In the 18th century, Capability Brown was the foremost landscape gardener in England, his huge lawns flaunting the wealth of his aristocratic patrons in the large numbers of servants and resources required to first build and then maintain them. Real castles and fortified houses associated with wars in the Middle Ages became increasingly opulent palaces.
The conspicuous consumption spread throughout Europe and even to the American Colonies, moving from the upper to the middle classes where today’s Home Owners Associations require a perfect lawn in cookie cutter subdivisions, ideally with an over sized and over pretentious McMansion, the less energy efficient and harder to maintain, the better.
Unfortunately, those same middle classes do not have interests in foreign colonies, mills or thousands of acres of farm lands and indentured servants as the British Nobles did (many of them ruined ironically by the upkeep of their own ancestral properties), so adding to one of the many monthly charges from lawn care, pool care, pest service, alarm service, maid service, maintenance, insurance, property taxes (3% per year in Dallas) and utilities that eat up income even on a fully paid off home. Today, just existing is an expensive proposition and policing, educational quality and business opportunities are closely tied to the neighborhood, city and state meaning that a cut in neighborhood might also be a cut in income and education.
Similarly, in the past loans were meant to be repaid with a definite principal and series of payments. Today, credit cards make their money not on being repaid but in the various fees associated with their use and especially over-use. Their ideal client never repays and repays the initial sum many times while always owing it. Cars magically fall apart after the warranty period adding still further to the pattern of paying to live with planned obsolescence in everything from media formats to televisions and computers.
In an economy where workers are simply used up and then layed off, it is simple to describe the rat race but harder to describe a solution. Re-examining the England of the 18th century, the same nobles had been quick to leverage their influence in Parliament and with the King to have common lands enclosed, forcing peasants from the fields where they had historically lived free to become landless workers in their mills or economically forced colonists, further supporting the nobles wealthy lifestyles, much as CEOs today who talk of valuing employees while doing no such thing.
New social theories, revolutions and wars did not change the relationship between the rich and the poor but in Dwapara Yuga Yogananda's ideals of simple living and high thinking suggest a solution in looking for housing such as Dome Homes and Earthships in ways to reduce monthly bills to a minimum and leveraging Internet options to be away from expensive areas and the need to use up vehicles on pointless commutes and especially to not "live up to the Jones", the pathetic exercise of defining one's life in terms of plastic surgery, cars, homes, casinos and vanity church building projects 'ours has the taller steeple and nicer gardens'. Before SRF's current great wealth from property investments and rents, Yogananda had the monastics growing their own foods and tending flocks!
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