[1] The average American household earns 42 percent more, adjusted for inflation, than it did 30 years ago, and spends nearly 70 percent more, according to the United Nations and the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, says Claes Johansson, a statistician for the United Nations Human Development Report, our gross domestic product per capita (i.e., average wealth) has grown by nearly 90 percent during that time, and our life span has increased by 5.2 years. “Both are indicators of a higher standard of living,” he says.

[2] Four in five Americans say they’re satisfied with their housing situation. And yet, 40 percent are actively looking for a new house, according to an Associated Press survey; and 72 percent say they can barely afford to maintain their standard of living, according to a Washington Post poll. Why the discrepancy? “People are reluctant to criticize their houses or standard of living, because to do so is to criticize themselves,” says Claus Bech-Danielsen, Ph.D., a housing researcher at Aalborg University in Denmark. “Or they may be saying they’re satisfied because they’re at their financial limit.”

[3] The typical house built in the early 1900s was all about function. According to the National Association of Home Builders, it was between 700 and 1,200 square feet, stood two stories, had two or three bedrooms, and—unless it was in a city—probably lacked indoor plumbing. It was heated by a woodstove, steam boiler, or coal furnace. Only the very wealthy had air-conditioning.

[4] “People enjoy listening to rain on their roofs because, to their ancestors, that sound came with having shelter and staying dry,” says Robert Barton, Ph.D., an anthropology professor at Durham University in England. “We also biologically associate rain with bringing life in the form of food.”

[5] “Improving a home builds ties between the resident and the house,” says Bech-Danielsen. “Physical changes translate into a mental connection.” This attachment is derived from a certain neuropeptide in the brain, which carries information or a feeling to cells. This molecule differs only slightly from the one that creates attachment and love between people.

[6] Taking on the elements is symbolically important for people who are leading high-stress lives, says Clare Cooper Marcus, Ph.D., a University of California at Berkeley professor of architecture and the author of House as a Mirror of Self. “It’s an escape from the trappings of modern life at the most basic, instinctual level.”

[7] “To feel ‘at home’ simply means you can act without thinking,” says Bech-Danielsen. “It’s the feeling of comfort that comes when you control your environment, whether it’s your home, your car, or your office. There will be no surprises; you can work by routine.”

[8] “The exterior of your house represents how you see yourself fitting into society,” says Cooper Marcus. A Utah University study found that people are more likely to view a new and bigger home as a status symbol than less necessary symbols, like a luxury car or an expensive vacation.

[9] “Evolution planted inside of men the pressure to be the best fathers they can be,” says Kevin MacDonald, a psychology professor at California State University at Long Beach. After all, those who abandon their children are left without descendants.

This Simple Palace

It’s a tiny cottage, unremarkable in every way but one: Spending time within its walls teaches a man what it means to live like a king

BY OLIVER BROUDY PHOTOGRAPHS BY RAYMOND MEEKS

Seventy years ago, my grandfather was living in a tar-paper cottage a few hundred yards from here, in what’s now a ghost town in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Amenities included windows, a woodstove, and a bedroom closet more than large enough to accommodate his three shirts. The most popular feature was probably the fireplace, built with local rock, rich with chunks of tantalite and mica that glittered in the firelight.

Today, the two dirt roads that once wound through the town are overgrown with prairie grasses, and while the ponderosa pines still hold the town’s perimeter, the aspens have begun to creep in among the tar-paper wreckage. My grandfather’s cottage still stands, sort of, with a bow-backed roof and blown-out windows, and though vandals have etched their brief lineage on the walls and left beer cans among the rusted bed frames, enough remains to provide a pretty clear picture of the sort of life he lived: Simple. Functional. Devoid of extraneous luxury.

It’s a life a lot different from the one most of us live today, with our ChemLawns and our ice makers, our four bathrooms and three-car garages. Over the past 55 years, the size of the average American home has grown from 1,016 to 2,469 square feet. We have more gadgets, labor-saving devices, and entertainment systems than ever before. Never in history have humans lived so well.1 And yet, surveys show that many Americans remain profoundly dissatisfied with their standard of living.2 The house isn’t big enough, the driveway isn’t long enough, the ceiling isn’t tall enough, the view isn’t breathtaking enough, the walk-in closet needs a window. Real estate itself has become just another game, subsumed by the fever to stay one step ahead of the next guy. It’s very different from the days of my grandfather, when a simple cottage in the hills was enough.

In the summer of 2007, I returned to those hills, to live for a time more or less as my grandfather had, in a hunting cabin constructed from the collapsed remains of the old schoolhouse. I’d get my light from a kerosene lantern, my water from Potato Creek, and my evening entertainment from listening to the elk bellow. The idea was to turn back the clock, to dissolve to a time before clap lights, gated communities, and bathroom spas. How could he have been happy with so little? Was it simply that he didn’t know any better, or was there some other explanation?

I arrived in Spearfish, a small town at the northern tip of the Black Hills, on a Wednesday. There I had arranged to meet with Chris Hills, a local historian. Hills drives a forklift at a lumber mill and in his spare time writes books—a true Black Hills intellectual. He knows everything there is to know about Tinton, my grandfather’s ghost town, including how to get there, a fact I had forgotten since my last visit, decades ago.

We met at a restaurant downtown, and after a brief refresher course on Black Hills history, and an upscale meatball sandwich, I followed his red pickup out of town. The road out of Spearfish rises slowly. One minute from Main Street, the asphalt gives way to packed dirt. Gradually, the houses thin out and the greenery begins to thicken. Soon, it’s just trees and dust and hay wheels in the fields and the occasional deer propelling itself up a near-vertical embankment. Civilization fades like a cheer.

After half an hour we bumped over a cattle gate and turned right on Beaver Creek Road. Progress was slowed by rutted washouts and bovine roadblocks, swinging their great heads around to stare. On the right we passed Beartown, where prospectors camped in the 1870s, when the gold rush was in full swing. “Beartown,” a sign now read, “Population: 1.” Finally, 45 minutes after we headed out, the road wound around a shoestring mining operation and right up to the barbed-wire gate that serves as Tinton’s front door.

With the engines off, the silence flooded in. It stops you, like a bright new color or surprising new taste. After listening for a moment, I popped the trunk to remove my gear. Dust covered the rear bumper in a fine scrim. My guide waited at the gate, holding up the wire so I could step under.

“The Tollefson family lived here and ran the post office,” he said a few minutes later, indicating a buckling pile of tar paper, sun-bleached beams, and burdock. “Diana Tollefson was a very gifted artist, and she put little Walt Disney characters on the wall of her children’s bedroom.” Hills pointed out an interior wall bearing the smudged remains of a deer, a mouse, a little red hen. “And Thumper . . . Did Thumper get . . . ? Well, Thumper’s gone.”

Hills, I soon learned, knew more about my family history than I did. The property, he said—about 500 acres—came into the family in 1926, when a local entrepreneur managed to convince my great-grandfather, an aging Chicago steel baron, to back a tin-mining operation. Named for the ore it sat on, the town had already been built by that point, to support a similar venture that went bust a generation before.

The few times I’d visited Tinton over the years were mostly just to keep an eye on the mine, which my grandfather had cranked up again when he was 92, after a 50-year hiatus. (The family thought this was unwise.) He first caught the mining bug in the ’20s, when his father got involved, but it wasn’t until the early ’40s that he moved out here, with his wife and two daughters, to fulfill a contract with the U.S. Government to mine lithium for the Signal Corps. It was a time when mining, like whaling before the cannon-fired harpoon, still bore a patina of romance. It was man against nature, and the match was more or less even. The ingenuity and grit of one versus the stealth, unpredictability, and sheer staying power of the other. The work engrossed him utterly.