4

You Will Become A Hoarder

The human animal has an innate psychological need to claim space and to put its mark on things. And since it's considered "unsightly" to piss all over your front porch every morning, we mark our home by buying a bunch of useless junk to put in it. Filling your space with every dumb trinket imaginable is the quickest, most socially acceptable way of saying "MINE."

The first six months of homeownership makes you rethink everything that you've ever wanted. Napkin holders? Flagpole for the yard? Hose caddy? Extended-reach insect vacuum? For me, the desire to cram every nook and cranny of my house with stupid shit got so bad that merely driving past a Bed, Bath & Beyond would set my mind ablaze with panic that there was something the house needed. Not "we need" or even "I need," mind you, but "the house needs," as if it was less of a block of wood and concrete that I'd bought and more of an insatiable monster that I now had to tame with wicker baskets and decorative margarita pitchers.

And speaking of margaritas, holy shit do you start to collect booze. When I lived in an apartment, I might have had a bottle of Jack or vodka, and maybe even some champagne that I was saving for the day that someone finally bought my epic script. Now I have an entire cabinet full of (and walls covered with) booze, and I have no idea where it came from or why, because I don't even drink that much to begin with. People can't resist the urge to bring over alcohol and offer it up to the house like a sacrifice to the drunken gods.

Related: 5 Insane True Stories Of Buying The House From Hell

3

You Will Finally Understand Your Parents

Remember how your parents never let you do anything? "No eating in the living room." "Get your feet off the coffee table." "Stop getting the dog high."

2

You Are Forced To Become A Boring Person

When something breaks in your house, you get a crash course in whatever aspect of your home needs maintenance. Suddenly you will find yourself fascinated as you devote hours to researching the three steps to mold reclamation, or chemical termite extermination, or air vent reconstruction. All of which conspires to make you the most tedious person to talk to ever.

One of the things that comes with such newfound knowledge is the insatiable desire to discuss it with others. You're like a college freshman who's just taken their first psychology course and can't stop relating everything to Freud. Remember that kid? Remember how exhausting they were? That's you now, except this time you're obsessed with the technique you used to fix your dishwasher.

You're an adult, and even though you're probably a deeply interesting person, the fact that you've had to learn how to keep a home from falling apart means that you've discovered new avenues for being boring that never existed as personality options before. So when you go to a party or hang out with friends, instead of discussing the incendiary genius of Bob Stinson's guitar work in the Replacements' early oeuvre, you find yourself ranting to everyone that you know about how to save a bundle on garden mulch. (Get it at that place on Strickland. Ask for Steve.)

Related: 6 Famous Houses From Movies (That Ruined The Owners' Lives)

1

You Start To Think Like An Asshole

The rewards of homeownership are pretty great, and thus it's turned into kind of a status symbol. There's a reason the U.S. government conspired with the real estate lobby after World War II to make owning a home synonymous with achieving the American Dream. But homeownership is a privilege, and not acknowledging that kind of privilege is a bit of a douche move. And demanding that privilege while insisting it doesn't exist is an even douchier move.

It's this kind of thinking that regards anyone without houses as people who just didn't work hard enough to earn them. And when that gets ingrained in your head, as it has with the creaky pundits in this country who are screaming right now about how the current generation is ruining the economy with their avocado toast and paper towels, you slip into asshole-dom. You wonder why those millennials aren't buying houses, and instead of getting to the root of the issue with insight and compassion, you figure that it must be because of all of the mimosas and Nintendo Switches those fools are buying.

The point of all this is that you need to tread carefully if you don't want all these new changes to turn you into a dickhead. Because while we all become adults, we don't have to become dickheads. But there are intense pressures pushing you in that direction. In your quest to keep those damn kids the hell off your lawn, don't forget that you're intensely lucky just to have a lawn.

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