymore, it’s the whole spreadsheet.
I did the maths again this week, which is a mistake I make roughly monthly, like clockwork, like a very depressing tide. My rent in this particular corner of North London has, over the past eighteen months, quietly crept past what I used to spend on absolutely everything else combined, food, transport, the increasingly theoretical concept of “going out.” I sat with that number for a while. Then I made a cup of tea, because that at least is still cheap, and got on with my evening.
This is not a new observation, I know. Everyone with a pulse and a London postcode has made some version of this complaint. But there is something particularly bracing about watching it happen to your own numbers in real time, watching the categories on your banking app quietly reshuffle themselves until rent isn’t really a line item any more so much as the entire spreadsheet, with everything else politely squeezed into whatever margin remains.
I want to be careful not to turn this into a straightforward moan, because London does still, genuinely, offer things worth the money, on the good days. But I think what’s changed for me, and for most people I know in this specific age bracket and this specific postcode, is the sense that the city used to feel like it was offering you something in exchange for the premium. These days it increasingly feels like you’re simply paying the premium, and the something is more of a rumour.
I’ve started doing the thing where you calculate your effective hourly rate for the hours you spend actually enjoying your home, versus the hours you spend working to pay for it. I won’t share the number. It’s not a flattering one. But it has genuinely changed how I think about the flat itself, less as a home in the cosy sense and more as a very expensive, very well-located storage unit for my body between shifts.
None of this is a call to arms, exactly. I don’t have a five-point policy solution tucked into my back pocket. What I have is a slightly grim sense of humour about it, and a genuine curiosity about how many of my neighbours are running the same private arithmetic behind their own front doors, arriving at their own equally unflattering numbers, and equally deciding to just get on with the tea and the evening rather than dwell on it too visibly.
If you want the more formal version of this argument, with actual data attached rather than my personal spreadsheet trauma, there’s a good rundown at Satire Examples, which I’d recommend if you like your cost-of-living despair a bit more rigorously sourced than mine.
More from this author at Lowri Griffiths, prat.uk.