“We are not rich by what we possess…”

Buddhists will tell you that the root of all suffering is desire. We live in a “want” society and we are given to confuse emotional states with desire. What’s more, we get “influencers” on all sides telling us what we should want, what we need to need, and what we can’t live without. I almost used a famous Roy Rogers quote here as the title – “Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.” and he was so right. I’m guilty of it. I would add, though, that in this day and age of social media mania, it’s to impress people we will never meet.

At the dawn of the digital age, I saw a push to get rid of physical media in favor of MP3s. I was coming to my internet awareness in the age of LimeWire and Napster and yes, I downloaded my fair share of Warez as well. When I was in college, I was on the college radio station and I took collecting CDs pretty seriously and later actually worked in a music store, but MP3s travel better and I romanticized the idea of the nomad. Have Zune, will travel. I waffled back and forth between the two until it just didn’t matter any more weather I had digital or physical media. The Chuck Palahniuk novel, Fight Club, comes to mind… “The things you own end up owning you.”

The push now is more about owning physical media, specifically books and music, over digital subscriptions. I guess I have always fallen in the middle and I’ve never been a big subscriber. I am not on any streaming service in favor of… other sites. I don’t care to own physical media because I have too much junk already. If I had a dedicated listening room, I would be rich and wouldn’t care about using up valuable space in my home for stuff I wouldn’t be using 24-7. I look at it in a more utilitarian fashion. I think the move from subscription streaming services towards physical media as a way to control your environment and your mental space. I’m not going to watch the same film or TV series over and over and over again but I’ll search for something new… that’s where the value would lie for me in a subscription service if I decided to subscribe.

All that being said, subscription services for software is dumb. Adobe, I’m looking at you. Sure, it’s more money for the manufacturer of the product, but the product should be one off purchase. Forcing people to continually pay for a thing just for the privilege of using it is ridiculous. I own a car so I don’t have to take a taxi or lift everywhere I want to go. This is how I see software.

Everything comes down to control and feeling safe. If you feel like the digital existence we’ve curated for ourselves with monthly subscriptions and purely digital stuff is too transient and insecure and just not for you, that’s fine. Don’t spend money on it. Illusion of control achieved. If you feel the clutter in your home is too much and you sell all your records and CDs in favor of a monthly Spotify subscription, that’s fine too. Illusion of control achieved. The point is, want is the driver in this game. The want for entertainment. The want to change your current situation, moving from physical to digital or vice versa. The want of distraction. Want is the enemy.

“We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.”
— Immanuel Kant