Ask the Sophist: Is it wrong to get my mortgage paid off?
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 152
ASK THE SOPHIST
Shelter Rescue
To: The Sophist
Subject: Take the Win Already
Dear The Sophist,
I had a great gig at the same studio for 24 years! Which means that when it came to a brutal end last year, I failed to see it coming. I spend my days like I imagine all folks in my situation do: wracked with anxiety, especially since the industry I’m in has been decimated and my career is almost certainly over.
But while wringing the last out of my employment insurance I got some amazing news: one of my family members, who received a generous inheritance from a successful small-business-owning uncle, has also lost his longtime gig and has decided to sell his house, move to an affordable small town, and retire early. He’s offered to pay off the rest of my mortgage—which owing to being in one of the most expensive cities in the world I never would have lived to pay off—and let me semi-retire, with pensions and part-time work probably keeping me in groceries.
My problem is that I still can’t shake the anxiety. I didn’t “earn” this break that keeps me in my home, and the early retirement feels like stolen valor. I’ve known forever that I’m a financial basket case that never would have lived without a massive debt hanging over me, and yet I’m struggling with taking the goddamn win already. What’s wrong with me?
—Lucky Deadbeat
Dear Housing Insecure,
Life isn't fair. You know this, because if life were fair, you'd still be doing the work you enjoyed and to which you dedicated your career. Instead, you lost your job, and it sounds like maybe your coworkers lost their jobs too, and the entire structure that you'd built your working life around for 24 years—a structure that was easy to mistake for some kind of enduring agreement—turned out not to care in the slightest what might become of you in Year 25.
But now a little bit of unfairness has broken the other way, thanks to your uncle. Unlike the other victims of the employment market and the housing market, you suddenly see a feasible path to survival—maybe even to a certain amount of leisure—opening up before you.
And the result is that you're feeling guilty about not working? Even as you plan to keep working? The Sophist is well aware, through observation and experience, of how poisonous the American idea of the individual work ethic can be, especially in combination with the American ethic of systemic exploitation. From the cradle, you've been propagandized to think that you're in some merit-based competition, and that if your employer screws you over, it's because you didn't play the game correctly.
The real game is to recognize that the game is rigged, and to try to find your way through without trampling other people along the way. Congratulations! It's not a failure of solidarity for you to avoid getting crushed under your mortgage, being forced to sell your home for what equity you can salvage, and setting off on a downward spiral into shabbier circumstances. Yes, generational wealth on the housing market is an engine of inequity, but that doesn't mean forsaking it would have solved anything here. If you lost your current dwelling, it wouldn't go to some other broke person.
The Sophist must also note that it seems a little churlish and self-centered for you to second-guess your uncle about helping you out of a jam. You must have done something to deserve the generosity, at least in his eyes. Don't be angsty and weird about it! Accept it with good grace.
It's not as if your uncle is loading you into the Great Glass Elevator and taking you on a ride to a new life of unconscionable luxury. You're getting your house, the house you currently eat and sleep and use the toilet in, paid off. Barring some new round of misfortune—far from impossible!—you now have an idea of where and how you're going to live until you get old and have to liquidate the house to pay for your elder care. Dutiful worker that you are, you still see yourself as having to take on jobs for groceries.
Having food and shelter for the rest of your life, with a chance to ease up on your labors, is really the minimum that a decent society would offer everyone. If the gap between your conditions and everyone else's still plagues your conscience, put your newly free time and your newly eased mind to work on building that better society. Volunteer! Organize! You've witnessed what your regular uncle can do; just imagine what your Uncle Sam might do, if you can get him to try.
Raise the roof,
The Sophist
Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
WEATHER REVIEWS
Montreal to New York City, August 24, 2025
★★ The fractures in the asphalt of the lot below the window were dark where the overnight rain had collected along them. A man walked down the otherwise empty downtown street in shorts, stripped to the waist, swinging a shirt in his hand, happy or disturbed or just done with a run. Sun blessed the people coming out to use their dwindling store of warm weekend days. On the drive to Walmart, clouds came back long enough to make it seem worth opening the moonroof, only for the returning glare to make the dashboard screen with its blipping navigation icon unreadable. The whine of insects came in when a rear window was opened a crack. In the time it took to take the last set of dorm supplies upstairs, the cars in the loading zone got speckled with water by a swiftly passing shower. A new round of rain, harsh and splatting, arrived on the way to the St. Lawrence River. Reeds and tall grasses swayed in returning light, showing whites and yellows overlaid on their brown and green. Full sun beat down on the line at the border crossing. The clouds moved almost imperceptibly slowly but the border line moved nearly not at all, till 45 minutes later a sheet of cloud was covering the sun. The big American flag, badly anchored to its pole, waved under the darkening sky as the lanes broke down and people started battling for any tiny advantage. On the Thruway, rain spat down again and retreated again. The highway wound past sunlit vignettes in the cloud shade of the Adirondacks: a verdant meadow, a steep slope of evergreens, a forest of dead snags rising from lush green. Somewhere above mile 103, the scattered individual glimpses of color among the trees gathered into a band of premature October foliage. New and worse clouds, with the evil yellowish color of smoke, closed over, and an ugly mundane rain settled in, the kind that was half road spray. The drive outlasted that, too. A stiff mild wind blew over the Ramapo rest stop. Manhattan stretched away from the George Washington Bridge, all lit up and with clouds here and there catching and returning the glow.
New York City, August 25, 2025
★★★★★ In the otherwise dry morning, a fleeting damp spot showed under the uncollected bags of recycling at the curb. The shade was almost cool and the sun was not yet too hot. One of the figs on the balcony, green for weeks, had suddenly turned dark and soft. Little rough-edged cumulus clouds drifted below translucent feathery little patches on the general blue. The breeze sent an empty can rolling along the sidewalk, then made it veer off the curb into the street. A burning smell was carrying from somewhere.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast!
Tom Scocca
Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of sandwiches selected from A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband with Bettina's Best Recipes, edited by Louise Bennett Weaver & Helen Cowles Lecron, published in 1917 and available at archive.org for the modern, equal, and non-sexist delectation of all.
HAM SANDWICHES (Four portions)
1/2 C chopped ham
1 T chopped olives
2 T pickles
3 T salad dressing
12 slices bread
Mix ham, olives, and pickles with salad dressing and spread on lettuce or nasturtium leaves between buttered slices of bread. Trim off the crusts, and cut the sandwiches in fancy shapes.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net .
SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
Indignity is presented on Ghost. Indignity recommends Ghost for your Modern Publishing needs. Indignity gets a slice if you do this successfully!
