When I was a kid, I loved watching a show called This Old House. When I recently checked the PBS website for This Old House I didn’t recognize any of the cast members — a reminder that I haven’t lived in the U.S. for a very long time, and that even when I was still in America I didn’t have a television. But I remember being very young — This Old House is almost as old as I am — and watching episodes featuring good old-fashioned Yankee carpenter Norm Abram restoring sagging homes to a beautiful condition. What a gift Norm Abram had been given! He imposed order on disordered structures, made straight the beams and boards, and rendered old houses liveable again so that families could go on enjoying them for generations to come. This Old House was a weekly homage to the handyman, the person whose skill and sweat come together to give the rest of us good, clean, sturdy places to rest our heads.

Somewhere along the way, though, the culture of America changed. Yankee carpenters like Abram, men rooted in a particular place who tended to old buildings with love, gave way to people who fix up old houses to sell them. “House flipping,” it’s called. You don’t put sweat equity into a house to make it a home. You buy a dump, spend a few weekends making it look like something that would do well as an Airbnb, and then flip it, having turned a fixer-upper into a fungible “property.” This old house, which used to be transformed with the talent and labor of carpenters and other craftsmen into a wonderful dwelling place, became this sold house, a commodity uploaded into the global exchange network running on ephemerality, buzz, fads, PR, and impermanence. Nobody lives in “this sold house” except as a placeholder until somebody else comes along and buys it at a steep markup.

This change, from this old house to this sold house, is part of a much bigger planetary trend. Haven’t you ever spent an hour scrolling through the professional frauds who make their lives look glamorous on social media? The envy they inspire is futurity commodified. They want you to want what they have, even though, ironically, they don’t have it either. They just titillate; they don’t build. Why would they when the world runs on commerce, not craftsmanship?

Why value this place, this person, this thing, when there are so many others waiting to take their places, and at a higher resale value? Sure, I could spend the afternoon replacing the carburetor in an old car so that the car would run again and I could go on using it, cranking it up for spins around the neighborhood. But why do that when someone will buy the car as a collector’s item, make it so shiny and expensive that nobody would ever dream of driving it, or even touching it, and then put it up for auction on the internet, where it will fetch 50 times what I originally paid for it? If I replace the carburetor and use the car, then it’s just my car, with my memories all over it like fingerprints. But if someone makes the car a global commodity, then it becomes “iconic,” and people will pay out the wazoo to have it, holding it until it increases in value before offloading it to the next person.

Given the right climate, one could grow bananas in one’s garden. Those bananas would be free to eat. Or, one could tape a banana to a wall and sell it for six million dollars (see here). Isn’t it much more exciting to make a global joke about bananas than to grow bananas and eat them?

The same goes for just about everything. There is an endless torrent of people, “locales” (why not just say “cities”?), products, and services, and none of them have value except insofar as they can be traded. What we have now, who we’re with now, where we are now — these are meaningless. What counts is what’s coming next. Anything that can’t be upgraded and put beyond reach, made unusable because of sheer extravagance in restoration, is essentially worthless.

People flip houses in Boca Raton and then go on flipping until eventually they end up buying castles in Europe. But they flip those, too, and then upgrade to buying and selling penthouses in Manhattan and Dubai. Such people never settle anywhere. They rack up airline miles and may spend more time in the first class cabin of jumbo jets than they do in any living room on the ground. But what’s the use of a living room anyway when you’re always on your way to someplace else? There are bananas taped to walls to buy. There are exchanges to be made, so there’s no time to waste time with people and houses stuck in one little place.

Our entire global economy works this way. We have, let’s face it, a consumerist socialism in America and just about everywhere else. Don’t save money. Don’t tie yourself down. Buy now, and buy more, so that others may prosper, too. The money in your pocket will be in my pocket tomorrow, but only for a moment because I’ll use that cash to buy something from somebody else. My money is your money, your money is my money. The only difference between this and old-school socialism is that the medium of mass leveling is not the government but the global flea market of the internet. I buy, you sell. I sell, you buy. We all go into debt while getting rich together. Not rich now, but later — once we pay off the credit cards, and the mortgage, and the car note. Which we never do before it’s time to buy something else. Marx called this whole system of relativity “exchange value.” I don’t know what we call it now, but it’s destroying our humanity. We, human persons, have become mere conduits for exchange.

We could plant a garden out back of this old house. Bananas would be good, of course. We could also wait for tomatoes in the summer, turnips in the winter. We could mark time on the kitchen wall by making a line with a pencil to show how tall our kids, and their kids, are getting. But that would all interfere with the open house for buyers, and with the resale value of “the property.” This sold house opens up infinite possibilities. Maybe we can sell this “property” and funnel the cash into another one in Thailand! And then from there renovate something in Azerbaijan. Think of the airline miles we’ll get! Of the YouTube subscribers, the Instagram views!

I am near 50 and I can tell you, dear reader, that I am bone-weary of the “this sold house” economy. I remember Norm Abram, his laconic ways, his wise hands, his whole-person care for the work he was doing. I want roots, not a prettified version of repo on repeat. This old house: this is where my heart is. I hope your old house is where your heart is, too.