Luke Clark Tyler lives in a 78-square-foot studio in Midtown Manhattan for only $800 a month:

Here's Elizabeth A. Harris today in the New York Times:

Few are keen to crumple themselves and their belongings into an itty-bitty room and call it home, yet the eagerness to explore these spaces seems to spread like a determined little wildfire. Videos go viral; news media coverage quickly spans oceans; attendance is even up at a small Manhattan museum currently offering an exhibit on micro-apartments. Perhaps this voracious interest is mere curiosity about how living so small can be comfortably done. Maybe it is just voyeurism. More often, it seems, it is something else: schadenfreude, the pleasure one takes in the misfortune of others. Because, finally, somebody has an apartment smaller than yours.

The revolt some people feel toward small apartments is built partly on the belief that you're only human when you have a bunch of stuff, when you have lots of money, that you must live far away from other people. Huh. Monks in monasteries and nuns in convents—people who live with almost nothing in close quarters—are quite literally some of the happiest people I've ever met.