july

We spend and spend and spend and hold nothing in our hands

creating and destroying; built flying cars & autonomous vehicles, now building /faust, more here: /july, web: july.rocks

Ownership is just a rental for the duration of your lifetime

Indeed. Ownership is a fleeting concept considering the increasingly rapid change in circumstances in our lives (including and up to death). In fact, there’s something very 
cynical (in the original Diogenes acception of the word) and possibly liberating about letting go of ownership.

Case in point, my great grandparents lived a much linear life — virtually born and died in the same place, one occupation throughout their professional lives, few and steady relationships within a narrow geographical circle.

I OTOH move continents and switch jobs every few years, my areas of interest are greatly expended relative to theirs, etc. I may live a bit longer, but ownership is a material attachment that I don’t need nor want most of the time. I am arguably more of a different person now than I was ten years ago, relative to my ancestors across their entire lifetime.

PhD in aviation ∩ climate science | Aviator, diver, ETH maxi, nexialist | Host of /diving /ethfinance /eth-staker /geopolitics /science /singapore /thomas

Same for my car — leasing is a great simplifier where I don’t have to worry about the responsibilities of ownership including maintenance and resale. I can also swap cars sooner than I used to. In fact, even leasing (let alone owning) an asset that sits unused 99% of the time will eventually sound archaic to us; perhaps license-sharing is the next logical evolution of business models, at least for tangible capital assets like cars (which can own themselves and autonomously drive to where they are needed, sustaining their own economic existence thanks to @faust!).

A subscription model clearly may not fit everyone’s use case. What I consider important is having a choice, and what I think we can objectively lament is that those choices have more often than not disappeared. But it also used to be the other way around — we *didn’t* have a choice and had to buy everything, and we’d end up being defined and owned by our own possessions.

For example, I don’t need to bequeath my Photoshop license to my kid when I pass. Instead of buying a newer version every few years, I pay for a subscription for however long in my life I need it, and upgrades are included. My hobbies, interests, and professional needs are fluid enough that this model can serve me well.

Books are another example. There are books I want to own in hardcover form because I consider them culturally important and timeless enough to form part of an inter-generational library. But I’m also open to flat-fee subscription services such as Kindle Unlimited to expand my reach to many more books I would not otherwise have thought of purchasing. Same goes for most consumption-based media (music, movies, TV shows, etc). I am glad that I no longer need physical CDs nor even curating a massive library of painstakingly tagged MP3 files.